332 



TREES OF NORTH AMERICA 



A slender tree, occasionally 30-40 high, with a trunk rarely exceeding a foot in 

 diameter, and stout branclilets terete or slightly angled while young, coated when 



they first appear with rusty tomentum reduced in their second season to fine pubes- 

 cence persistent until the end of their second or third year. Bark rarely exceeding 

 Y in thickness, dull brown, irregularly divided by shallow fissures, the surface 

 separating into thick appressed scales. Wood heavy, soft, strong, close-grained, 

 orange color streaked with brown, with thick light brown or gray sapwood of 36-40 

 layers of annual growth. 



Distribution. Pine-barren swamps, almost to the exclusion of other plants, in the 

 immediate neighborhood of the coast of the south Atlantic and Gulf states from 

 North Carolina to Mississippi. 



2. OCOTEA, Aubl. 



Aromatic trees. Leaves scattered, alternate or rarely subopposite, penniveined, 

 coriaceous, rigid, glabrous or more or less covered with pubescence. Flowers gla- 

 brous or tomentose on slender bibracteolate pedicels from the axils of lanceolate 

 acute minute bracts, in cymose clusters in axillary or subterminal stalked panicles; 

 calyx-tube campanulate, the 6 lobes of the limb nearly equal, deciduous; stamens 

 12, in 4 series, those of the inner series reduced to linear staminodia, with minute 

 abortive anthers; filaments inserted on the tube of the calyx; those of the outer series 

 opposite its exterior lobes, shorter or sometimes rather longer than the anthers, 

 glabrous or hirsute, furnished in the third series near the base with two conspicuous 

 globose stalked yellow glands; anthers oblong, flattened, 4-celled, introrse in the 

 2 outer series, extrorse, subextrorse, or very rarely introrse in tlie third series, in 

 the pistillate flower rudimentary and sterile; ovary ovate, glabrous, more or less 

 immersed in the tube of the calyx, gradually narrowed into a short erect style 

 dilated at the apex into a capitate obscurely lobed stigma; in the staminate flower 

 linear-lanceolate, effete or minute, sometimes 0; raphe ventral; micropyle superior. 

 Fruit nearly inclosed while young in the thickened tube of the calyx, exserted at 

 maturity, surrounded at the base by the cup-like truncate or slightly lobed calyx- 

 tube; pericarp thin and fleshy. Seed ovate, pendulous; testa thin, membranaceous. 



Ocotea with nearly two hundred species is confined principally to the tropical 



