The generic name is in honor of Dr. Francis Clifton (d. 1736), an English physician.
1. [Cliftonia monophylla] Britt. Titi. Ironwood.
Leaves 1½′—2′ long, ½′—1′ wide, bright green and lustrous on the upper surface, paler on the lower surface; persistent until the autumn of their second year. Flowers fragrant, appearing in February and March, in racemes at first nodding, and conspicuous from the long exserted dark red-brown caducous bracts, becoming erect as the flowers open. Fruit about ¼′ long, ripening in August and September; seeds 1/16′—⅛′ long, light brown.
A tree, occasionally 40°—50° high, with a stout often crooked or inclining trunk, occasionally 15′—18′ in diameter, and usually divided 12°—15° from the ground into a number of stout ascending branches, and slender rigid bright red-brown branchlets, becoming paler during their second and third seasons; or sometimes a shrub, with numerous straggling stout or slender stems frequently only a few feet high or occasionally 30°—40° high. Winter-buds about ¼′ long. Bark of young stems and of large branches thin, the surface separating into small persistent scales 1′—2′ long, becoming near the base of old trees deeply furrowed, dark red-brown, ¼′ thick, and broken on the surface into short broad scales. Wood heavy, close-grained, moderately hard, brittle, not strong, brown tinged with red, with thick lighter colored sapwood of 40—50 layers of annual growth; burning with a clear bright flame, and valued as fuel.
Distribution. Damp sandy peat soil in swamps almost submerged for several months of the year, or often in shallow rarely overflowed swamps; coast region of the south Atlantic states from the valley of the Savannah River to the coast of western Florida, and through the maritime Pine-belt of the Gulf coast to eastern Louisiana.
XXXIII. AQUIFOLIACEÆ.
Trees or shrubs, with terete branchlets, scaly buds, and alternate simple entire crenate or pungently toothed petiolate persistent or deciduous leaves, with minute stipules. Flowers axillary, solitary or cymose, small, greenish white, diœcious; calyx 4—6-lobed, the lobes imbricated in the bud, hypogynous; petals 4—6, oval or oblong, obtuse, free or united at base, imbricated in the bud; disk 0; stamens as many as and alternate with the petals and adnate to the base of the corolla; anthers introrse, 2-celled, the cells opening longitudinally, small and sterile in the pistillate flower; pistil compound; ovary 4—8-celled, minute and rudimentary in the staminate flower; style short or 0; stigmas as many as the cells of the ovary, nearly confluent; ovule generally solitary in each cell, suspended, anatropous; raphe usually dorsal, the micropyle superior. Fruit a drupe, with as many indehiscent bony or crustaceous 1-seeded nutlets as carpels; sarcocarp thin and fleshy. Seed narrowed at the ends, suspended; seed-coat membranaceous, pale brown; embryo minute in the apex of the copious fleshy albumen; cotyledons plain; the radicle superior.
The Holly family with five genera is distributed in temperate and tropical regions of the two hemispheres. Of the five genera now recognized, only Ilex is important in the number of species or is widely distributed.