5. LYONIA Nutt.
Trees or shrubs, with slender terete branchlets, and fibrous roots. Leaves petiolate, thin or coriaceous. Flowers on slender pedicels from the axils of ovate acute bracts, in axillary and terminal umbellate fascicles or panicled racemes; calyx persistent, 4—5-toothed or parted, the divisions valvate in the bud; corolla globular, 4 or 5-toothed or lobed, the lobes imbricated in the bud; stamens 8—10, included; filaments flat, incurved, usually slightly adnate to the base of the corolla, dilated and bearded at base, geniculate; anthers oblong, the cells opening below the apex by large oblong pores; disk 10-lobed; ovary 5-celled, depressed in the centre; style columnar, stigmatic at apex; ovules attached to a placenta borne near the summit of the axis, anatropous. Fruit ovoid, many-seeded, loculicidally 5-valved, the valves septiferous and separating from the placentiferous axis, 5-ribbed by the thickening of the valves at the dorsal sutures, the ribs more or less separable in dehiscence. Seeds minute, pendulous, narrow-oblong; seed-coat loose, thin, reticulate, produced at the ends beyond the nucleus into short fringe-like wings; embryo axile in fleshy albumen, cylindric elongated; cotyledons much shorter than the terete radicle turned toward the hilum.
Lyonia with about twenty species is confined to North America, the West Indies, and Mexico. Of the four or five species which occur in the United States one is occasionally a small tree.
The genus is named in honor of John Lyon, an English gardener who made important collections of plants in the United States early in the nineteenth century.
1. [Lyonia ferruginea] Nutt.
Xolisma ferruginea Hell.
Leaves cuneate-obovate, rhombic-obovate or cuneate-oblong, acute or rounded at apex, usually tipped with a cartilaginous mucro, gradually narrowed at base, and entire, with thickened revolute margins, scurfy when they unfold, and at maturity thick and firm, pale green, smooth and shining or sometimes obscurely lepidote above, covered below with ferrugineous or pale scales, 1′—3′ long and ¼′—1½′ wide, with a prominent midrib and primary veins; appearing in early spring and persistent until the summer or autumn of their second year; petioles short, thick, much enlarged at base. Flowers ⅛′ in diameter, chiefly produced on branches of the year or occasionally on those of the previous year, opening from February until April when the leaves are fully grown, on slender recurved pedicels much shorter than the leaves, in crowded axillary short-stemmed or sessile ferrugineous-lepidote fascicles, with minute acute deciduous bracts and bractlets; calyx 5-lobed, with acute lobes, covered on the outer surface with ferrugineous scales, and about one third as long as the white pubescent corolla, with short reflexed acute teeth slightly thickened and ciliate on the margins; filaments shortened by a conspicuous geniculate fold in the middle; ovary coated with thick white tomentum; style stout, as long or a little longer than the corolla. Fruit on a stout erect stem, oblong, 5-angled, ¼′ long; seed pale brown.
A tree, occasionally 20°—30° high, with a slender crooked or often prostrate trunk sometimes 10′ in diameter, thin rigid divergent branches forming a tall oblong irregular head, and slender branchlets coated when they first appear with minute ferrugineous scales and covered in their second year with glabrous or pubescent light or dark red-brown bark smooth or exfoliating in small thin scales. Winter-buds minute, acute, and covered with ferrugineous scales. Bark of the trunk ⅛′—¼′ thick, divided into long narrow ridges by shallow longitudinal furrows, reddish brown and separating into short thick scales. Wood heavy, hard, close-grained although not strong, light brown tinged with red, with thick lighter colored sapwood.
Distribution. Hummocks and sandy woods; coast region of South Carolina and Georgia, northern Florida to the centre of the peninsula, the shores of Tampa Bay, and to the neighborhood of Apalachicola (Franklin County); in the United States arborescent in the rich soil of the woody hummocks rising in the sandy Pine-covered coast plain, and as a low shrub in the dry sandy sterile soil of Pine-barrens; in the West Indies and Mexico.