LAUKACiLE. SILVA OF NORTE AMERICA. 



7 



PERSEA PUBESCENS. 



Swamp Bay. 



Leaves oval or lanceolate, conspicuously veined, pubescent or tomentose on the 

 lower surface. Branchlets coated with tomentum. 



Persea pubescens. 



Laurus Carolinensis, Michaux f. Hist. A 

 (not Michaux) (1813). 



Laurus Carolinensis, p pubescens, Pursh 

 i. 276 (1814). 



Tamala 



Carolinensis, ^ pubescens, Meisner, De Cai 

 Ir. XV. pt. i. 51 (1864). — Mez, Jahrb. Konig 

 '■. V. 176 (Lauracece Americance Monog.). 

 Carolinensis, var. palustris, Chapman, Fl 



Persea Carolinensis, a, C. G. Nees ab Esenbeck, Syst. Laur. (1865). — Sargent, Forest Trees N. Am. lOth Census 



150 (1836). 



U. S. ix. 119. 



A slender tree, occasionally thirty or forty feet in height, with a trunk rarely exceeding a foot in 

 diameter ; or usually a shrub sending up from the ground numerous stems twelve or fifteen feet tall. 

 The bark of the trunk rarely exceeds a quarter of an inch in thickness, and is dull brown and irregu- 

 larly divided by shallow fissures, the surface separating into thick appressed scales. The branches are 

 stout, and terete or slightly angled while young, and when they first appear are coated with rusty 

 tomentum, which is reduced in their second season to a fine pubescence and does not entirely disappear 

 until the end of their second or third year. The leaves are oval or lanceolate, and entire ; they are 

 often contracted toward the apex into long points, and are gradually narrowed at the base into stout 

 petioles grooved on the upper side, coated with rusty tomentum, and one half to three quarters of an 

 inch in length ; when they first appear they are dark red, thin, and tomentose on both surfaces, and 

 at maturity they are thick and coriaceous, pale green and lustrous above, pale and pubescent below, 

 except on the midribs and primary veins, which are coated with rusty tomentum, four to six inches long, 

 and three quarters of an inch to an inch and a half wide, with thick conspicuous veins and sHghtly 

 revolute margins ; they remain on the branches until after the beginning of their second year, and then 

 turn yellow and fall gradually. The panicles of flowers are borne on stout tomentose peduncles 

 produced from the axils of leaves of the year and two or three inches in length. The flowers are often 

 nearly a quarter of an inch long, with thick and firm calyx-lobes coated on the outer surface with a 

 dense rusty tomentum which likewise clothes the peduncles, the pedicels, and the minute caducous 

 bracts and bractlets ; the lobes of the outer series are broadly ovate, abruptly pointed at the apex, 

 pubescent on the inner surface, and about half as long as those of the inner series, which are ovate- 

 lanceolate, slightly thickened at the apex, and hairy on the inner surface. The stamens, which are 

 slightly exserted, have flattened hairy filaments longer than the anthers ; these are fertile and four-celled 

 in the three outer series, and in the inner series are reduced to sagittate stalked staminodia, the fila- 

 ments of the third series being furnished near the base with two nearly sessile glands rounded on the 

 back and sHghtly two-lob ed on the inner face. The ovary is ovate and glabrous, and is abruptly con- 

 tracted into a glabrous style gradually enlarged at the apex into a flat slightly two-lobed stigma. The 

 fruit ripens in the autumn and is oblong-ovate to subglobose, and very dark blue or nearly black ; it is 

 three quarters of an inch long, and in falling separates from the slightly thickened calyx and pedicel, 

 which remain on the branch until after the beginning of winter.* 



1 The Swamp Bay has previously been considered a variety of low wet ground always selected by this tree, the tomentum that 

 Persea Borbonia - but characteristics which appear constant, — the clothes the branches and the under surface of the leaves, and the 



