PALMA. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 83 
THRINAX KEYENSIS. 
FLowers short-pedicellate ; perianth-lobes broadly ovate, acute; filaments nearly 
triangular, united below; stigma flat. Seeds pale chestnut-brown. 
Thrinax Keyensis, Sargent, Bot. Gazette, xxvii. 86 (1899). 
A tree, with an ashy gray stem, often twenty-five feet in height and from ten to fourteen inches in 
diameter, raised on a base of thick matted roots from two to three feet high and eighteen or twenty 
inches wide, and surmounted by a broad head of leaves, the upper erect, the lower, both living and 
dead, pendulous and closely pressed against the stem. The leaves are nearly orbicular, or truncate at 
the base, but rather longer than they are broad, from three to four feet long, and divided for two 
thirds of their length into lobes which are often two and a half inches wide near the middle of the leaf, 
the lowest lobes being parallel with the petiole or spreading from it nearly at right angles; they are 
thick and firm, light yellow-green and very lustrous on the upper surface, with bright orange-colored 
midribs and much thickened orange-colored margins to the lobes, and on the lower surface they are 
coated when they unfold with hoary deciduous tomentum and at maturity are pale blue-green and more 
or less covered with loosely attached silvery white pubescence; the rachis of the leaf is a thin undulate 
border and the ligule is thick, pointed, an inch in length and in width, and lined at first with hoary 
tomentum ; the leaves are borne on stout petioles flattened above, obscurely ridged on the lower surface, 
tomentose while young, pale blue-green, from three to four feet long, an inch wide at the apex and 
from three to four inches wide at the much thickened concave base, which is coated with a thick silvery 
white felt-like tomentum which also covers the broad vaginas composed of thick loosely woven coarse 
tough fibres. The flower-panicles are usually about six feet in length and are stout, spreading, and 
gracefully incurved, with firm thick spathes more or less coated with hoary tomentum ; their primary 
branches are much compressed and vary in length from three or four inches at the base of the panicle 
to an inch and a half at its apex and, like the short secondary branches, are bright orange color. The 
flowers, which open in June and occasionally also irregularly in November and are white and slightly 
fragrant, are raised on short thick disk-like pedicels and are about an eighth of an inch long; they 
consist of a cupular six-lobed perianth with broadly ovate acute lobes, six stamens with nearly triangular 
filaments united at the base, and oblong versatile anthers, and an ovate ovary gradually narrowed into a 
stout thick style dilated into a broad funnel-shaped flat stigma. The fruit, which ripens in October 
and also irregularly late in the spring or in early summer, is lustrous, ivory-white, and from one sixteenth 
to nearly one quarter of an inch in diameter, with thin flesh and a pale chestnut-brown seed three 
sixteenths of an inch in diameter, penetrated only to the middle by the basal cavity. 
Thrinax Keyensis, which is the largest and handsomest of the fan-leaved Palms of tropical Florida, 
grows in dry sandy soil close to the beach on the north side of the largest of the Marquesas keys, where, 
mingled with Coccothrinax jucunda, it lifts its broad and stately head of massive foliage above the low 
shrubby undergrowth of Rhus Metopium, Conocarpus erecta, Jacquinia armillaris, and Hugenia buai- 
folia. It grows also on Crab Key, a small island to the westward of Torch Key, one of the Bahia 
Honda group.’ 
1 This Palm was first seen by me on the Marquesas keys in 50) in the belief that the thick fleshy black fruit of Coccothrinax 
November, 1886, without flowers or fruit and was incorrectly re- _jucunda belonged to it. 
ferred to Euthrinax (Garden and Forest, ix. 162 ; Silua N. Am. x. 
