A tree, occasionally 50°—60° high, with a tall straight trunk 12′—20′ in diameter, slender spreading branches forming a narrow oblong round-topped head, and glabrous branchlets yellow-green and marked by orange-colored lenticels when they first appear, becoming in their first winter orange-colored to reddish brown. Winter-buds about 1/16′ long, their inner scales at maturity 1′ in length, ⅛′ wide, spatulate, acute at apex, and slightly puberulous on the inner surface and on the margins. Bark of the trunk ⅔′—1′ thick, gray tinged with red and divided by longitudinal furrows into broad rounded ridges covered with small thick appressed scales. Wood heavy, hard, very close-grained, brown tinged with red, with lighter colored sapwood of 80—90 layers of annual growth; sometimes used locally for the handles of tools and the bearings of machinery. The leaves have a pleasant acidulous taste, and are reputed to be tonic, refrigerant, and diuretic, and are occasionally used in domestic practice in the treatment of fevers.
Distribution. Well-drained gravelly soil on ridges rising above the banks of streams; coast of Virginia (Norfolk County) to that of North Carolina (near Newbern, Craven County), southwestern Pennsylvania to southern Ohio and Indiana (Perry County), and to western Kentucky and Tennessee, along the Appalachian Mountains and their foothills, and southward to western Florida, the shores of Mobile Bay, the coast region of Mississippi, and West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana; up to altitudes of 3500° on the southern mountains; of its largest size on the western slopes of the Big Smoky Mountains, Tennessee.
Often cultivated as an ornamental plant in the eastern states and hardy as far north as eastern Massachusetts, and occasionally in western and central Europe.
5. LYONIA Nutt.
Trees or shrubs, with slender terete branchlets, and fibrous roots. Leaves petiolate, thin or coriaceous. Flowers on slender pedicels from the axils of ovate acute bracts, in axillary and terminal umbellate fascicles or panicled racemes; calyx persistent, 4—5-toothed or parted, the divisions valvate in the bud; corolla globular, 4 or 5-toothed or lobed, the lobes imbricated in the bud; stamens 8—10, included; filaments flat, incurved, usually slightly adnate to the base of the corolla, dilated and bearded at base, geniculate; anthers oblong, the cells opening below the apex by large oblong pores; disk 10-lobed; ovary 5-celled, depressed in the centre; style columnar, stigmatic at apex; ovules attached to a placenta borne near the summit of the axis, anatropous. Fruit ovoid, many-seeded, loculicidally 5-valved, the valves septiferous and separating from the placentiferous axis, 5-ribbed by the thickening of the valves at the dorsal sutures, the ribs more or less separable in dehiscence. Seeds minute, pendulous, narrow-oblong; seed-coat loose, thin, reticulate, produced at the ends beyond the nucleus into short fringe-like wings; embryo axile in fleshy albumen, cylindric elongated; cotyledons much shorter than the terete radicle turned toward the hilum.
Lyonia with about twenty species is confined to North America, the West Indies, and Mexico. Of the four or five species which occur in the United States one is occasionally a small tree.
The genus is named in honor of John Lyon, an English gardener who made important collections of plants in the United States early in the nineteenth century.
1. [Lyonia ferruginea] Nutt.
Xolisma ferruginea Hell.
