LV. MYRSINACEÆ.
Trees or shrubs, with watery juice, alternate entire coriaceous punctate leaves, without stipules. Flowers regular, perfect or dimorphous; calyx persistent under the fruit; corolla, without staminodia, glandular-punctate; stamens inserted on the corolla, as many as and opposite its lobes; ovary 1-celled, with an undivided style and a minute terminal stigma; ovules peltate, immersed in the fleshy central placenta, amphitropous. Fruit a drupe. Seed solitary, globose, with copious cartilaginous or corneous albumen; seed-coat membranaceous.
A tropical family of thirty genera, with two arborescent species reaching the shores of southern Florida.
CONSPECTUS OF THE ARBORESCENT GENERA OF THE UNITED STATES.
Flowers perfect in terminal panicles; anthers on short broad filaments; style elongated.1. [Ardisia.] Flowers dimorphous in small axillary clusters; anthers sessile; stigma sessile or in one form of the staminate flower terminal on a slender style.2. [Rapanea.]