OLEACEZ, 
SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 65 
OSMANTHUS AMERICANUS. 
Devil Wood. 
FLowErs polygamo-diecious, in short axillary racemes or cymes. Leaves lanceolate- 
oblong, entire. 
Osmanthus Americanus, Bentham & Hooker, Gen. ii. 677 
(1876). — Gray, Syn. Fl. N. Am. ii. pt. i. 78. — Sargent, 
Forest Trees N. Am. 10th Census U. §. ix. 113. 
Olea Americana, Linneus, Mant. 24 (1767). — Marshall, 
Arbust. Am. 98. — Lamarck, Jil. i. 28 ; Dict. iv. 543. — 
Willdenow, Spec. i. pt. i. 45; Hnum. 13. — Michaux, FV. 
Bor-Am. ii. 222.— Vahl, Enum. i. 41.— Persoon, Syn. 
i. 9. — Desfontaines, Hist. Arb. i. 112.— Du Mont de 
Courset, Bot. Cult. ed. 2, ii. 592. — Nouveau Duhamel, v. 
Fl. Am. Sept. i. 7.— Roemer & Schultes, Syst. i. 70. — 
Rafinesque, Fl. Ludovic. 38. — Nuttall, Gen. i. 5.— El- 
liott, Sk. i. 5. — Sprengel, Syst. i. 34. — Croom, Am. Jour. 
Sci. xxvi. 315. — Don, Gen. Syst. iv. 48. — Loudon, Ard. 
Brit. ii. 1208, £. 1034. — Spach, Hist. Vég. viii. 267. — 
Dietrich, Syn. i. 37. — De Candolle, Prodr. viii. 286. — 
Chapman, 7. 369. — Curtis, Rep. Geolog. Surv. N. Car. 
1860, iii. 57. — Porcher, Resources of Southern Fields 
and Forests, 493.— Gray, Man. ed. 5, 401. 
67. — Michaux f. Hist. Arb. Am. iii. 50, t. 6. — Pursh, 
A tree, occasionally forty-five feet in height, with a trunk sometimes a foot in diameter; usually 
much smaller and often shrubby in habit. The bark of the trunk is thin, dark gray or gray tinged 
with red, and roughened with small thin appressed scales which in falling display the dark cinnamon-red 
inner bark. The branchlets are slender, slightly angled, ultimately terete, light or bright red-brown, and 
marked with minute pale lenticels, becoming ashy gray in their second year, when they are roughened 
by the small elevated orbicular leaf-scars in which appear a ring of minute fibro-vascular bundle-scars. 
The winter-buds are half an inch long and linear-lanceolate, with two thick lanceolate reddish-brown 
scales puberulous on both surfaces. The leaves are involute in vernation, lanceolate, oblong or some- 
times obovate, acute or rarely emarginate at the apex, gradually narrowed at the base into broad stout 
petioles, and entire, with thickened revolute margins ; when they unfold they are coated on the lower 
surface with pale tomentum, and at maturity are thick and coriaceous, glabrous, bright green, lustrous 
on the upper surface, obscurely reticulate-venulose, four or five inches long, and half an inch to 
nearly two inches wide, with broad pale midribs impressed on the upper side, and remote forked primary 
veins arcuate near the margins; they are borne on petioles which vary from half an inch to three 
quarters of an inch im length, and, unfolding in the spring after the appearance of the flowers, do not 
fall until the second year. The flowers, which are exceedingly fragrant, open in March from stout- 
branched pilose inflorescence-buds formed during the previous autumn in the axils of leaves of the 
year. The staminate and the pistillate and perfect flowers are borne on different individuals in three- 
flowered clusters, and are sessile or short-pedicellate and produced in pedunculate cymes or short 
The bracts are scale-like, nearly triangular, acute, keeled on the back, puberulous, slightly 
The calyx is minute, puberulous, with acute rigid lobes, and 
racemes. 
ciliate on the margins, and persistent. 
much shorter than the creamy white corolla, which before anthesis forms an oblong-ovate bud coated 
with pale pubescence, and when expanded is an eighth of an inch long, with an elongated tube and 
short spreading ovate rounded lobes. The stamens are inserted on the middle of the tube of the corolla 
and are included or slightly exserted ; in the pistillate flower they are small and often rudimentary. The 
ovary is abruptly contracted into a stout columnar style crowned with a large slightly exserted capitate 
stigma, and in the staminate flower is reduced to a minute point. The fruit, which ripens early in the 
autumn, is oblong or obovate, an inch long, and dark blue, with thin dry flesh, a thick or sometimes 
thin-walled brittle ovate pointed stone, and a solitary ovate seed covered with a thin chestnut-brown 
