TAXACE^ 



99 



April; staminate with broadly ovate acute scales; pistillate nearly ^' long, with 

 oblong ovate ronnded scales. Fruit ovate or oblong-ovate, I'-l^' long, light green 

 more or less streaked with purple. 



. A tree, oO-70 but occasionally 100 high, with a trunk l-2 or rarely 4 in 

 diameter, and whorls of spreading slender slightly pendulous branches forming 

 a handsome pyramidal and in old age a round-topped head. Bark ^'-^' thick, 

 gray-brown tinged with orange color, deeply and irregularly divided by broad fis- 

 sures into narrow ridges covered with elongated loosely appressed plate-like scales. 



Wood light, soft, close-grained, clear light yellow, with thin nearly white sap wood; 

 occasionally used for fence-posts. 



Distribution. Borders of mountain streams, California, nowhere common but 

 widely distributed from Mendocino County to the Santa Cruz Mountains in the coast 

 region and along the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada from Eldorado to Tulare 

 County at elevations of 3000^-5000 above the sea; most abundant and of its largest 

 size on the northern coast ranges. 



Rarely cultivated as an ornamental tree in western Europe. 



2. TAXUS, L. Yew. 



Trees or shrubs, with brown or dark purple scaly bark, and spreading usually hori- 

 zontal branches. Leaves flat, often falcate, gradually narrowed at the base, dark 

 green, smooth and keeled on the upper surface, paler, papillate, and stomatiferous 

 on the lower surface, their margins slightly thickened and revolute. Flowers : the 

 staminate composed of a slender stipe bearing at the apex a globular head of 48 

 pale yellow stamens consisting of 4-6 conical pendant pollen-sacs peltately con- 

 nate from the end of a short filament; the pistillate sessile in the axils of the upper 

 scale-like bracts of a short axillary branch, the ovule erect, sessile on a ring-like 

 disk, ripening in the autumn into an ovate-oblong seed gradually narrowed and 

 short-pointed at the apex, marked at the base by the much-depressed hilum, about ^' 

 long, entirely or nearly surrounded by but free from the now thickened succulent 

 translucent sweet scarlet aril-like disk of the flower closed or open at the apex; 

 seed-coat thick, of two layers, the outer thin and membranaceous or fleshy, the 

 inner much thicker and somewhat woody; albumen uniform. 



