A tree, in Florida sometimes 40° high, with a tall trunk 4′ or 5′ in diameter, covered with smooth pale gray bark, small branches and slender terete ascending ashy gray branchlets.
Distribution. Florida, Paradise and Long Keys in the Everglades, Dade County; on the Bahama Islands and in Cuba, Jamaica and Hayti.
2. EUGENIA L.
Trees or shrubs, with hard durable wood and scaly bark. Flowers often large and conspicuous, on short bibracteolate pedicels, in axillary racemes or fascicles or dichotomously branched cymes, with minute caducous bracts and bractlets; calyx campanulate, scarcely produced above the ovary, the limb 4 or rarely 5-lobed; petals usually 4, free and spreading; ovary 2 or rarely 3-celled; ovules numerous in each cell, semianatropous. Fruit 1—4-seeded. Seeds globose or flattened; seed-coat membranaceous or cartilaginous; embryo thick and fleshy; cotyledons thick, more or less conferruminate into a homogeneous mass; radicle very short, turned toward the hilum.
Eugenia with some five hundred species is common in all tropical regions, with eight species reaching the shores of southern Florida, of these 6 are small trees. Several species are valued for their stimulant and digestive properties; some produce useful timber or edible fruit, and others are cultivated for the beauty of their flowers. Cloves are the flower-buds of Eugenia aromatica Baill., a native of the Molucca Islands; and Eugenia Jambos L., the Rose Apple, of southeastern Asia, is cultivated in all tropical countries as a shade-tree and for its delicately fragrant fruit.
The generic name commemorates the interest in botany and gardening taken by Prince Eugène of Savoy, who built the Belvidere Palace near Vienna in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and made a collection of rare plants in its gardens.
CONSPECTUS OF THE ARBORESCENT SPECIES OF THE UNITED STATES.
Flowers in axillary racemes or fascicles. Flowers in short solitary or clustered axillary racemes. Leaves ovate or obovate, rounded at apex, short-petiolate; fruit subglobose to short-oblong.1. [E. buxifolia] (C, D). Leaves ovate, contracted at apex into a broad point, distinctly petiolate; fruit globose, black, ½′ in diameter.2. [E. axillaris] (C, D). Flowers in axillary fascicles. Leaves usually broad-ovate, narrowed at apex into a short point, subcoriaceous; fruit subglobose, rather broader than high, ⅔′—1′ in diameter, becoming black at maturity.3. [E. rhombea] (D). Leaves oblong-ovate, narrowed at apex into a long point, coriaceous; fruit subglobose to obovoid, ¼′—⅓′ long, bright scarlet.4. [E. confusa] (D). Flowers in dichotomously branched cymes. (Anamomis.) Leaves ovate or obovate; cymes usually 3-flowered; flowers not more than ¼′ in diameter; fruit black.5. [E. dicrana] (D). Leaves oblong or broad-elliptic; cymes 3—15-flowered; flowers up to ½′ in diameter; fruit red.6. [E. Simpsonii] (D).
1. [Eugenia buxifolia] Willd. Gurgeon Stopper. Spanish Stopper.
