1. CITHAREXYLON L.
Trees or shrubs, with coriaceous lustrous leaves, slightly angled branchlets, without a terminal bud, and with minute axillary buds. Flowers small, on short ebracteolate pedicels, alternate or scattered on the filiform rachis of a slender raceme; calyx membranaceous, tubular-campanulate, truncate, minutely 5-toothed, spreading and cup-shaped under the fruit; corolla salver-form, usually white, the spreading limb somewhat oblique, 5-lobed, the lobes broad-ovate, rounded, slightly unequal, the 2 posterior exterior, sometimes reduced to staminodia; stamens included; filaments short, filiform, slightly thickened at base, the 2 anterior filaments longer than the others; anthers oblong; staminodium 1, posterior, linear, acute, rarely fertile; ovary ovoid, incompletely 4-celled by the development of two parietal placentas, gradually narrowed into a short included style; ovule solitary in each cell, erect, attached laterally near the base, ascending, anatropous; micropyle inferior. Fruit a 2-stoned 4-seeded fleshy drupe tipped with the remnants of the style, with thin flesh and a thick-walled bony stone separable into 2 2-seeded compressed smooth light brown nutlets rounded on the back and concave on the inner face. Seed erect, without albumen, filling the seminal cavity; seed-coat membranaceous, light brown; embryo subterete, straight; cotyledons thick and fleshy, oblong, much longer than the short inferior radicle turned toward the oblong basal hilum.
Citharexylon with about twenty species is confined to tropical America, where it is distributed from southern Florida through the West Indies to southern Mexico, Lower California, Bolivia, and Brazil.
The generic name, from κιθάρα and ξύλον, is a translation of the English West Indian name Fiddle Wood, a corruption of the earlier French-colonial Bois Fidèle, in allusion to the strength and toughness of the wood of the trees of this genus.
1. [Citharexylon fruticosum] L. Fiddle Wood.
Citharexylon villosum Jacq.
Leaves oblong-obovate to oblong, acute, acuminate, rounded or emarginate at apex, and gradually narrowed at base, with thickened slightly revolute margins, and glabrous or coated with short pubescence (var. villosum Schulz); conspicuously reticulate-venulose, pale green, 3′—4′ long and 1′—1½′ wide, with a broad pale midrib rounded on the upper side and remote prominent arcuate veins; petioles stout, grooved, ⅔′ in length, separating in falling from an elevated nearly circular persistent woody base. Flowers fragrant, appearing throughout the year on slender pedicels from the axils of scarious pubescent bracts, in drooping axillary pubescent racemes crowded near the end of the branches and 2′—4′ long; calyx coated with pale hairs, or sometimes nearly glabrous; corolla ⅛′ across the expanded lobes of the limb, and covered on the inner surface of the tube with pale hairs; staminodium minute. Fruit subglobose to oblong-ovoid, light red-brown, very lustrous, ⅓′ in diameter, with thin sweet rather juicy flesh, and inclosed nearly to the middle in the cup-like pale brown slightly and irregularly lobed or sometimes nearly entire calyx; seeds oblong, narrowed at the rounded ends, about ⅛′ long.
A tree, in Florida rarely more than 30° high, with a trunk 4′—7′ in diameter, slender upright branches forming a narrow irregularly shaped head, and slender slightly many-angled branchlets light yellow and covered with pale simple caducous hairs or pubescent when they first appear, becoming in their second year terete and ashy gray; or often a shrub, with numerous low stems. Winter-buds globose, nearly immersed in the bark, and covered with hoary pubescence. Bark of the trunk 1/16′—⅛′ thick, light brown tinged with red, the surface separating into minute appressed scales. Wood heavy, exceedingly hard, strong, close-grained, clear bright red, with thin lighter colored sapwood.
Distribution. Florida, Cape Canaveral to the southern keys; common and of its largest size in the United States on the shores of Bay Biscayne near the mouth of the Miami River, Dade County; northward usually a low shrub; on the Bahama Islands and on many of the Antilles.