PALMA, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 17 
SERENOA ARBORESCENS. 
Fruit globose. Leaves green on both surfaces. 
Serenoa arborescens, Sargent, Bot. Gazette, xxvii. 90 (1899). 
A tree, from thirty to forty feet in height, with one or several clustered erect inclining or 
occasionally semiprostrate stems three or four inches in diameter, and covered almost to the ground 
with the closely clasping bases of -the leaf-stalks and below with a thick pale gray rind. The leaves 
are thin and firm, bright yellow-green on the upper surface, blue-green on the lower surface, about two 
feet in diameter, and divided nearly to the base into numerous lobes which are half an inch wide near 
the middle of the leaf and are only slightly thickened at the pale yellow midribs and margins; their 
petioles, at first erect, soon become spreading and are from eighteen inches to two feet in length, one 
third of an inch wide at the apex and an inch wide at the base, and are armed with stout flattened 
curved orange-colored teeth. The spadix is from three to four feet long, with a slender much flattened 
stalk, panicled lower branches eighteen or twenty inches in length, and six or eight thick firm pale 
green conspicuously ribbed spathes deeply divided at the apex, which terminates in a narrow membrana- 
ceous border.. The flowers, which are about one twentieth of an inch long, are solitary toward the ends 
of the branches and in two or three-flowered clusters at their base; their calyx is light chestnut-brown 
The fruit is globose and a third of an inch in diameter, with thin 
dry flesh covering the dark orange-colored fibrous strong-smelling resinous inner coat which closely 
invests the pale brown crustaceous nut. The seed is subglobose, somewhat flattened below, with a pale 
vertical mark on the lower side, a minute hilum joined to the micropyle by a pale band, and an obscure 
oblong acute raphe. 
and the corolla is pale yellow-green. 
Serenoa arborescens inhabits the great Cypress swamps and low hummocks adjacent to the 
Chockoliskee River and its tributaries in southwestern Florida which, south of Cape Romano, extend 
from the neighborhood of the coast to the borders of the Everglades. 
undrained soil, it stands for many months of every year in water from one to eighteen inches deep. 
Growing always in low 
Occasionally occupying almost exclusively areas several acres in extent, it is more often scattered among 
Cypress-trees or southward among Royal Palms. 
Serenoa arborescens was discovered’ in the spring of 1887 in the Royal Palm Hummock near the 
town of Everglade on the Chockoliskee River by Mr. Pliny W. Reasoner.’ 
1 At the time of its discovery neither flowers nor fruit were col- 
lected, but in October, 1888, Mr. E. N. Reasoner visited the 
Chockoliskee River and obtained a few seeds, a stem for the 
Jesup Collection of North American Woods in the American Mu- 
One 
of these has been grown in my garden in Brookline, Massachu- 
setts, and is now about eight feet high. In the spring of 1898 Dr. 
Robert Ridgway, the distinguished ornithologist, informed me that 
his guide on a recent journey which he had made to the southeast 
of Fort Myers on the Caloosahatchee River, Mr. R. G. Corbett of 
Immockalee, had told him of a tall slender Palm in the Cypress 
swamps thirty or forty miles to the southeast of Lake Trafford and. 
near the head of the Chockoliskee ; and through Mr. Corbett I 
obtained in 1898 leaves, flowers, and ripe fruits of this interesting 
Palm, which proved identical with the one discovered by Mr. Rea- 
seum of Natural History, New York, and a few small plants. 
soner, and a second species of Serenoa. 
2 Pliny Ward Reasoner (May 6, 1863-September 17, 1888) was 
born in Princeton, Illinois, and was the son of Henry C. Reasoner, 
who moved in 1848 from South Egremont, Massachusetts, to Illi- 
nois, where he married and engaged in farming. Young Reasoner 
was educated in the high school at Princeton, and in 1881 went to 
Florida, where he established at Oneco near the Manitee River a 
commercial nursery in which he gathered together a large collec- 
tion of tropical and subtropical plants and where he died of yellow 
fever just when his intelligence, industry, and energy had made him 
widely and favorably known and the usefulness and success of his 
career seemed assured. 
it to the horticultural 
journals of the country, writing principally on exotic plants suit- 
Mr. Reasoner was a constant 
able for cultivation in southern Florida, and he was the author of a 
report on Tropical and Semitropical Fruits in Florida and the Gulf 
States, published in 1887 by the Department of Agriculture of the 
United States in Bulletin No. 1, Division of Pomology. 
