1. ELLIOTTIA Ell.
A glabrous tree or shrub, with slender terete branchlets, scaly buds, and fibrous roots. Leaves petiolate, oblong or oblong-obovate, acute at the ends or occasionally rounded at apex, entire, thin, dark green and glabrous above, pale and villose below, particularly on the thin yellow midrib and obscure forked veins; deciduous; petioles slender and flattened, with an abruptly enlarged base nearly covering the small axillary buds. Flowers perfect, on slender elongated pedicels, in erect terminal elongated racemose panicles, with minute acute scarious caducous bracts and bractlets; calyx short, tubular, puberulous, dark red-brown, 4-toothed, the broad apiculate teeth erose on the margins and imbricated in the bud; petals 4, imbricated in the bud, spatulate-linear, sessile; stamens 8, hypogynous, shorter than the petals, filaments broad, flattened; anthers oblong-ovoid, the cells callous-mucronate, free at the apex of the spreading lobes, opening from above downward; disk much thickened, fleshy; ovary sessile, subglobose, 4-lobed, 4-celled, concave at apex; style elongated, slender, gradually enlarged and club-shaped above and incurved at apex; stigma 3—5-lobed, smaller than the thickened end of the style; ovules numerous in each cell, attached on the inner angle of a tumid placenta, ascending, anatropous. Fruit unknown.
Elliottia with a single species is confined to the southern United States.
The genus is named in honor of Stephen Elliott (1771—1830), the distinguished botanist of South Carolina.
1. [Elliottia racemosa] Ell.
Leaves 3′—4′ long, 1′—1½′ wide; petioles ⅓′—½′ in length. Flowers about ½′ long, opening from the middle to the end of June, in clusters 7′—10′ in length.
A tree, 15°—20° high, with a trunk 4′—5′ in diameter, short ascending branches forming a pyramidal head, and erect branchlets light red-brown and pilose when they first appear, bright orange-brown, lustrous, and nearly glabrous during their first winter, and roughened by slightly raised oblong-obovate leaf-scars with conspicuous central fibro-vascular bundle-scars, becoming light brown slightly tinged with red during their second season and dark gray-brown the following year; or more frequently shrubby. Winter-buds: terminal broad-ovoid, acute, about ⅛′ long, with much thickened bright chestnut-brown shining scales conspicuously white-pubescent near the margins toward the apex; lateral buds smaller, ovoid, compressed, rounded or short-pointed at apex. Bark thin, smooth, pale gray.
Distribution. Sandy woods in a few isolated stations in the valley of the Savannah River, near Augusta, Richmond County, and in Burke and Bullock Counties, Georgia.