I have observed, in the middle of a very hot day, that the flowers unbend themselves more, the calix seems to expand, and the whole flower to turn itself towards the sun in the same manner as does the sun-flower. When the branch is cut, the flower dries as it were instantaneously, so that it seems to contain very little humidity.
WANZEY.
This tree is very common throughout all Abyssinia. I do not know the reason, but all the towns are full of them; every house in Gondar has two or three planted round it, so that, when viewed first from the heights, it appears like a wood, especially all the season of the rains; but very exactly on the first of September, for three years together, in a night’s time, it was covered with a multitude of white flowers. Gondar, and all the towns about, then appeared as covered with white linen, or with new-fallen snow. This tree blossoms the first day the rains cease. It grows to a considerable magnitude, is from 18 to 20 feet high. The trunk is generally about 3 feet and a half from the ground; it then divides into four or five thick branches, which have at least 60° inclination to the horizon, and not more. These large branches are generally bare, for half way up the bark is rough and furrowed. They then put out a number of smaller branches, are circular and fattish at the top, of a figure like some of our early pear-trees. The cup is a single-leaved perianthium, red, marked very regularly before it flowers, but when the flower is out, the edges of the cup are marked with irregular notches, or segments, in the edge, which by no means correspond in numbers or distances to those that appeared before the perfection of the flower.
Wanzey
Heath. Sc.
London Publish’d Dec.r 1.st 1789 by G. Robinson & Co.
The flower itself consists of one leaf of the funnel-fashioned kind, spreads, and, when in its full perfection, folds back at the lips, though it has in some flowers marks or depressions which might appear like segments, yet they are not such, but merely accidental, and the edge of most of the flowers perfectly even, without any mark of separation.
The pistil consists of a very feeble thread; in the top it is bisected, or divided, into two; its apex is covered with a small portion of yellow dust. There are two, and sometimes three, of these divisions. The fruit is fully formed in the cup while the flower remains closed, and like a kind of tuft, which falls off, and the pistil still remains on the point of the fruit; is at first soft, then hardens like a nut, and is covered with a thin, green husk. It then dries, hardens into a shell, and withers. The leaf is of a dark green, without varnish, with an obtuse point; the ribs few but strong, marked both within and without. The outside is a greenish yellow, without varnish also.