1. ARALIA L.
Aromatic spiny trees and shrubs, with stout pithy branchlets, and thick fleshy roots, or bristly or glabrous perennial herbs. Leaves digitate or once or twice pinnate, the pinnæ serrulate; stipules produced on the expanded and clasping base of the petiole. Flowers perfect, polygamo-monœcious or polygamo-diœcious, on slender jointed pedicels, small, greenish white; calyx-tube coherent with the ovary, the limb truncate, repand or minutely toothed, the teeth valvate in the bud; petals imbricated in the bud, inserted by their broad base on the margin of the disk, ovate, obtuse or acute and slightly inflexed at apex; stamens inserted on the margin of the disk, alternate with the petals; filaments filiform; anthers oblong or rarely ovoid, attached on the back, introrse, 2-celled, the cells opening longitudinally; ovary 2—5-celled; styles 2—5, in the fertile flower distinct and erect or slightly united at base, spreading and incurved above the middle, or incurved from the base and sometimes inflexed at apex, crowned with large capitate stigmas, in the sterile flower short and united. Fruit fleshy, laterally compressed or 3—5-angled, crowned with the remnants of the style; nutlets 2—5, orbicular, ovoid or oblong, compressed, crustaceous, light reddish brown, 1-seeded. Seed compressed; seed-coat thin, light brown, adnate to the thin fleshy albumen; cotyledons ovate-oblong, as long as the straight radicle.
Aralia with forty species is confined to North America and Asia.
The name is of obscure meaning.
1. [Aralia spinosa] L. Hercules’ Club.
Leaves clustered at the end of the branches, twice pinnate, 3°—4° long and 2½° wide, with a stout light brown petiole 18′—20′ in length, clasping the stem with an enlarged base and armed with slender prickles, or occasionally unarmed; pinnæ unequally pinnate, usually with 5 or 6 pairs of lateral leaflets and a long-stalked terminal leaflet, and often furnished at base with a pinnate or simple leaflet; leaflets ovate, acute, dentate or crenate, cuneate or more or less rounded at base, short-petiolulate, when they unfold lustrous, bronze-green, and slightly pilose on the midrib and primary veins, and at maturity thin, dark green above, pale beneath, 2′—3′ long and 1½′ wide, with a thin midrib occasionally furnished with small prickles and slender primary veins nearly parallel with their margins; in the autumn turning light yellow before falling; stipules acute, about 1′ long, at first puberulous on the back and ciliate on the margins. Flowers 1/16′ long, appearing at midsummer on long slender pubescent straw-colored pedicels, in many-flowered umbels arranged in compound panicles, with light brown puberulous branches becoming purple in the autumn, forming a terminal racemose cluster 3°—4° long, and rising solitary or 2 or 3 together above the spreading leaves; bracts and bractlets lanceolate, acute, scarious, persistent; petals white, acute, inflexed at apex; ovary often abortive; styles connivent. Fruit ripening in autumn, black, ⅛′ in diameter, globose, 3—5-angled, crowned with the blackened styles, with thin purple very juicy flesh; seeds oblong, rounded at the ends, about 1/10′ long.
A tree, 30°—35° high, with a trunk 6′—8′ in diameter, stout wide-spreading branches, and branchlets ½′—⅔′ in diameter, armed like the branches and young trunks with stout straight or slightly incurved orange-colored scattered prickles, and nearly encircled by the conspicuous narrow leaf-scars marked by a row of prominent fibro-vascular bundle-scars, light orange-colored in their first season, lustrous and marked irregularly with oblong pale lenticels, becoming light brown in their second year, with bright green inner bark; more often a shrub, with a cluster of unbranched stems 6°—20° tall. Winter-buds: terminal conic, blunt at apex, ½′—¾′ long, with thin chestnut-brown scales; axillary triangular, flattened, about ¼′ long and broad. Bark of the trunk dark brown, about ⅛′ thick, and divided by broad shallow fissures into wide rounded ridges irregularly broken on the surface. Wood close-grained, light, soft, brittle, brown streaked with yellow, with lighter colored sapwood of 2 or 3 layers of annual growth. The bark of the roots and the berries are stimulant and diaphoretic, and are sometimes used in medicine and in domestic practice.
Distribution. Deep moist soil in the neighborhood of streams; southern Pennsylvania to southern Indiana, southeastern Iowa and southeastern Missouri, and southward to northern Florida, western Louisiana, and eastern Texas; probably of its largest size on the foothills of the Big Smoky Mountains in Tennessee.
Occasionally cultivated as an ornamental plant in the eastern states and in western Europe; hardy in eastern Massachusetts.