ERICACER, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 31 
ELLIOTTIA RACEMOSA. 
Catyx short, cupular, 4-toothed ; petals 4; stamens 8; ovary sessile on a thick- 
ened disk. 
Hlliottia racemosa, Elliott, Sk. i. 448 (1817).— Chapman, Fl. 273. — Baillon, Adansonia, i. 205. — Gray, Syn. Fl. 
N. Am. ii. pt. i. 44. —Sargent, Garden and Forest, vii. 207, £. 37. 
A tree, fifteen or twenty feet in height, with a trunk four or five inches in diameter covered with 
thin smooth light gray bark, and short ascending branches which form a narrow pyramidal head ; or 
more frequently shrubby. The branchlets are erect, slender, and terete, and when they first appear 
light red-brown and pilose; during their first winter they are bright orange-brown, lustrous and nearly 
glabrous, light brown slightly tinged with red during their second season, and dark gray-brown the 
following year. The terminal winter-buds are broadly ovate, acute, and about an eighth of an inch 
long, with much thickened bright chestnut-brown shining scales conspicuously white-pubescent near the 
margins toward the apex. The leaves are oblong or oblong-ovate, acute at the ends or occasionally 
rounded at the apex, membranaceous, dark green and glabrous on the upper surface, pale and villose 
on the lower surface particularly along the thin yellow midribs and obscure forked veins, from three to 
four inches long and from an inch to an inch and a half wide; they are borne on slender flattened 
villose petioles from one third to one half of an inch in length, and abruptly enlarged at the base,. 
which nearly covers the small ovate compressed axillary buds; these are rounded or short-pointed at 
the apex. The leaf-scars are slightly raised and oblong-obovate, with conspicuous central fibrovascular 
bundle-scars. The flowers, which are about half an inch long, open from the middle to the end of 
June, and are borne on slender elongated pedicels, in loose many-flowered racemose panicles from seven 
to ten inches in length, with acute scarious caducous bracts and bractlets. The calyx is short, cup- 
shaped, dark red-brown, and puberulous, with broad apiculate teeth erose on the margins. The four 
petals are spatulate-linear and white. The eight stamens are shorter than the petals, with elongated 
broad flattened filaments and oblong-ovate anthers callous-mucronate at the tips of the spreading lobes. 
The ovary is sessile on a thick fleshy disk, four-celled, and abruptly narrowed into the slender elongated 
style, incurved at the apex, and the ovules are numerous in each cell. The fruit is still unknown. 
Elliottia racemosa, which is one of the rarest North American trees, inhabits sandy woods in a 
few isolated stations in the valley of the Savannah River near Augusta, and in Burke and Bullock 
counties, Georgia. It was discovered early in the nineteenth century near Waynesboro, Georgia, 
and was included, but without a description, by Muehlenberg in his Catalogus Plantarum Americe 
Septentrionalis published in 1813.* 
Three or four plants taken from the woods near Augusta in 1875 by Asa Gray and planted in 
Mr. Berckmans’s nursery in that city have grown into shapely trees and are still flourishing. There is 
only one other record? of the successful cultivation of this plant. 
1 Elliottia racemosa was di: d near Way , Burke 
County, Georgia, perhaps by Stephen Elliott himself. Much later 
Bloys, Bullock County, Georgia, about forty miles south of Waynes- 
boro. (See Small, Jour. N. Y. Bot. Gard. ii. 113. — Harper, Plant 
it was found near Augusta, and in 1853 Mr. S. T. Olney collected 
it at Hamburg on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River 
opposite Augusta. No trace of Elliottia has been found in these 
stations by the botanists who have visited them in recent years but 
in June, 1901, Mr. R. M. Harper found a colony of the plants near 
World, v. 87, £. 12.) Elliott states that he had also received speci- 
mens of Elliottia from the Oconee [River]. (Sz. i. 448.) 
? Muehlenberg states that a Mr. Oemler “had the shrub, once, 
in his garden.” (See letter of April 20, 1818, to Baldwin in Reli- 
“quie Baldwiniane, 79.) 
