A tree, in Florida 18°—20° high, with a trunk 4′—5′ in diameter, long slender drooping branches covered with wart-like excrescences, and stout slightly angled branchlets roughened and somewhat enlarged at the nodes by the thickening of the large crowded cup-shaped persistent woody bases of the leaves, and covered with thin creamy white bark becoming dark or ashy gray in their third year. Winter-buds with linear acute apiculate scales becoming woody, and persistent for one or two years. Bark of the trunk about ⅛′ thick, light brown tinged with red, and irregularly divided into large thin scales. Wood heavy, hard, very close-grained, thin, light brown or orange color, with lighter colored sapwood.
Distribution. Florida, only near the shores of Bay Biscayne on rich hummocks; common on the shores of many of the Antilles, and southward to southern Mexico, the Pacific coast of the Isthmus of Panama, and to Venezuela.
B. Ovary inferior (partly superior in Caprifoliaceæ).
LXV. RUBIACEÆ.
Trees or shrubs, with watery juice, and opposite simple entire leaves turning black in drying, with stipules. Flowers regular, perfect; calyx-tube adnate to the ovary, its limb 4 or 5-lobed or toothed; corolla 4 or 5-lobed; stamens inserted on the tube of the corolla, as many as and alternate with its lobes; filaments free, or united at base; anthers introrse, 2-celled, the cells opening longitudinally; disk epigynous, annular; ovary inferior; style slender; ovules numerous, or 1 in each cell; raphe ventral; micropyle superior. Fruit capsular, akene-like, or drupaceous. Seeds with albumen; seed-coat membranaceous.
The Madder family with some three hundred and fifty genera is chiefly tropical, with a few herbaceous genera confined exclusively to temperate regions. To this family belong the Coffee, the Cinchonas, South American trees yielding quinine from their bark, and the plant which produces ipecacuanha, a species of Cephaelis and a native of Brazil, the Gardenia and other plants cultivated for their fragrant flowers.
CONSPECTUS OF THE ARBORESCENT GENERA OF THE UNITED STATES.
Fruit a capsule; seeds numerous, surrounded by a wing; parts of the flower in 5’s. Calyx 5-lobed, the lobes unequal, sometimes developing into rose-colored leaf-like bodies; filaments free; wing of the seed broad, oblong-ovate, unsymmetric on the sides; leaves deciduous.1. [Pinckneya.] Calyx 5-toothed; filaments united into a short tube; wing of the seed narrow, symmetric; leaves persistent.2. [Exostema.] Fruit akene-like, 1 or 2-seeded; parts of the flower in 4’s or rarely in 5’s, flowers in pedunculate globose heads; leaves deciduous.3. [Cephalanthus.] Fruit drupaceous, with a 4-celled stone; parts of the flower in 4’s; leaves persistent.4. [Guettarda.]
1. PINCKNEYA Michx.
A tree, with fibrous roots, scaly light brown bitter bark, resinous scaly buds, stout terete pithy branchlets coated while young with hoary tomentum, becoming glabrous, and marked by scattered minute white lenticels and large nearly orbicular or obcordate leaf-scars displaying a lunate row of numerous crowded fibro-vascular bundle-scars. Leaves complanate in the bud, elliptic to oblong-ovate, acute at apex, cuneate at base, and gradually narrowed into a long stout petiole, thin, coated at first with pale pubescence, and at maturity dark green and puberulous above, paler and puberulous below, especially along the stout midrib and primary veins, deciduous; stipules interpetiolar, conspicuously glandular-punctate at base on the inner face, inclosing the leaf in the bud, triangular, subulate, pink, becoming oblong, acute, scarious, light brown, caducous. Flowers in pedunculate terminal and axillary pubescent trichotomous few-flowered cymes, with linear-lanceolate acute bracts and bractlets at first pink, becoming scarious, deciduous, or sometimes enlarging and rose-colored; flower-buds sulcate, coated with thick pale tomentum; calyx-tube clavate, bracteolate at base, covered with hoary tomentum, not closed in the bud, the limb 5-lobed, with subulate-lanceolate lobes green tinged with pink, scarious, or in the central flower of the ultimate division of the cyme with 1 or rarely with 2 of the lobes produced into oval or ovate acute rose-colored puberulous membranaceous leaf-like bodies, deciduous; corolla salver-form, light yellow, cinereo-tomentose, with a long narrow tube somewhat enlarged in the throat, 5-lobed, the lobes valvate in the bud, oblong, obtuse, marked by red lines and pilose with long white hairs on the inner surface, recurved after anthesis; stamens exserted; filaments filiform, free; anthers oblong, emarginate; ovary 2-celled; style filiform, exserted, slightly enlarged, 2-lobed and stigmatic at apex; ovules numerous, inserted in 2 ranks on a thin 2-lipped placenta longitudinally adnate to the inner face of the cell. Fruit a subglobose obscurely 2-lobed 2-celled capsule, loculicidally 2-valved, the valves thin and papery, light brown, puberulous, especially at the base, faintly rayed, marked by oblong pale spots and by the scars left by the falling of the deciduous calyx-limb and style, sometimes tardily septicidally 2-parted to the middle, persistent on the branches during the winter, the valves finally falling from the woody axis, their outer layer very thin, brittle, separable from the slightly thicker tough woody inner layer. Seeds horizontal, 2-ranked, minute, compressed; seed-coat thin, light brown, reticulate-veined, produced into a broad thin oblong-ovate wing, unsymmetrical on the sides, acute at apex, and longer above than below the seed; embryo elongated, immersed in the thick fleshy albumen; cotyledons ovate-oblong, foliaceous, longer than the terete radicle turned toward the hilum.