A tree, 30°—40° high, with a trunk rarely exceeding 15′ in diameter, and slender branchlets densely rusty pubescent during their first season, and during their third year becoming glabrous, red-brown, rugose and marked by occasional small lenticels. Winter-buds acuminate, dark reddish brown and covered with short reddish pubescence. Bark of the trunk ½′—¾′ thick, furrowed and divided into parallel ridges, the red-brown surface broken into short thick scales.
Distribution. Sandy woods near Bluffton, Beaufort County, and in the neighborhood of Charleston, South Carolina, and on Colonel’s Island near the mouth of the North Newport and Medway Rivers, near Dunham, Liberty County, Georgia.
XL. STERCULIACEÆ.
Trees or shrubs, with bitter astringent juice, mucilaginous bark, and alternate simple leaves, with stipules. Flowers perfect, regular; calyx of 5 sepals, imbricated in the bud; corolla 0 (in Fremontia); anthers extrorse; pistil of 5 united carpels; ovary 5-celled; styles united; ovules anatropous.
A family of about fifty genera mostly confined to the tropics. Its most important species, Theobroma Cacao L., of the West Indies, produces chocolate from the cotyledons. Firmiana simplex F. N. Meyer, of this family and a native of southern China, is often planted as an ornamental tree in the southern states, where it has sometimes become naturalized, and in California.
1. FREMONTIA Torr.
A tree or shrub, with stellate pubescence and naked buds. Leaves broad-ovate, lobed, thick, prominently veined, usually rufous on the lower surface, persistent; stipules minute, deciduous. Flowers solitary, terminal or opposite the leaves, pedicellate, subtended by 3 or rarely 5 minute caducous bracts; calyx subcampanulate, hypogynous, deeply 5-lobed, the lobes imbricated in the bud, petaloid, yellow, spreading, obovate, often mucronate, 1′ long, the 3 outer a little smaller than the others, pubescent on the outer surface, with a hairy cavity at the base of the inner surface; corolla 0; stamens 5; filaments alternate with the sepals, united to the middle into a column; anthers oblong-linear, incurved at the ends, 2-celled, the cells opening longitudinally; ovary 5-celled, the cells opposite the sepals; style filiform, elongated, terminated by an acute undivided stigmatic point; ovules numerous in each cell, horizontal. Fruit an ovoid acuminate 4 or 5-valved loculicidally dehiscent capsule densely coated with long matted hairs, the inner surface of the cells villose-pubescent. Seeds oval; seed-coat crustaceous, puberulous, with a small fleshy marginal deciduous ariloid appendage on the chalaza; embryo straight, in thick fleshy albumen; cotyledons oblong, foliaceous, three or four times longer than the short radicle.
Fremontia, named in honor of John C. Frémont, the distinguished explorer of western North America, is represented by a single species.
1. [Fremontia californica] Torr. Slippery Elm.
Fremontodendron californicum Cov.