The genus consists of a single West Indian species, extending into southern Florida and to Venezuela.
The generic name is from canella, the diminutive of the Latin cana or canna, a cane or reed, first applied to the bark of some Old World tree from the form of a roll or quill which it assumed in drying.
1. [Canella Winterana] Gærtn. Cinnamon Bark. White Wood. Wild Cinnamon.
Leaves contracted into a short stout grooved petiole, 3½′—5′ long and 1½′—2′ wide, bright green and lustrous. Flowers about ⅛′ in diameter, opening in the autumn. Fruit ripening in March and April, bright crimson, soft and fleshy, ½′ in diameter; seeds about 3/16′ long.
A tree, in Florida 25°—30° high, with a straight trunk 8′—10′ in diameter, and slender horizontal spreading branches forming a compact round-headed top. Bark of the trunk ⅛′ thick, light gray, broken on the surface into numerous short thick scales rarely more than 2′—3′ long and about twice as thick as the pale yellow aromatic inner bark. Wood very heavy, exceedingly hard, strong, close-grained, dark red-brown, with thick light brown or yellow sapwood of 25—30 layers of annual growth. The bitter acrid inner bark is the wild cinnamon bark of commerce. It has a pleasant cinnamon-like odor and is an aromatic stimulant and tonic.
Distribution. Florida, region of Cape Sable, Munroe County (Flamingo [A. A. Eaton], East Cape, Madeira Hammock), and widely distributed on the southern keys, usually growing in the shade of other trees; on the Bahama Islands and many of the Antilles.
XLIII. KŒBERLINIACEÆ.
An intricately branched almost leafless tree or shrub, with thin red-brown scaly bark, stout alternate glabrous branchlets covered with pale green bark and terminating in a sharp rigid straight or slightly curved spine. Leaves minute, early deciduous, alternate, narrow-obovate, rounded at apex. Flowers perfect, on slender club-shaped puberulous pedicels from the axils of minute scarious deciduous bracts, in short umbel-like racemes below the end of the branches; calyx of 3 or 5 minute sepals imbricated in the bud, deciduous; petals 4, convolute in the bud, hypogynous, obovate or oblong, subunguiculate, white, much longer than the sepals; disk 0; stamens 8, free, hypogynous, as long as the petals; filaments thickened in the middle, subulate at the ends; anthers oval, attached on the back near the base, 2-celled, the cells opening longitudinally; ovary ovoid, 2-celled, contracted at base into a short stalk and above into a simple subulate style; stigma terminal, obtuse, slightly emarginate; ovules numerous, adnate in several series to the fleshy placenta, horizontal or dependent, anatropous. Fruit a 2-celled berry, black at maturity, subglobose, tipped with the remnants of the pointed style; flesh thin and succulent, the cells 1 or 2-seeded by abortion. Seed vertical, circinate-cochleate; seed-coat crustaceous, slightly rugose, striate; albumen thin; embryo annular; cotyledons semiterete; the radicle ascending.
The family is represented by a single genus.