Chiococca alba
species of plant
Chiococca alba is a species of flowering plant in the coffee family (Rubiaceae) native to Florida and the extreme southern tip of Texas in the United States, Bermuda, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, the Galápagos, and tropical South America. Common names include David's milkberry, West Indian milkberry, cahinca and West Indian snowberry. The specific epithet, alba, means "white" in Latin and refers to the color of its fruits.
Description
West Indian milkberry is an evergreen woody vine or scrambling shrub that often grows on other vegetation and may reach a height of 6 m (20 ft). The opposite, simple leaves are 5–11 cm (2.0–4.3 in) long and may be elliptic to ovate or broadly lanceolate in shape. Yellow, bell-shaped flowers up to 1 cm (0.39 in) in length appear throughout the year on racemes or panicles of six of to eight. The fruit is a white drupe 4–7 mm (0.16–0.28 in) in diameter that generally contains two dark brown seeds.
Taxonomy
Lonicera alba was described in 1753 by Carl Linnaeus. It was moved to Chiococca in 1893 by A. S. Hitchcock, and is considered the type species of that genus. Stewardson Brown described the Bermuda population of the plant as a new species, C. bermudiana, in 1909 due to its lighter green and larger leaves, larger berries, and wider and longer pedicels.
The public source identifies “Chiococca alba” as species of plant. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Chiococca, alba and species.
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Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5101397. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1753, 1893 and 1909.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chiococca alba” 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.