BORRAGINACE^ 



785 



or in early spring from autumnal flowers, bright orange-red, ^' in diameter, with a 

 thick tough skin ?nd thin dry flesh inclosing the 4 nutlets, the enlarged spreading 

 calyx becoming sometimes ^' across. 



A tree, in Florida occasionally 40-50 high, with a buttressed and often fluted 

 trunk 8'-10' in diameter, and slender branchlets light red and pilose, with pale 

 deciduous hairs when they first appear, becoming in their first winter dark red, 



orange color or ashy gray, and sometimes roughened by pale lenticels, their thin 

 bark often separating into delicate scales; usually much smaller and often a shrub, 

 with numerous spreading stems. Winter-buds minute, globose, covered with hoary 

 tomentum, nearly immersed in the bark. Bark of the trunk ^e'-^' thick, light 

 brown tinged with red, more or less fissured and divided on the surface into thick 

 plate-like irregular scales. Wood hard, strong, very close-grained, brown streaked 

 with orange, with thick hardly distinguishable sapwood. 



Distribution. Keys of southern Florida; common; also on the Bahama Islands 

 and on many of the Antilles. 



3. EHRETIA, P. Br. 



Trees or shrubs, with entire or dentate leaves, and scaly buds. Flowers small, in 

 terminal and axillary scorpioid clusters; calyx open or closed in the bud, the divisions 

 imbricated, ovate or linear; corolla usually white, with a short or cylindrical tube 

 and spreading obtuse lobes; ovary oblong-conical, 1-celled before anthesis, becoming 

 incompletely 4-celled by the development of the 2 parietal placentas; style columnar, 

 parted into 2 divisions terminating in capitate stigmas; ovules attached laterally near 

 the middle on the inner face of the revolute placentas, anatropous; raphe ventral; 

 micropyle superior. Fruit fleshy, small, globose, with thin flesh; stone separable into 

 2 2-celled thick-walled bony nutlets rounded on the back, plane on the inner face, and 

 attached to a thin axile column. Seed terete, usually erect, filling the longitudinally 

 incurved seminal cavity; seed-coat thin, membranaceous, light brown; embryo axile 

 in thin albumen; cotyledons ovate, plane, shorter than the elongated superior radicle 

 turned toward the hilum. 



Ehretia with about fifty species is widely distributed through tropical and warm 

 extratropical regions of the two hemispheres, with a single species extending into 

 southwestern Texas. 



