2. CONOCARPUS L.
A tree or shrub, with angled branchlets. Leaves alternate, short-petiolate, narrow-ovate or obovate, acute, gradually contracted and biglandular at base, glabrous or sericeous. Flowers perfect, minute, in dense capitate heads in narrow leafy terminal panicles, with acute caducous bracts and bractlets coated with pale hairs, on stout hoary-tomentose peduncles bibracteolate near the middle; calyx-tube truncate, obliquely compressed at base, clothed with pale hairs, the limb campanulate, parted to the middle, the lobes ovate, acute, erect, pubescent on the outer and puberulous on the inner surface, deciduous; petals 0; disk 5-lobed, hairy; stamens usually 5, inserted in 1 rank, or rarely 7 or 8 in 2 ranks; anthers cordate, minute; style thickened and villose at base. Fruits scale-like, broad-obovoid, pointed, recurved, and covered at apex with short pale hairs, densely imbricated in ovoid reddish heads; flesh coriaceous, corky, produced into broad lateral wings; stone thin-walled, crustaceous, inseparable from the flesh. Seed irregularly ovoid; seed-coat membranaceous, pale chestnut-brown.
The genus consists of a single species of tropical America and Africa.
The generic name, from χῶνος and καρπὸς, is in allusion to the cone-like shape of the heads of fruits.
1. [Conocarpus erecta] L. Buttonwood.
Leaves slightly puberulous on the lower surface when they first appear or coated with pale silky persistent pubescence (var. sericea, DC.), 2′—4′ long, ½′—1½′ wide, lustrous, dark green or pale on the upper surface, paler on the lower surface, with a broad orange-colored midrib, obscure primary veins, and reticulate veinlets; petioles stout, broad, ½′ in length. Flowers produced throughout the year, in heads ⅓′ in diameter on peduncles ½′—1½′ in length, in panicles 6′—12′ long. Cone of fruit about 1′ in diameter.
A tree, 40°—60° high, with a trunk 20′—30′ in diameter, small branches forming a narrow regular head, and slender branchlets conspicuously winged, light red-brown, usually glabrous, or silky pubescent (var. sericea, DC.), becoming terete and marked by large orbicular leaf-scars in their second year; or sometimes a low shrub, with semiprostrate stems. Bark of the trunk dark brown, divided by irregular reticulating fissures into broad flat ridges broken on the surface into small thin appressed scales. Wood very heavy, hard, strong, close-grained, dark yellow-brown, with thin darker colored sapwood of about 10 layers of annual growth; burning slowly like charcoal and highly valued for fuel. The bark is bitter and astringent, and has been used in tanning leather, and in medicine as an astringent and tonic.
Distribution. Low muddy tide-water shores of lagoons and bays; Florida, Cape Canaveral and Cedar Keys to the southern keys; of its largest size in Florida on Lost Man’s River near Cape Sable; at its northern limits a low shrub; common on the Bahama Islands, in the Antilles, on the shores of Central America and tropical South America, on the Galapagos Islands, and on the west coast of Africa.