Cosmibuena Ruiz & Pav. includes four species of succulent, terrestrial or usually epiphytic shrubs and small trees distributed rather widely in the mainland New World tropics. Cosmibuena plants are found in wet tropical forests, from low to high elevations, including in mangrove stands. The genus can be recognized by its combination of well developed, oblanceolate to obovate stipules that are shortly united around the stem and held erect and flattened together in bud, its succulent leaves with the secondary venation usually not visible, its rather large salverform corollas with long tubes, and its cylindrical woody capsules that contain numerous flat papery seeds with winged and sometimes shortly fringed margins. The fragrant white flowers are nocturnal and apparently last for only one night. The corollas turn yellow the next morning and fall off during that day. The flowers are homostylous. The seeds are apparently wind-dispersed. The corolla lobes are convoluted in bud in C. valerioi, but imbricated with three lobes external in the other three species. Cosmibuena valerioi resembles Hillia in this arrangement of the corolla lobes in bud and in its solitary rather than cymose flowers but resembles Cosmibuena in its stipules and seeds, thus this species is problematic in taxonomic placement.

Species of Cosmibuena can be confused with those of Hillia Jacq.; however Hillia differs in its interpetiolar stipules (i.e., separate rather than united around the stem) and its seeds with a tuft of silky filaments 1-3 cm long attached at the apical end. Cosmibuena was monographed by Taylor (1992). Based on a detailed morphological analysis, Andersson (1995) included Cosmibuena in an expanded tribe Hillieae, and subsequent molecular work has supported this classification and the inclusion of C. valerioi in this genus (Bremer & Eriksson 2009).

Author: C.M. Taylor. The content of this web page was last revised on 3 December 2010.
Taylor web page: http://www.mobot.org/MOBOT/Research/curators/taylor.shtml

Neotropics: Wet lowland and mangrove forests to montane forests, southern Mexico to Bolivia.

• Taylor, C.M. 1994. Revision of Hillia (Rubiaceae). Ann. Missouri Bot. Gard. 81(4): 571–609.
• Taylor, C.M. 1992. Revision of Cosmibuena (Rubiaceae). Ann. Missouri Bot. Gard. 79(4): 886–900.
• Andersson, L. & C.M. Taylor. 1994. 162(1–4). Rubiaceae-Cinchoneae-Coptosapelteae. 50: 1–112. In G. W. Harling & L. Andersson (eds.) Fl. Ecuador. University of Göteborg, Göteborg.
• Bremer, B. & T. Eriksson. 2009. Time tree of Rubiaceae: Phylogeny and dating the family, subfamilies, and tribes. Int. J. Pl. Sci. 170(6): 766–793.

The following list is based on ongoing study, and is intended to facilite work on this genus. This list includes the species and names that have so far been studied.
Note: Synonymous names are listed here without links, and with their equivalents; accepted names are listed in the next section of this webpage, with links to additional data.
Note: For each accepted species name linked below, clicking will lead to the Rubiaceae Project data page. To then see the standard TROPICOS Name page directly from that page, go to the upper right of the screen and under "Project", choose "TROPICOS".