About Ficus
Ficus is the largest genus in Moraceae, with about 880 species found throughout the tropics and subtropics and especially diverse in Borneo and New Guinea. Unlike other genera in the family, its tiny flowers are enclosed inside a hollow, urn-shaped receptacle (the syconium, or fig) and are pollinated by specialised fig wasps that enter it. Some species start life on other trees and send down aerial roots, and most exude a milky latex when damaged. Widely grown as houseplants are the rubber plant (F. elastica), fiddle-leaf fig (F. lyrata) and weeping fig (F. benjamina), while the common fig (F. carica) is cultivated for its fruit.
The rubber plant is an evergreen tree in the genus Ficus native from the eastern Himalaya through Myanmar to the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and Java, reaching 20–30 m tall in the wild. It begins life as an epiphyte on other trees and later produces aerial roots from its branches, which thicken into additional trunks once they reach the ground. The leaves are elliptic, 8–30 cm long, thick, leathery and glossy, and each new leaf unfurls from a red stipule sheath. It was once cultivated as a source of natural rubber and is widely grown as a houseplant.
Scientific Name
Ficus
Family
No related plants registered in this genus yet