The generic name, from κιθάρα and ξύλον, is a translation of the English West Indian name Fiddle Wood, a corruption of the earlier French-colonial Bois Fidèle, in allusion to the strength and toughness of the wood of the trees of this genus.
1. [Citharexylon fruticosum] L. Fiddle Wood.
Citharexylon villosum Jacq.
Leaves oblong-obovate to oblong, acute, acuminate, rounded or emarginate at apex, and gradually narrowed at base, with thickened slightly revolute margins, and glabrous or coated with short pubescence (var. villosum Schulz); conspicuously reticulate-venulose, pale green, 3′—4′ long and 1′—1½′ wide, with a broad pale midrib rounded on the upper side and remote prominent arcuate veins; petioles stout, grooved, ⅔′ in length, separating in falling from an elevated nearly circular persistent woody base. Flowers fragrant, appearing throughout the year on slender pedicels from the axils of scarious pubescent bracts, in drooping axillary pubescent racemes crowded near the end of the branches and 2′—4′ long; calyx coated with pale hairs, or sometimes nearly glabrous; corolla ⅛′ across the expanded lobes of the limb, and covered on the inner surface of the tube with pale hairs; staminodium minute. Fruit subglobose to oblong-ovoid, light red-brown, very lustrous, ⅓′ in diameter, with thin sweet rather juicy flesh, and inclosed nearly to the middle in the cup-like pale brown slightly and irregularly lobed or sometimes nearly entire calyx; seeds oblong, narrowed at the rounded ends, about ⅛′ long.
A tree, in Florida rarely more than 30° high, with a trunk 4′—7′ in diameter, slender upright branches forming a narrow irregularly shaped head, and slender slightly many-angled branchlets light yellow and covered with pale simple caducous hairs or pubescent when they first appear, becoming in their second year terete and ashy gray; or often a shrub, with numerous low stems. Winter-buds globose, nearly immersed in the bark, and covered with hoary pubescence. Bark of the trunk 1/16′—⅛′ thick, light brown tinged with red, the surface separating into minute appressed scales. Wood heavy, exceedingly hard, strong, close-grained, clear bright red, with thin lighter colored sapwood.
Distribution. Florida, Cape Canaveral to the southern keys; common and of its largest size in the United States on the shores of Bay Biscayne near the mouth of the Miami River, Dade County; northward usually a low shrub; on the Bahama Islands and on many of the Antilles.
2. AVICENNIA L.
Trees, with coriaceous persistent leaves, stout pithy branches thickened at the nodes and marked by interpetiolar lines, and long thick horizontal roots producing numerous short vertical thick and fleshy leafless stems rising above the surface of the soil. Flowers opposite, cymose, in centripetal pedunculate spikes or heads, closely invested by a bract and 2 bractlets, the peduncles solitary or in pairs in the axils of upper leaves and ternate on the end of the branches, their bracts and bractlets concave, acute, apiculate, keeled on the back, scarious, slightly ciliate on the margins, shorter than the corolla, persistent under the fruit; calyx cup-shaped, coated like the bracts and bractlets with canescent pubescence, divided nearly to the base into 5 concave ovate rounded lobes imbricated in the bud; corolla campanulate, white, with a straight cylindric tube shorter than the glabrous or tomentose spreading 4-lobed limb, the posterior lobe usually larger than the others; stamens exserted; filaments short, filiform, slightly thickened at base; anthers ovoid; ovary ovoid, pubescent, 1-celled, gradually narrowed into an elongated slender style divided at apex into 2 lobes stigmatic on their inner face; ovules 4, suspended from the summit of a free central placenta, orthotropous, naked. Fruit an ovoid oblique compressed 1-seeded capsule apiculate at apex; pericarp thin, light green, villose-pubescent on the outer surface, longitudinally veined on the inner surface, opening by the ventral suture and displaying the embryo enlarging before separating from the branch, ultimately 2-valved. Seed naked, without albumen; embryo filling the cavity of the fruit, light green; cotyledons thick and fleshy, broader than long, slightly pointed, deeply cordate at base, unequal, conduplicate; radicle elongated, clavate, retrorsely hirsute, inferior, descending obliquely and included between the lobes of the cotyledons slightly attached near the apex in the bottom of the capsule to the withered columella by a minute papillose point; plumule hairy.
Avicennia with three species is widely distributed on maritime shores of the tropics of the two worlds, with one species reaching those of the southern United States. Avicennia produces hard strong wood. The bark is rich in tannic acid, and is used for tanning leather. The chief value of these trees is in their ability to live on low tidal shores by the structure of the embryo, which is growing and ready to take root as soon as it falls into the soft mud, and in the long horizontal roots furnished with short vertical fleshy leafless branches or aerating roots, forming a close network which holds the soil together and prevents it from being washed away by outflowing tides, and extends the growth of the tree by numerous stems which soon form dense thickets.