1. [Exothea paniculata] Radlk. Ironwood. Ink Wood.
Leaves appearing in April, on stout grooved petioles ½′—1′ in length; leaflets 4′—5′ long and 1½′—2′ wide. Flowers opening in Florida in April, ¼′ across when expanded, the staminate and pistillate on separate plants. Fruit fully grown by the end of June and then ½′—⅝′ long, and dull orange color, remaining on the branches during the summer, ripening in the autumn; seeds ¼′—⅜′ in diameter.
A tree, sometimes 40°—50° high, with a trunk 12′—15′ in diameter, slender upright branchlets orange-brown when they first appear, becoming reddish brown in their second year and thickly covered by small white lenticels. Bark of the trunk ⅛′—¼′ thick, the bright red surface separating into large scales. Wood very hard and heavy, strong, close-grained, bright red-brown, with lighter colored sapwood of 10—12 layers of annual growth; valued for piles and also used in Florida in boat-building, for the handles of tools, and many small articles.
Distribution. Florida, Mosquito Inlet on the east coast to the shores of Bay Biscayne and on the Everglade Keys, Dade County, and on the southern keys; on the Bahamas, on many of the Antilles, and in Guatemala; on the Florida Keys generally distributed, but not common.
3. HYPELATE P. Br.
A glabrous tree or shrub, with smooth bark and slender terete branchlets. Leaves long-petioled, the petioles sometimes narrow-winged, 3-foliolate, the terminal leaflet rather larger than the others, persistent; leaflets sessile, obovate, rounded or rarely acute or emarginate at apex, entire, with thickened revolute margins and a prominent midrib, coriaceous, feather-veined, the veins arcuate and connected near the margins, dark green and lustrous on the upper surface, bright green on the lower surface. Flowers regular, polygamo-monœcious, minute, on slender pedicels from the axils of minute deciduous bracts, in few-flowered long-stemmed wide-branched terminal or axillary panicles; calyx 5-lobed, the lobes ovate, rounded at apex, slightly puberulous on the outer surface, ciliate on the margins, deciduous by a circumscissile line, petals 5, rather longer than the calyx-lobes, rounded, spreading, ciliate on the margins, white; stamens 7 or 8, inserted on the lobes of the annular fleshy disk; filaments filiform, as long as the petals in the staminate flower, much shorter in the pistillate flower; anthers oblong, attached on the back near the bottom, the cells spreading from above downward; ovary sessile on the disk, slightly 3-lobed, 3-celled, contracted into a short stout style, rudimentary in the staminate flower; stigma large, declinate, obscurely 3-lobed; ovules 2 in each cell, borne on the middle of its inner angle, superposed, amphitropous, the upper ascending, with the micropyle inferior, the lower pendulous, with the micropyle superior. Fruit an ovoid black drupe crowned with the remnants of the persistent style and supported on the persistent base of the disk; flesh thin and fleshy; walls of the stone thick and crustaceous. Seed solitary by the abortion of the upper ovule, suspended, obovoid; seed-coat thin, slightly wrinkled; embryo conduplicate, filling the cavity of the seed; cotyledons thin, foliaceous, irregularly folded, incumbent on the long radicle.
The genus with a single species is distributed from southern Florida to the Bahamas, Cuba, Porto Rico, St. Martin, Anguilla and Jamaica.
Hypelate is the ancient name of the Butcher’s Broom.