ABSTRACT

Waterleaf (Talinum triangulare Jacq.) is an herbaceous annual and perennial plant with a broad cosmopolitan worldwide distribution. Native to tropical Africa, it is cultivated for medicinal purposes and culinary purpose, the plants are recognized with several indigenous names the Yorubas call it ‘gbure’ whereas the Igbos call it ‘mgborodi’ while some tribe in southern Delta calls the plant ‘Ebologie’, in Sierra Leone, it is referred to as ‘bologi’ while in Cameroon, it is called ‘elok-sup’. Talinum triangulare is regarded as a volunteer crop, which comes up immediately after the first rains of the year, usually around March/April. The crop is mostly found growing in the wild as weed and they are often domesticated by women and children

In low light, plants need to absorb maximum light for photosynthesis if they are to survive. In high light the problem is reversed. Plants need to maximize their capacity for utilizing their abundant light energy. At the same time, the plants have to deal with excess sunlight when their photosynthetic capacity is exceeded. As a consequence of such unrelenting selection pressures, plants have evolved a variety of features that optimize light interception, absorption and processing, according to the light environment in which they had evolved and adapted Plant biometrics and anatomical measurement was used to understand the differences in the growth of the water leaf plants cultured under different light intensity. From this study it was correlated that light intensity greatly influenced the physiological characteristics of the plant and had effects on their morphological activities.