Morphological characterization of Veldt grape (Cissus quadrangularis Linn.) ecotypes

An investigation on morphological characterization of fifty Veldt grape ecotypes collected from different geographical locations of Tamil Nadu was conducted at the Department of Medicinal and Aromatic Crops, Coimbatore. Among the fifty ecotypes studied, 64% of them possessed petioles with moderate green colour, followed by dark green colour (34%) and only one ecotype had light green coloured petiole. Regarding the shape of the leaves, 23 ecotypes possessed kidney shaped (46%) leaves, followed by 16 with cordate shaped (32%), 7 with circular shaped (14%) and 4 with pentagonal shaped (8%) leaves. The twiners exhibited maximum of clockwise orientation in all the ecotypes. Among the 50 ecotypes of Veldt grape, only 4 ecotypes entered the reproductive stage with greenish pink coloured flowers. Analysis of genetic parameters of morphological traits indicated high estimates  of GCV (>35%) for plant height (41.09), number of matured leaves (51.65), number of twiners (45.8), number of primary roots (37.5) and PCV(>35%) for number of sprouts (37.01), number of matured leaves (58.35), number of twiners (49.02) and number of primary roots (41.51). All the genetic parameters were positively and significantly correlated with stem yield, except for days taken for rooting. Path coefficient analysis revealed direct positive effect for number of sprouts (0.143), twiner length (1.205), leaf width (0.527), stem girth (0.046), root length (0.562), number of primary roots (0.119), number of secondary roots per plant (1.243), internode length (1.138) and plant height (0.451) on stem yield indicating that direct selection through these traits would be much effective for the yield improvement of Cissus ecotypes.