Distribution and Habitat:  Found throughout Mexico, South America and kerala.

Botany: Plants are perennial with rhizomes, bulbs, tubers, corms, or tuber like rhizomes, rarely semishurbs. 

• Flowers: Regular or zygomorphic, usually in inflorescences, bisexual; flowers 3 cm in diameter, open in the evening and are scented but are completely shriveled by morning. The narrow pleated foliage anchors 10” flower spikes that start in late summer and continue until frost. Perianth corolloid; 3 stamens, styles are 5 or 6 lobed; ovary is inferior, trilocular.
• Fruit: Multiseeded, oblong or roundish loculicidal capsule.

Chemical constituent: Four quinoid compounds are obtained from dichloromethane extract of E.bulbosa. Isolated compounds are naphthoquinone, eleutherinone and the known compounds, previously isolated from this species eleutherin and eleutherol. 

Properties:  antibacterial, antifungal

Uses: The dichloromethane extract prepared from the under ground parts showed strong activity on fungus Cladosporium sphaerospermum. Eleutherin has a weak and transient effect of decreasing the prothrombin time (in vivo rats) and a weak on Bacillus subtilis(in vitro).