A tree, occasionally 20°—25° high, with a short often crooked trunk 6′—8′ in diameter, stout spreading branches forming a low round-topped head, and stout branchlets, becoming in their second year dark gray or brown, slightly puberulous, and marked by occasional large lenticels and by elevated obcordate leaf-scars; or often a shrub, with numerous stems sometimes only 2° or 3° tall. Bark of the trunk thin, gray tinged with red, and irregularly divided into broad flat ridges, the surface ultimately separating into long thin papery scales. Wood light, rather soft, close-grained, and dark brown, with thick light brown sapwood.
Distribution. Dry limestone ridges, and depressions in the desert; valley of the Rio Grande, Texas, and southern New Mexico, southward into Mexico; most abundant and of its largest size in Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon between the mouth of the Rio Grande and the base of the Sierra Madre.
2. BEURERIA Jacq.
Trees or shrubs, with oblong-obovate or ovate leaves involute in the bud, persistent. Flowers on slender bracteolate pedicels, in terminal corymbose many-flowered cymes, with linear-lanceolate caducous bracts and bractlets; calyx campanulate, 5-toothed, the divisions closed and valvate in the bud; corolla white, campanulate, the lobes broad-ovate, spreading after anthesis; anthers ovoid, rugulose, apiculate; ovary incompletely 4-celled by the development of the 2 parietal placentas, narrowed into a terminal style 2-parted at apex, the divisions more or less coalescent; stigmas capitate; ovules attached on the back near the middle of the inner face of the revolute placentas, anatropous; raphe ventral; micropyle superior. Fruit subglobose, flesh thin; stone somewhat 4-lobed and separable into 4 thick-walled bony 1-seeded nutlets rounded and furnished on the back with a thick spongy longitudinal many-ridged appendage, flattened on their converging inner faces and attached at apex to a filiform column. Seed terete, filling the seminal cell, longitudinally incurved round a rather small cavity opposite an elevated oblong scar on one of the inner faces of the nutlet and connected with the hilum by a narrow passage; seed-coat membranaceous, light brown; embryo axile in fleshy albumen; cotyledons plane; radicle slender, elongated, turned toward the hilum.
Beureria with forty species is confined to tropical America, two species reaching the shores of southern Florida; of these one is a tree and the other Beureria revoluta H. B. K. is an arborescent shrub.
The generic name is in honor of J. A. Beurer, an apothecary at Nuremberg.
1. [Beureria ovata] Meyers.
Beureria havanensis Hitch., not Meyers.
Leaves elliptic to oval or broad-obovate, acute and often apiculate or rounded and then occasionally emarginate at apex, gradually narrowed and cuneate at base entire, densely covered when they unfold with white caducous hairs, and at maturity thick, dark yellow-green and lustrous above, paler below, 2½′—3′ long and 1¼′—2′ wide, with slightly thickened undulate margins, a slender, orange-colored midrib, thin primary veins and conspicuous reticulate veinlets more prominent above than below; usually persistent through their second summer; petioles slender, covered when they first appear like the very young branchlets with long white hairs, very soon glabrous, ½′—1′ in length. Flowers opening in spring and late in autumn on pedicels ½′ long and furnished near the middle with an acuminate scarious bractlet ¼′ in length and caducous from a persistent base, in open glabrous 15—20-flowered long-stalked cymes 3′—4′ in diameter, with slender branches, and small bracts; calyx gradually narrowed into a stipe-like base, the lobes acuminate, ciliate on the margins; corolla subcampanulate, creamy white, with a short tube somewhat enlarged in the throat, and broad-ovate spreading lobes ¾′ across when expanded; stamens rather longer than the tube of the corolla, anthers much shorter than the filaments; ovary conic, glabrous, gradually contracted into a slender exserted style divided only toward the apex or sometimes nearly entire, and crowned with 2 capitate stigmas. Fruit ripening in early autumn or early spring from autumnal flowers, bright orange-red, ½′ in diameter, with a thick tough skin and thin dry flesh inclosing the 4 nutlets, the enlarged spreading calyx becoming sometimes ½′ across.