(L.) Corrêa
Description
Aegle marmelos (L.) Corrêa, the bael or wood-apple, is a deciduous tree of the Rutaceae native to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia and now widely cultivated and naturalised across the tropics. Its very numerous records center on India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Thailand, Indochina, southern China and Malesia, with introductions into the Americas, Australia and elsewhere. The species grows in dry deciduous forest, scrub and on cultivated and temple ground, tolerating poor, alkaline and seasonally arid soils. It is essentially a lowland and foothill plant, and the tree photographed along the Sabha-Khola in Nepal at 550 m in May represents the warm sub-Himalayan tract where it flowers with the pre-monsoon heat.
The tree reaches up to about 10–15 m, with a spreading crown and armed branches bearing stout, straight, axillary spines. The leaves are alternate and trifoliolate (rarely with five leaflets), the leaflets ovate-lanceolate, crenulate and dotted with translucent aromatic oil glands. The flowers are greenish-white, fragrant, bisexual, borne in short axillary panicles, with four to five petals and numerous stamens. The fruit is a large, globose, woody-rinded amphisarca, grey-green ripening to yellowish, the hard shell enclosing a sweet, aromatic, mucilaginous orange pulp with numerous wool-coated seeds.
Monotypic or nearly so within Aegle, the species is of exceptional cultural and economic importance: it is sacred in Hindu tradition, associated with Shiva, and is a long-established medicinal plant, the unripe fruit valued in the treatment of dysentery and digestive disorders. The pulp is consumed fresh and in beverages. Owing to its hardiness and usefulness it is extensively planted, and it is nowhere considered threatened, though its near-ubiquitous cultivation obscures the limits of its truly native range.
Author: (L.) Corrêa · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China Vol. 11, Flora of Pakistan, Stone: Rutaceae (Flora Malesiana)