4. GYMINDA Sarg.
Trees or shrubs, with pale quadrangular branchlets and minute acuminate buds. Leaves opposite, short-petiolate, oblong-obovate, rounded and sometimes emarginate at apex, entire or remotely crenulate-serrate above the middle with revolute thickened margins, feather-veined, coriaceous, persistent; stipules minute, acuminate, membranaceous, caducous. Flowers unisexual, pedicellate, in axillary pedunculate few-flowered dichotomously branched cymes bibracteolate at apex; calyx minute, 4-lobed, persistent, with a short urceolate tube and rounded lobes; disk fleshy, filling the tube of the calyx, cup-shaped, slightly 4-lobed; petals entire, obovate, white, rounded at apex, reflexed, much longer than the lobes of the calyx; stamens 4, opposite the sepals, inserted in the lobes of the disk, exserted, 0 in the pistillate flower; filaments slender, subulate, incurved; anthers oblong; ovary 2-celled, oblong, sessile, confluent with the disk, crowned with a large 2-lobed sessile stigma, rudimentary and deeply cleft in the staminate flower; ovule solitary, suspended from the apex of the cell; raphe dorsal; micropyle superior. Fruit drupaceous, 2-celled, 1 or 2-seeded, black or dark blue, oval or obovoid, crowned with the remnants of the persistent stigma, often 1-celled by abortion; flesh thin; stone thick, crustaceous. Seed oblong, suspended; seed-coat membranaceous; albumen thin, fleshy; embryo axile; cotyledons ovate, foliaceous; radicle superior, next the hilum.
Gyminda with a single species is distributed from southern Florida to Trinidad and southern Mexico, and is represented in Central America by what is perhaps a second species.
The generic name is formed by transposing the first three letters of Myginda, to which this plant had been referred.
1. [Gyminda latifolia] Urb.
Gyminda Grisebachii Sarg.
Leaves 1½′—2′ long, ¾′—1′ broad, pale yellow-green. Flowers produced on shoots of the year from April to June. Fruit ripening in November, ¼′ long.
A tree, sometimes 20°—25° high, with a trunk rarely more than 6′ in diameter, and branchlets becoming terete during their third season and covered with thin slightly grooved roughened bright red-brown bark. Bark of the trunk thin, brown tinged with red, separating into thin minute scales. Wood very heavy, hard, close-grained, dark brown or nearly black, with thick light brown sapwood of 75—80 layers of annual growth.
Distribution. Florida, common and generally distributed over the southern keys from the Marquesas group to Upper Matecombe Key; in Cuba, Porto Rico, Trinidad, and southern Mexico. A form (var. glaucescens, Small.) with smaller less coriaceous very glaucous leaves occurs in Cuba.