SAXIFRAGACE. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 135 
LYONOTHAMNUS FLORIBUNDUS. 
Tron Wood. 
Lyonothamnus floribundus, Gray, Proc. Am. Acad. ser. Acad. ser. 2, i. 210.—Sargent, Garden and Forest, ii. 
2, xii. 292. T. S. Brandegee, Zod, i. 111, 136, t. 4. 435. 
Lyonothamnus asplenifolius, Greene, Bull. Cal. Acad. i. Lyyonothamnus floribundus, var. asplenifolius, T. S. 
187; ii. 149, 397, t. 6.—T. S. Brandegee, Proc. Cal. Brandegee, Zoé, i. 136. 
A bushy tree, rarely thirty to forty feet in height, with a single trunk sometimes eight or ten 
inches in diameter, but usually with a number of tall stems rising from the ground; or, in exposed 
situations, reduced to a low shrub. The bark of the trunk is a third of an inch thick and dark red- 
brown, and is composed of many thin papery layers, five or six of which, after partially separating, 
remain on the stem broken into long loose strips. The branchlets are at first pale orange-color and, 
like the branches of the inflorescence, are coated with pubescence which soon disappears, and at the end 
of their first season they are bright red and lustrous. The leaves, which vary from four to eight 
inches in length and from half an inch in width when entire to four inches when pinnately divided, 
are coated on the lower surface, when they unfold, with thick white deciduous tomentum, and are dark 
green and rather lustrous on the upper surface, and yellow-green, glabrous, or pubescent on the lower, 
with orange-colored midribs. The inflorescence, which appears in June and July, varies from four to 
eight inches across, the individual flowers being from an eighth to a quarter of an inch im diameter. 
The fruit ripens in August and September, and is three sixteenths of an inch long.’ 
Lyonothamnus floribundus is known only on the islands of Santa Catalina and Santa Cruz off the 
coast of California, where it is found growing in dry rocky soil on the steep slopes of cations. It is 
most abundant on Santa Cruz, where many fine groves exist on the northern shore of the island, and 
where it attains its largest size. On Santa Catalina it is much smaller, rarely arborescent in habit, and 
usually produces simple or sinuate or lobulate leaves. 
Lyonothamnus floribundus is an interesting and handsome plant. It is the only North American 
representative of its family which attains the size and habit of a tree. The beauty of its multiform 
persistent leaves, and the ample size and abundance of its clusters of flowers, will cause it to be valued 
as an ornament in the gardens of temperate countries. 
1 Plants of Lyonothamnus with simple leaves and with pinnately and his conclusion that the plants of Santa Catalina and of Santa 
divided leaves appear distinct, but on Santa Catalina trees were Cruz are merely heterophyllous forms of one species is doubtless 
found by Mr. T. S. Brandegee on which both the narrow simple correct (Zoé, i. 111). 
leaves and the divided leaves of all the different forms occurred, 
