344 
RUBIACEAE. 
CEPHALANTHUS. Button Bush. 
(Family Rubiaceae). 
Rather slender openly branched 
shrubs: deciduous. Twigs round, 
slender, floriferous or dying back 
at the end, glabrous: pith rather 
small, more or less 4- or 6-sided, 
light brown, continuous. Buds 
mostly solitary, sessile, conical, 
indistinctly scaly, in depressed 
supra-axillary areas, the end-bud 
lacking. Leaf-scars in whorls of 3, 
or opposite in pairs, roundish, 
somewhat raised: bundle-trace 1, 
crescent-shaped: stipule-scars or 
persistent stipules connecting the 
leaf-scars. 
Winter-character references: — 
Cephalanthus occidentalis. Bren- 
del, 28, 30, pl. 1; Hitchcock (3), 
16; Schneider, f. 223. 
Even through the winter, the 
button bush usually carries at the 
ends of its branches some of the round inflorescence-heads 
that have given it its common name. Its prevailing leaf- 
arrangement appears to be whorled, but many plants with 
opposite leaf-scars are found. In this respect it parallels 
Deutzia, Diervilla and Hydrangea: but in these genera the 
opposite arrangement’ seems to be the more characteristic, 
and the whorled the exceptional. 
Twigs reddish and glossy. 
C. occidentalis. 
