Leaves usually 3-lobed, rarely entire or sometimes 5—7-lobed, 1½′ in diameter; petioles stout, ½′—⅔′ in length. Flowers appearing in July in great profusion on short spur-like lateral branchlets. Fruit 1′ long; seeds very dark red-brown, about 3/16′ long.
A tree, 20°—30° high, with a short trunk 12′—14′ in diameter, stout rigid branches spreading almost at right angles, and stout terete branchlets thickly coated when they first appear with rufous pubescence, becoming glabrous and light red-brown; more often a low intricately branched shrub. Bark of the trunk rarely more than ¼′ thick, deeply furrowed, the dark red-brown surface broken into numerous short thick scales. Wood hard, heavy, close-grained, dark brown tinged with red, with thick lighter colored sapwood. The mucilaginous inner bark is sometimes used domestically in poultices.
Distribution. Lower slopes of the California mountains; western base of Mt. Shasta to the San Pedro Mártir Mountains, Lower California; nowhere common west of the Sierra Nevada, but of its largest size on their western foothills; most abundant east of the Sierra Nevada in the region of the Mohave Desert, growing as a low shrub and sometimes forming thickets several acres in extent.
Occasionally cultivated in western and southern Europe as an ornamental plant.
XLI. THEACEÆ.
Trees or shrubs, with simple alternate leaves, without stipules. Flowers perfect, regular, hypogynous; sepals and petals 5, imbricated in the bud; stamens numerous; anthers 2-celled, the cells opening longitudinally; pistil of 3—5 united carpels; ovary 3—5-celled; styles as many as the cells of the ovary, partly united. Fruit capsular; embryo with large cotyledons.
The Camellia family with eighteen genera is principally confined to the tropics of the New World and to southern and eastern Asia. Two genera are represented in the flora of the southern United States, and of these Gordonia is arborescent. Its most important genus, Camellia of eastern Asia, contains the Tea plant, Camellia Thea Link, and several species cultivated for the beauty of their flowers.
1. GORDONIA Ell.
Trees or shrubs, with terete branchlets, with an acuminate terminal bud, slender acuminate naked axillary buds, and watery juice. Leaves pinnately veined, entire or crenate, subcoriaceous and persistent, or thin and deciduous. Flowers axillary, solitary, long-stalked or subsessile; calyx subtended by 2—5 caducous bracts; sepals unequal, rounded, concave, coriaceous, persistent; petals free or slightly united, obovate, concave, white, deciduous; stamens numerous, filaments short, united at base into a fleshy cup adnate to the base of the petals and inserted with them, or long and inserted directly on the petals; anthers introrse, yellow; ovary sessile; style elongated, erect, 5-lobed at the stigmatic apex; ovules 4—8 in each cell, pendulous in 2 series from its inner angle, collateral, anatropous. Fruit a woody oblong or subglobose 5-celled capsule loculicidally 5-valved, with a persistent axis angled by the projecting placentas. Seeds 2—8 in each cell pendulous, flat, without albumen; seed-coat woody, usually produced upward into an oblong wing; embryo mostly straight or oblique, with oblong flat or oblique cotyledons; radicle short, superior.