4. OSMANTHUS Lour.
Trees or shrubs, with terete or slightly angled branches, and fibrous roots. Leaves simple, persistent. Flowers fragrant, polygamo-diœcious or perfect, on ebracteolate pedicels subtended by scale-like bracts, in short axillary racemes or in short axillary or rarely terminal fascicles; calyx minute, 4-toothed or divided, the divisions imbricated in the bud, persistent under the fruit; corolla tubular, 4-lobed, the lobes imbricated in the bud, ovate, obtuse, spreading after anthesis; stamens 2, inserted on the tube of the corolla opposite the lateral lobes of the calyx, or rarely 4; filaments terete, short; anthers ovoid or linear-oblong, blunt, or apiculate by the prolongation of the connective, attached on the back below the middle, 2-celled, the cells opening longitudinally by marginal slits, sometimes rudimentary or 0 in the pistillate flower; ovary subglobose; style columnar, short or elongated, crowned with an entire capitate stigma; ovules laterally attached near the apex of the cell; raphe ventral. Fruit a fleshy 1-seeded ovoid or globose drupe tipped with the remnants of the style; flesh thin and succulent; stone hard and bony. Seed filling the cavity of the stone; cotyledons flat, much longer than the short superior radicle turned toward the hilum.
Osmanthus with ten species inhabits eastern North America, the Hawaiian Islands, Polynesia, Japan, China, and the Himalayas. Osmanthus fragrans Lour., a native of China and the temperate Himalayas, is cultivated in China for its fragrant minute cream-colored or yellow flowers used by the Chinese to perfume tea, and is everywhere a favorite garden plant.
The generic name, from ὀσμή and ἄνθος, relates to the fragrance of the flowers.
1. [Osmanthus americanus] B. & H. Devil Wood.
Leaves oblong-lanceolate or obovate, acute or rarely rounded and occasionally emarginate at apex, and gradually narrowed and cuneate at base, with thickened revolute margins, when they unfold coated beneath with pale tomentum, and at maturity thick and coriaceous, glabrous, bright green, lustrous above, obscurely reticulate-venulose, 4′—5′ long and ½′—2½′ wide, with a broad pale midrib and remote forked primary veins arcuate near the margins; persistent until their second year; petioles stout, ½′—¾′ in length. Flowers opening in March from pilose inflorescence-buds formed the previous autumn in the axils of the leaves of the year, the staminate, pistillate, and perfect flowers on different individuals in 3-flowered clusters, sessile or short-pedicellate, in pedunculate cymes or short racemes, with scale-like nearly triangular acute persistent bracts; calyx puberulous, with acute rigid lobes, and much shorter than the creamy white corolla ⅛′ long when expanded, with an elongated tube and short spreading ovate rounded lobes; stamens inserted on the middle of the tube of the corolla, included or slightly exserted, small and often rudimentary in the pistillate flower; ovary abruptly contracted into a stout columnar style crowned with a large exserted capitate stigma, reduced in the staminate flower to a minute point. Fruit ripening early in the autumn, oblong or obovoid, 1′ long, dark blue, with thin flesh and a thick or sometimes thin-walled brittle ovoid pointed stone; seed ovoid, covered with a chestnut-brown coat marked by broad conspicuous pale veins radiating from the short broad ventral hilum and encircling the seed.
A tree, occasionally 60°—70° high, with a trunk sometimes a foot in diameter, and slender slightly angled ultimately terete branchlets light or red-brown and marked by minute pale lenticels, becoming ashy gray in their second year and roughened by the small elevated orbicular leaf-scars displaying a ring of minute fibro-vascular bundle-scars; usually much smaller and often shrubby. Winter-buds narrow-lanceolate, ½′ long, with 2 thick lanceolate reddish brown puberulous scales. Bark of the trunk thin, dark gray or gray tinged with red, and roughened by small thin appressed scales displaying in falling the dark cinnamon red inner bark. Wood heavy, very hard and strong, close-grained, difficult to work, dark brown, with thick light brown or yellow sapwood.
Distribution. Usually in moist soil near the borders of streams and Pine-barren ponds and swamps, and occasionally on dry sandy uplands; coast region of the south Atlantic and Gulf states, from the valley of the lower Cape Fear River, North Carolina, to the valley of the Kissimmee River, the interior of the peninsular (Lake and Orange Counties) and the shores of Tampa Bay, Florida, and westward to eastern Louisiana.