EBENACES. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 11 
DIOSPYROS TEXANA. 
Black Persimmon. Chapote. 
STAMINATE flowers in 1 to 3-flowered fascicles; anthers opening only near the 
apex ; pistillate flowers without staminodia; ovary pubescent. Leaves cuneate-oblong 
or obovate. 
Diospyros Texana, Scheele, Linnea, xxii. 145 (1849). — Am. Cent. ii. 300. — Sargent, Forest Trees, N. Am. 10th 
Walpers, Ann. iii. 14. — Torrey, Bot. Mex. Bound. Surv. Census, U. S. ix. 105. — C. G. Pringle, Garden and For- 
109.— Hiern, Trans. Camb. Phil. Soc. xii. pt. i. 238. — est, ii. 394. — Coulter, Contrib. U. S. Nat. Herb. ii. 257 
Gray, Syn. Fl. N. Am. ii. pt.i. 70. — Hemsley, Bot. Biol. (Man. Pl. W. Texas). 
An intricately branched twiggy tree, occasionally forty to fifty feet in height, with a trunk eighteen 
to twenty inches in diameter, dividing at some distance above the ground into a number of stout upright 
branches which form a narrow round-topped head; often much smaller, and toward the northern and 
western limits of its range reduced to a low many-stemmed shrub. The bark of the trunk is smooth, 
thin, light gray, slightly tinged with red, the outer layer falling away in large irregularly shaped 
patches displaying the smooth gray inner bark. The branchlets are slender, terete, rigid, and slightly 
zigzag by the death of the tips before the terminal buds are formed; when they first appear they are 
coated with pale or rufous tomentum, and in their first winter they are ashy gray, glabrous or puberu- 
lous, later becoming brown, and marked by minute pale lenticels and by the small elevated semicircular 
leaf-scars in which appear lunate rows of fibro-vascular bundle-scars. The winter-buds are obtuse, 
barely more than a sixteenth of an inch long, and protected by broadly ovate scales rounded at the 
apex, and coated with rufous tomentum. The leaves are cuneate-oblong to obovate, revolute in verna- 
tion, rounded and often retuse at the apex, and wedge-shaped at the base; when they unfold they are 
covered on the lower surface with thick pale tomentum, and on the upper with scattered long white 
hairs; at maturity they are thick and coriaceous, dark green and lustrous, glabrous or puberulous 
above, paler and pubescent below, three quarters of an inch to an inch anda half long, and a third of an 
inch wide, with short thick hairy petioles, broad midribs, and about four pairs of arcuate primary 
veins which, like the reticulate veinlets, are inconspicuous on the upper side of the leaf. The leaves 
unfold in February and March, and fall during the following winter without changing color. The 
flowers appear in early spring, when the leaves are about one third grown, on branches of the previous 
year, the staminate in one to three-flowered crowded pubescent fascicles, on slender drooping pedicels 
furnished near the middle with minute caducous bractlets, the pistillate solitary or rarely in pairs on 
separate plants, and borne on stouter club-shaped bibracteolate pedicels. In the sterile flower the calyx 
is an eighth of an inch long and deeply divided into five ovate or lanceolate lobes, silky-tomentose 
on both surfaces, recurved after the opening of the flower, and much shorter than the corolla, which 
is an eighth of an inch long, creamy white, and slightly contracted below the five short spreading 
rounded lobes ciliate on their margins. There are sixteen stamens, which are distinct, glabrous, shorter 
than the corolla, and inserted on it in two rows and in pairs, those of the outer row being rather longer 
than those of the inner row; the anthers are linear-lanceolate and open at the apex by short slits. The 
pistillate flowers, which have no staminodia, are a third of an inch long, with oblong acute silky-tomen- 
tose calyx-lobes half the length of the pubescent corolla, which, when expanded, is nearly half an inch 
across the short spreading lobes. The ovary is ovate and gradually contracted into four spreading styles 
two-lobed at the apex; it is pubescent like the young fruit, and is ultimately eight-celled with a single 
