MYRTACES, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 49 
KUGENIA GARBERI. 
Red Stopper. 
LEAVES ovyate-oblong, contracted at the apex into long points, coriaceous. 
Eugenia Garberi, Sargent, Garden and Forest, ii. 28, £.87 Eugenia procera, Sargent, Forest Trees N. Am. 10th Cen- 
(1889). sus U. S. ix. 89 (in part) (1884). 
A tree, fifty to sixty feet in height, with a straight trunk eighteen to twenty inches in diameter, 
and stout upright branches which form a narrow compact head. The bark of the trunk is an eighth 
of an inch thick and, like that of the principal branches, is bright cinnamon-red and separates freely 
into thin small scales. The branchlets are slender, terete, and covered with smooth ashy gray bark. 
The leaves are ovate-oblong, abruptly or gradually contracted into long narrow points rounded or acute 
at the apex, and wedge-shaped or occasionally rounded at the base, with thickened revolute entire 
margins; as they unfold they are thin and light red, and at maturity are dark green and very lustrous 
on the upper surface, paler and marked with minute black dots on the lower, an inch and a half to two 
inches long, and one third to two thirds of an inch broad, with stout petioles a quarter of an inch in 
length and thick orange-colored midribs barely impressed on the upper side, primary veins arcuate and 
united into a conspicuous marginal line, and prominent reticulated veinlets. The minute flowers, which 
are barely an eighth of an inch across when expanded, appear in Florida in September in many-flowered 
axillary clusters on slender pedicels which vary from one quarter to one half of an inch in length, and 
are furnished near the apex with two minute acute bractlets. The calyx is narrowly obovate and 
glandular-punctate, with four ovate acute lobes much shorter than the four broadly ovate rounded 
white petals. The fruit, which ripens in March and April, is a quarter to a third of an inch long, 
bright scarlet, subglobose or obovate, crowned with the conspicuous lobes of the calyx, glandular- 
roughened, and usually solitary and one-seeded, with thin dry flesh. The seed is nearly globose, with 
a thin crustaceous ight brown lustrous coat and an olive-green embryo. 
Eugenia Garbert occupies a rich hummock which, about three quarters of a mile east of the mouth 
of the Miami River, rises above the level sandy plain that separates Bay Biscayne in southeastern 
Florida from the Atlantic Ocean. Here it grows in considerable numbers in company with the Mastic, 
the Ironwood, the Gumbo Limbo, the Calabash, the Pigeon Plum, and other tropical trees, and with 
the Live Oak, the Red Mulberry, the Palmetto, and the Pine, in a grove which is one of the most 
interesting in the United States from the commingling of tropical trees with those which belong in a 
temperate region. Hugenia Garberi grows also on Old Rhodes and on Elliott’s Key in Florida, on the 
island of New Providence, one of the Bahama group,‘ and in Antigua.’ 
The wood of Eugenia Garberi is very heavy, exceedingly hard, strong, and close-grained, with 
numerous obscure medullary rays ; it is bright red-brown, with thick darker colored sapwood composed 
of fifty or sixty layers of annual growth. The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.9453, a 
cubic foot weighing 58.91 pounds. 
Eugenia Garberi was first collected in Florida near the Miami River by Dr. A. P. Garber.2 The 
lustre of its brilliant and abundant foliage, the deep rich color of its bark, and the handsome shape of 
its head, make this tree an attractive object ; no other tree of the Myrtle family indigenous in North 
America equals it in size, and few of the southern Florida trees surpass it in beauty. 
1 Bruce, Herb. Kew. 3 See i. 65. 
2 Nicholson, Herb. Aew. 
