Leaves 2-ranked, ovate, abruptly acuminate at apex, rounded, cordate and often oblique at base, finely serrate with incurved or rounded apiculate teeth, dark green and scabrate above, covered with pale tomentum below, 3′—4′ long, 1′—2½′ wide; petioles stout, tomentose, about ⅖′ in length; stipules narrow, acuminate, covered with long white hairs, about one third as long as the petioles. Flowers in early spring, subtended by minute scarious deciduous bracts on short slender pedicels in bisexual many-flowered pedunculate villose cymes about as long as the petioles; calyx 5-lobed, the lobes oblong, acute and incurved at apex, villose on the outer surface; staminate with glabrous filaments and slightly exserted yellow anthers; pistillate with a style divided to the base. Fruit short-oblong, pale yellowish brown, ⅙′—⅕′ in diameter.
A fast-growing short-lived tree, in Florida occasionally 25°—30° high, with a tall trunk 1½′—2½′ in diameter, small crowded branches ascending at narrow angles, and stout hoary-tomentose red-brown 2-ranked branchlets. Bark thin, chocolate-brown, roughened by numerous small wart-like excrescences, and separating into small appressed papery scales.
Distribution. Rich hummocks; near the shores of Bay Biscayne, in the Everglades, and on the southern keys, Florida; common; often springing up where the ground has been burned over, or otherwise cleared of its forests; on many of the West Indian islands and in Mexico.
XII. MORACEÆ.
Tree or shrubs, with milky juice, scaly or naked buds, and stalked alternate simple leaves with stipules. Flowers monœcious or diœcious, in ament-like spikes, or in heads on the outside of a receptacle or on the inside of a closed receptacle; calyx of the staminate flower 2—6-lobed or parted; stamens 1—4, inserted on the base of the calyx; calyx of the pistillate flower of 2—6 partly united sepals; ovary 1—2-celled; styles 1 or 2; ovule pendulous. Fruits drupaceous, inclosed in the thickened calyx of the flower and united into a compound fruit (syncarp). The Mulberry family is widely distributed with fifty-four genera confined largely to the warmer parts of the world. Three genera only, all arborescent, are indigenous in North America, although Broussonetia papyrifera Vent., the Paper Mulberry, a tree related to the Mulberry and a native of eastern Asia, and the Hop and the Hemp are more or less generally naturalized in the eastern and southern states.
CONSPECTUS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN GENERA.
Flowers on the outside of the receptacle; buds scaly. Flowers in ament-like spikes; syncarp oblong and succulent.1. [Morus.] Staminate flowers racemose, the pistillate capitate; syncarp dry and globose.2. [Maclura.] Flowers on the inside of a closed receptacle; buds naked; syncarp subglobose to ovoid, succulent.3. [Ficus.]
1. MORUS L. Mulberry.
Trees or shrubs, with slender terete unarmed branches prolonged by one of the upper axillary buds, scaly bark, fibrous roots, and winter-buds covered by ovate scales closely imbricated in 2 ranks, increasing in size from without inward, the inner accrescent, marking in falling the base of the branch with ring-like scars. Leaves conduplicate in the bud, alternate, serrate, entire or 3-lobed, 3—5-nerved at base, membranaceous or subcoriaceous, deciduous; stipules inclosing their leaf in the bud, lateral, lanceolate, acute, caducous. Flowers monœcious or diœcious, the staminate and pistillate on different branches of the same plant or on different plants, minute, vernal, in pedunculate clusters from the axils of caducous bud-scales or of the lower leaves of the year; staminate in elongated cylindric spikes; calyx deeply divided into 4 equal rounded lobes; stamens 4, inserted opposite the lobes of the calyx under the minute rudimentary ovary, filaments filiform, incurved in the bud, straightening elastically and becoming exserted, anthers attached on the back below the middle, introrse, 2-celled, the cells reniform, attached laterally to the orbicular connective, opening longitudinally; pistillate sessile, in short-oblong densely flowered spikes; calyx 4-parted, the lobes ovate or obovate, thickened, often unequal, the 2 outer broader than the others, persistent; ovary ovoid, flat, sessile, included in the calyx, crowned by a central style divided nearly to the base into 2 equal spreading filiform villose white stigmatic lobes; ovule suspended from the apex of the cell, campylotropous; micropyle superior. Drupes ovoid or obovoid, crowned with the remnants of the styles, inclosed in the succulent thickened and colored perianth of the flower and more or less united into a more or less juicy compound fruit; flesh subsucculent, thin; walls of the nutlet thin or thick, crustaceous. Seed oblong, pendulous; testa, thin, membranaceous; hilum minute, apical; embryo incurved in thick fleshy albumen; cotyledons oblong, equal; radicle ascending, incumbent.