LIX. SYMPLOCACEÆ.
Trees or shrubs, with simple pubescence, watery juice, scaly buds, and fibrous roots. Leaves simple, alternate, coriaceous or thin, pinnately veined, usually becoming yellow in drying, without stipules. Flowers regular, perfect, or polygamo-diœcious, on ebracteolate pedicels, in dense or lax axillary spikes or racemes, with small caducous bracts; calyx campanulate, 5-lobed, open in the bud, the tube adnate to the ovary, enlarged after anthesis; corolla divided nearly to the base into 3—11 usually 5 lobes imbricated in the bud; disk 0; stamens usually numerous, inserted in many series on the base of the corolla or rarely 4 in one series; filaments filiform or flattened, more or less united below into clusters; anthers ovoid-globose, introrse, 2-celled, the cells lateral, opening longitudinally; ovary inferior or partly inferior, 2—5-celled, contracted into a simple style, with an entire or slightly lobed terminal stigma; ovules 2 or rarely 4 in each cell, suspended from its inner angle, anatropous; raphe ventral; micropyle superior. Fruit a drupe (in the North American species), crowned with the persistent lobes of the calyx, with thin dry flesh and a bony 1-seeded stone. Seed oblong, suspended; seed-coat membranaceous; embryo terete, erect in copious fleshy albumen; cotyledons much shorter than the long slender radicle turned toward the broad conspicuous hilum.
The family consists of the genus Symplocos.