Erica sicula

Description

Erica sicula is a plant belonging to the genus Erica. The plant is native to Libya, Lebanon, Cyprus, Sicily, Syria and Turkey. It is a perennial, shrubby and evergreen plant, it looks like a dense bush about 50 cm high and wide, 30 to 150 cm high. It has short, needle-like leaves 5-6 mm long, dark green with a velvety appearance. The flowers are pendulous and collected in bunches at the apex of the stems, with funnel-shaped pink corolla. Flowering: April The nominal subspecies is endemic to some limestone promontories close to the sea in the northern part of the province of Trapani in Sicily. It grows on limestone cliffs from 0 to 500 m of altitude. Erica is a genus of roughly 857 species of flowering plants in the family Ericaceae. The English common names heath and heather are shared by some closely related genera of similar appearance. The genus Calluna was formerly included in Erica – it differs in having even smaller scale-leaves (less than 2–3 mm long), and the flower corolla consisting of separate petals. Erica is sometimes referred to as "winter (or spring) heather" to distinguish it from Calluna "summer (or autumn) heather". Most of the species of Erica are small shrubs from 20–150 cm (8–59 in) high, though some are taller; the tallest are E. arborea (tree heath) and E. scoparia (besom heath), both of which can reach up to 7 m (23 ft) tall. All are evergreen, with minute, needle-like leaves 2–15 millimetres (0.079–0.591 in) long. Flowers are sometimes axillary, and sometimes borne in terminal umbels or spikes, and are usually outward or downward facing. The seeds are very small, and in some species may survive in the soil for decades. A number of increasingly detailed phylogenetic hypotheses for Erica have been published based on nuclear ribosomal and plastid DNA sequences. The closest relatives of Erica are Daboecia (one or two species) and Calluna (monospecific), representing the oldest surviving lineages of a, by inference, ancestrally Palearctic tribe Ericeae. The small number of European Erica species represent the oldest lineages of the genus, within which a single, order-of-magnitude more species-rich, African clade is nested. Within the African clade, Cape and Madagascan/Mascarene species respectively represent monophyletic groups.