1. BUCIDA L.
A tree or shrub, with terete often spinescent branchlets. Leaves crowded at the end of spur-like lateral branchlets much thickened and roughened by the large elevated crowded leaf-scars, alternate, obovate to oblong-lanceolate, rounded and slightly emarginate or minutely apiculate at apex, gradually narrowed and cuneate at base, coriaceous, bluish green on the upper surface and yellow-green on the lower surface, pubescent while young, especially beneath, and glabrous at maturity with the exception of rufous hairs on the under surface of the stout midrib, and on the short stout petiole. Flowers perfect, greenish white, hairy on the outer surface, sessile in the axils of minute bracts, in lax elongated axillary clustered rufous-pubescent spikes; calyx-tube ovoid, constricted above the ovary, the limb campanulate, 5-lobed, the lobes valvate in the bud, persistent; petals 0; stamens 10, in two ranks, inflexed in the bud, unequal, 5 longer than the others and inserted opposite the calyx-lobes under the hairy 5-lobed disk, the others shorter, alternate with them and inserted higher on the calyx-tube; filaments incurved near the apex; anthers minute, sagittate; ovary included in the tube of the calyx; style thickened and villose at the base; ovules suspended on an elongated slender funiculus. Fruit ovoid, conic, oblique, and more or less falcate, irregularly 5-angled, coriaceous, light brown, puberulous on the outer surface, with thin membranaceous flesh inseparable from the crustaceous stone porous toward the interior. Seed ovoid, acute; seed-coat coriaceous, chestnut-brown; cotyledons fleshy; radicle superior.
Bucida with a single species is confined to tropical America, where it is distributed from southern Florida and the Bahama Islands through the West Indies to Guiana and Central America.
The generic name is from βοῦς, in allusion to the fancied resemblance of the fruit to the horns of an ox.
1. [Bucida Buceras] L. Black Olive-tree.
Leaves 2′—3′ long, 1′—1½′ wide, their petioles ⅓′—½′ in length. Flowers appearing in Florida in April, ⅛′ long, on spikes 1½′—3′ in length. Fruit about ⅛′ long.
A tree, with a single straight trunk, or often with a short prostrate stem 2°—3° in diameter, producing several straight upright secondary stems 40°—50° high and 12′—18′ in diameter, stout branches spreading nearly at right angles with the trunk and forming a broad head, and branchlets clothed when they first appear with short pale rufous pubescence mostly persistent for two or three years, becoming light reddish brown and covered with bark separating into thin narrow shreds. Bark of the trunk and of the large branches thick, gray tinged with orange-brown, and broken into short appressed scales. Wood exceedingly heavy, hard, close-grained, light yellow-brown sometimes slightly streaked with orange, with thick clear pale yellow sapwood of 30—40 layers of annual growth. The bark has been used in tanning leather.
Distribution. Florida, only on Elliott’s Key; widely distributed in brackish marshes through the West Indies to the shores of the Caribbean Sea and the Bay of Panama.