RUBIACEA, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 113 
GUETTARDA ELLIPTICA. 
FLOWERS perfect, 4-parted, in forked few-flowered cymes; calyx tubular; corolla 
sericeo-canescent on the outer surface. Fruit globose, 4 to 8-celled. Leaves membra- 
naceous. 
Guettarda elliptica, Swartz, Prodr. 59 (1788); Fl. Ind. 35. — Grisebach, Fl. Brit. W. Ind. 382; Cut. Pl. Cub. 
Occ. i. 634. — Lamarck, Jil. ii. 218. —Persoon, Syn. i. 131.— Gray, Syn. Fl. N. Am. i. pt. ii. 30. — Sargent, 
200. — Poiret, Lam. Dict. Suppl. ii. 859. — Lunan, Hort. Forest Trees N. Am. 10th Census U. 8. ix. 96. — Hitch- 
Jam. ii. 66.— Roemer & Schultes, Syst. iv. 442. — De cock, Rep. Missouri Bot. Gard. iv. 93. 
Candolle, Prodr. iv. 457. — Dietrich, Syn. i.787.— Don, Guettarda Blodgettii, Chapman, F7. 178 (1865). 
Gen. Syst. iii. 551.— Torrey & Gray, Fl. N. Am. ii. 
A tree, occasionally in Florida eighteen or twenty feet in height, with an irregularly buttressed or 
lobed trunk five or six inches in diameter, the deep depressions between the lobes continuous or often 
interrupted, slender upright branches, and thin terete branchlets. The bark of the trunk is a sixteenth 
of an inch thick, with a smooth dark brown surface covered with large irregularly shaped pale blotches 
and numerous small white spots. The branchlets, when they first appear, are coated with long pale or 
rufous hairs, and in their second year are light red-brown or ashy gray and conspicuously marked by 
pale lenticels and large elevated nearly orbicular leaf-scars. The leaves are opposite, broadly oval to 
elliptical-oblong, acute or obtuse and apiculate at the apex, wedge-shaped and rounded at the base, and 
entire ; when they unfold they are covered with silky hairs, and at maturity are three quarters of an 
inch to two and a half inches in length, half an inch to an inch in breadth, membranaceous, dark 
green and pilose or glabrate on the upper surface, lighter and pubescent on the lower, especially 
along the stout midribs and in the axils of the four to six pairs of primary veins; they are borne on 
stout hairy petioles from a quarter to half an inch long, and unfold in Florida in May and June, 
remaining on the branches until the trees begin their growth the followmg year. The flowers, which 
in Florida appear in June, are yellowish white and a quarter of an inch in length, and are produced in 
slender hairy-stemmed cymes developed near the ends of the branches from the axils of leaves of the 
year or from bud-scales at the base of the new shoots. The peduncles, which are shorter than the 
leaves, are forked near the apex and produce a flower in the fork and three at the end of each branch, 
or the lateral flowers of these clusters are replaced by branches which at their apex produce three 
flowers. The bractlets, which subtend the branches of the peduncle and the lateral flowers of the 
ultimate divisions of the inflorescence, are linear-lanceolate, acute, coated with hairs, one sixteenth of 
an inch long, and deciduous. The calyx is nearly globose and is contracted into an elongated tube, 
four-lobed at the apex with nearly triangular acute lobes ; it is coated on the outer surface with long 
pale hairs and is half the length of the salver-shaped erect corolla, which is externally canescent and 
four-lobed, with rounded lobes. The oblong anthers are borne on short slender filaments inserted above 
the middle of the tube of the corolla. The fruit, which ripens in November, is globose, dark purple, 
pilose, a third of an inch in diameter, and crowned with the remnants of the persistent calyx-tube; the 
flesh is thin, sweet, and mealy. The stone is globose, obscurely ridged, four to eight-celled, and usually 
two to four-seeded. The seed is oblong-lanceolate, compressed, nearly straight, and covered with a thin 
pale coat. 
Guettarda elliptica is found in Florida on the southern keys, growing in the immediate neigh- 
borhood of the coast; it also inhabits the Bahama Islands and the coast of Jamaica, where it was 
discovered by the Swedish botanist Swartz late in the last century. 
