Plantae > Tracheophyta > Magnoliopsida > Laurales > Lauraceae > Litsea > Litsea cubeba

Litsea cubeba (litsea)

Synonyms:

Wikipedia Abstract

May Chang (Litsea cubeba; Aromatic litsea) is an evergreen tree or shrub 5–12 meters high in the Lauraceae family. It is native to China, Indonesia, Taiwan and other parts of Southeast Asia. It is called "mountain pepper" (山胡椒) in Mandarin and maqaw (馬告) by the Atayal aborigines in Taiwan. As a famous spice among Taiwanese aborigines, a proposed National Park at Yilan County is named "Magao" after the spice. It produces a fruit which is processed for its lemony essential oil. The oil can also be extracted from the leaf, but this is considered to be lower in quality. The timber is sometimes used for making furniture and crafts. Plant parts are also used in medicine.
View Wikipedia Record: Litsea cubeba

Infraspecies

Litsea cubeba var. formosana

Attributes

Allergen Potential [1]  High
Edible [2]  May be edible. See the Plants For A Future link below for details.
Flower Type [2]  Hermaphrodite
Leaf Type [2]  Deciduous
Specific Gravity [3]  0.31
Structure [2]  Shrub
Usage [2]  The flowers, leaves and fruit walls are used for extracting an essential oil rich in citral which is used as a perfume and in medicine; The fruit core contains 61.8% of oil which is used for industry; The wood is used for general furniture and construction, etc;
Height [2]  23 feet (7 m)
View Plants For A Future Record : Litsea cubeba

Predators

Meandrusa payeni (Butterfly)[4]
Presbytis comata (grizzled leaf monkey)[5]
Racotis boarmiaria[4]
Trachypithecus auratus (Javan langur)[5]

External References

USDA Plant Profile

Citations

Attributes / relations provided by
♦ 1Derived from Allergy-Free Gardening OPALS™, Thomas Leo Ogren (2000)
♦ 2Plants For A Future licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
♦ 3Chave J, Coomes D, Jansen S, Lewis SL, Swenson NG, Zanne AE (2009) Towards a worldwide wood economics spectrum. Ecology Letters 12: 351-366. Zanne AE, Lopez-Gonzalez G, Coomes DA, Ilic J, Jansen S, Lewis SL, Miller RB, Swenson NG, Wiemann MC, Chave J (2009) Data from: Towards a worldwide wood economics spectrum. Dryad Digital Repository.
♦ 4HOSTS - a Database of the World's Lepidopteran Hostplants Gaden S. Robinson, Phillip R. Ackery, Ian J. Kitching, George W. Beccaloni AND Luis M. Hernández
♦ 5The Diversity of Plants as Feed Resources for the Java Gibbon (Hylobates moloch), Grizzled Langur (Presbytis cornata), and Silver Langur (Trachypithecus auratus) In Gunung Halimun National Park, Wartika Rosa Farida and Harun, Jurnal Primatologi Indonesia, Vol. 3, No. 2, Desember 2000, p.:55-61
Abstract provided by DBpedia licensed under a Creative Commons License
Species taxanomy provided by GBIF Secretariat (2022). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org on 2023-06-13; License: CC BY 4.0