3. EHRETIA P. Br.
Trees or shrubs, with entire or dentate leaves, and scaly buds. Flowers small, in terminal and axillary scorpioid clusters; calyx open or closed in the bud, the divisions imbricated, ovate or linear; corolla usually white, with a short or cylindric tube and spreading obtuse lobes; ovary oblong-conic, 1-celled before anthesis, becoming incompletely 4-celled by the development of the 2 parietal placentas; style columnar, parted into 2 divisions terminating in capitate stigmas; ovules attached laterally near the middle on the inner face of the revolute placentas, anatropous; raphe ventral; micropyle superior. Fruit fleshy, small, globose, with thin flesh; stone separable into 2 2-celled thick-walled bony nutlets rounded on the back, plane on the inner face, and attached to a thin axile column. Seed terete, usually erect, filling the longitudinally incurved seminal cavity; seed-coat thin, membranaceous, light brown; embryo axile in thin albumen; cotyledons ovate, plane, shorter than the elongated superior radicle turned toward the hilum.
Ehretia with about forty species is widely distributed through tropical and warm extratropical regions of the two hemispheres, with a single species extending into southeastern Texas.
The generic name commemorates the artistic and scientific labors of the German botanical artist, George Dionysius Ehret (1708—1770).
1. [Ehretia elliptica] DC. Anaqua. Knackaway.
Leaves oval or oblong, pointed and apiculate at apex, gradually rounded or cuneate at base, entire or occasionally furnished above the middle with a few broad teeth, conspicuously reticulate-venulose, unfolding late in winter and then thin, light green, lustrous, minutely tuberculate and pilose above, and covered below like the branches of the inflorescence, the outer surface of the calyx, and the young branchlets with rigid pale hairs, often furnished with axillary tufts of white hairs, and at maturity subcoriaceous, dark green and roughened on the upper surface by the enlarged circular crowded pale tubercles, and more or less covered with soft pale or rufous pubescence on the lower surface, especially on the narrow midrib, and numerous primary veins arcuate near the margins; irregularly deciduous during the winter; petioles stout, grooved, pubescent, ⅛′—¼′ in length. Flowers opening from autumn to early spring, in compact racemose scorpioid-branched panicles 2′—3′ long and broad, on short leafy branches of the year, with linear acute deciduous bracts about ¼′ long; calyx open in the bud, divided to the base into 5 linear acute divisions and nearly as long as the campanulate tube of the corolla, with ovate thin white lobes ½′ across when expanded. Fruit ripening in autumn and spring, light yellow, ¼′ in diameter, with thin sweet rather juicy edible flesh, and 2 2-seeded nutlets.
A tree, sometimes 40°—50° high, with a trunk occasionally 3° in diameter, stout spreading branches forming a handsome compact round-topped head, and slender branchlets, without a terminal bud, covered when they first appear, like the under surface of the leaves, the branches of the inflorescence, and the outer surface of the calyx of the flower, with rigid hirsute pale hairs, becoming in their first winter light brown tinged with red, sometimes puberulous, often roughened by numerous pale lenticels, and by small depressed obcordate leaf-scars displaying a short lunate row of fibro-vascular bundle-scars; usually much smaller within the territory of the United States, and often a low shrub. Winter-buds: axillary, minute, 1 or 2 together, superposed, buried in the bark, and covered by 2 pairs of dark scales persistent on the base of the growing branchlet and at maturity acute, dark chestnut-brown, coated with pale hairs, and sometimes ¼′ in length. Bark of young stems and of the branches thin, light brown, and broken into thick appressed scales, becoming on old trunks sometimes 1′ thick, deeply furrowed and divided into long thick irregular plate-like scales gray or reddish brown on the surface and separating into thin flakes. Wood heavy, hard, not strong, close-grained, difficult to split, light brown, with thick slightly lighter colored sapwood.
Distribution. River valleys in fertile soil, or as a shrub on dry barren ridges; valleys of the upper Marcos and of the Guadalupe Rivers, Texas, to the Rio Grande; often extremely common on the bottom-lands, and probably of its largest size in the United States on the Guadalupe and Nueces Rivers sixty or seventy miles from the coast; through Nuevo Leon and Coahuila to the mountains of San Luis Potosí.
Often planted as a shade-tree in the streets of the cities and towns of western Texas and northeastern Mexico.