Botany
A plant is a shrub or small tree reaching a height of 8 meters, often flowering when less than 1 meter high. Bark is light gray to brown, smooth but with small cracks. Leaves are leathery, opposite, dark green above and pale and hairy below, oblong-ovate to elliptic, 5 to 10 cm long, 2.5 to 5 cm broad, usually rounded at the apex and narrow at the base. Flowers are small, without individual stalks, appearing in small heads on stiff, angular and flowering stalks, occurring two together in the axils of the upper leaves, or several at the end of the branch. There are 3 to 7 flowers in each head. Corolla is orange-yellow, about 5 mm long, corolla tube being very short and cylindrical, with four lobes 5 mm in length, hairy without and smooth within. Calyx has five lobes, 2 to 8 mm long, hairy on the margins and the lower part of the back, smooth on the rest. Fruit is an ovoid capsule, 2.5 to 4 cm long and contains a single seed which completely fills the capsule. Like other mangroves, the tree has numerous, leafless, blind, erect, conical root-suckers or air-roots, aboout 8 to 20 cm high.
Distribution
Along muddy seashores and tidal streams in Quezon and Camarines Provinces; also in Mindoro, Palawan, Negros and Mindanao.
Constituents
Wood cortex yields a crystalline substance, lapachol.
Properties
Bark is astringent and diuretic.
Considered an aphrodisiac, cicatrizant.
Parts used and preparation
Resin, seeds, bark.
Uses
Edibility
In the Celebes, seeds, soaked in water overnight and boiled, used as famine food.
In Celebes and Java, fruit sometime eaten by fishermen.
Folkloric
Resin from the sapwood used locally for snake bites.
Seeds boiled in water used as maturative poultices and cicatrizant of ulcers.
In Arabia, roots used as aphrodisiac.
Unripe seeds used as poultice to hasten suppuration of boils and abscesses.
In Madras, used for small pox.
In Java, resin oozing from the bark used as contraceptive.
Bark used as diuretic.
Others
Wood used for rice mortars, firewood and for smoking fish.
Wood also used for cabinetry work; also yields a wood-tar.
In India, bark used as dyeing agent.
In Madras, the ashes from the wood used for washing clothes.
Studies
• Anti-Ulcer / Gastroprotective: Study of the plant extract of leaves of AO showed it was able to decrease the acidity and increase the mucosal defense in the gastric areas, justifying its use as an antiulcerogenic agent.
Availability
Wild-crafted.
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