Distribution. Florida, rich hummock soil, shores of Bay Biscayne and on the Everglade Keys, Dade County, and on several of the southern keys; on the Bahama Islands and on many of the Antilles.
3. BUMELIA Sw.
Small trees or shrubs, with terete usually spinescent branchlets, scaly buds, and fibrous roots. Leaves often fascicled on spur-like lateral branchlets, conduplicate in the bud, coriaceous or thin, short-petiolate, obovate and obtuse or elliptic, silky-pubescent or tomentose below, or nearly glabrous, with rather inconspicuous veins arcuate near the entire margins and conspicuous reticulate veinlets, deciduous or persistent. Flowers minute, on slender clavate ebracteolate pedicels from the axils of lanceolate acute scarious deciduous bracts, in many-flowered crowded fascicles in the axils of existing leaves or from the leafless nodes of previous years; calyx ovoid to subcampanulate, 5-lobed, the lobes in one series, imbricated in the bud, ovate or oblong, rounded at apex, nearly equal; corolla campanulate, white, with 5 spreading broad-ovate lobes rounded at apex and furnished on each side at base with a minute acute ovate or lanceolate appendage; stamens 5; filaments filiform; anthers ovoid-sagittate, attached on the back below the middle, the cells opening by subextrorse slits; staminodia petal-like, ovate or ovate-lanceolate, entire or obscurely denticulate, flattened or keeled on the back, sometimes furnished at base with a pair of minute scales; ovary hirsute, ovoid to ovoid-conic, gradually or abruptly contracted into a slender short or elongated simple style stigmatic at the acute apex. Fruit oblong-obovoid or globose, black, solitary or in 2 or 3-fruited clusters; flesh thin and dry or succulent. Seed ovoid or oblong, apiculate or rounded at apex, without albumen; seed-coat thick, crustaceous, light brown, smooth and shining, folded more or less conspicuously on the back into 2 lobes rounded at apex; embryo filling the cavity of the seed; cotyledons thick and fleshy, hemispheric, usually consolidated; radicle short, turned toward the basilar or subbasilar orbicular or elliptic hilum.
Bumelia, with about twenty-five species is confined to the New World, where it is distributed from the southern United States through the West Indies to Mexico, Central America, and Brazil. Of the twelve species in the United States which have been distinguished five are small trees.
Bumelia produces hard heavy strong wood, that of the North American species containing bands of numerous large open ducts defining the layers of annual growth and connected by conspicuous branched groups of similar ducts, presenting in cross-section a reticulate appearance.
The generic name is from βουμελία, a classical name of the Ash-tree.
CONSPECTUS OF THE ARBORESCENT SPECIES OF THE UNITED STATES.
Lower surface of the leaves pubescent or lanuginose. Leaves short-obovate to oblanceolate or elliptic, covered below with pale or ferrugineous silky pubescence.1. [B. tenax] (C). Leaves oblong-obovate, lanuginose below with ferrugineous or silvery white hairs.2. [B. lanuginosa] (A, C, H). Leaves glabrous or nearly so. Leaves deciduous. Leaves oblong-obovate, thick.3. [B. monticola.] Leaves elliptic to oblanceolate, usually acute or acuminate, thin.4. [B. lycioides] (A, C). Leaves persistent, obovate; fruit oblong.5. [B. angustifolia] (C, D).
1. [Bumelia tenax] Willd. Ironwood. Black Haw.
