Cestrum parqui
species of plant
Cestrum parqui, commonly known as palqui, green cestrum, Chilean cestrum, green poisonberry, or willow-leaved jessamine, is a species of flowering plant native to Chile.
In cultivation in the United Kingdom this plant has gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit (confirmed 2017). In Australia, the plant is regarded as an invasive species.
Description
C. parqui is a fast-growing, straggling, woody, semi-evergreen shrub that grows to over 3 metres in height (or more in warmer areas) with one or a few fragile green stems. Leaves are alternate, light green in colour, lance-shaped or marginally elliptic (that are wide at the middle), narrowly tapered at both ends, mainly 30–65 mm long and 8–23 mm wide. They have an unpleasant rubber-like smell when crushed. In areas with cool winters, the plant is partly deciduous.
Inflorescences
It produces terminal sprays of small, pungent-scented, tubular yellow-green flowers 2.5 cm long, followed by bunches of small, black, egg-shaped berries produced from summer to autumn. All parts of the plant are reported to be highly toxic. Whilst the flower colors are generally yellow-green, some varieties have mustard orange, creamy white, golden yellow and reddish-orange colors.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Cestrum parqui” is species of plant. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Cestrum, parqui and species, not as a finished interpretation.
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The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q289811. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cestrum parqui” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.