LEITNERIACE-^. 



SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 



Ill 



LEITNERIA FLORIDANA. 



Cork Wood. 



Fl. 



C. de 



Candolle, Prodr. xvi. pt. ii. 154. 



Hooker 



ser. 3, i. 33, t. 1044. 

 V. 150. 



Mis sour 



A shrub or small tree^ occasionally twenty feet in height-, with a straight slender trunk four or five 

 inches in diameter above the swollen gradually tapering base, and spreading branches which form a 

 loose open head. The bark of the trunk is about one sixteenth of an inch thick, dark gray faintly 

 tinged with brown, and divided by shallow fissures into narrow rounded ridges. The branchlets, when 

 they first appear, are light, rather reddish-brown, and thickly coated with thick hairs, which gradually 

 disappear, and during their first winter they are glabrous or puberulous, especially toward the 

 extremities, and dark red-brown. The leaves are four to six inches long and an inch and a half to two 

 and a half inches wide, and are borne on petioles which vary from one to two inches in length. The 

 aments of staminate flowers are an inch to an inch and a quarter long, and one quarter of an inch 

 thick, and twice as long as those of the pistillate flowers. The flowers open at the end of February or 

 early in March \ and the fruit, which is solitary or in clusters of two to four, and ripens when the 

 leaves are about half grown, is three quarters of an inch long and one quarter of an inch wide. 



Leitneria Floridmia inhabits muddy saline shores on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico near 

 Apalachicola, Florida, where it is known only in a few isolated stations ; and deep swamps inundated 

 during several months of the year in Butler and Duncan Counties, Missouri, where it is abundant, 

 growing with Taxodiiim distichum^ Acer riibriim^ Nyssa aqiiatica^ and Planera aqiiatica^ in rich 

 moist soil usually covered with water often two or three feet deep, and sometimes occupying muddy 

 sloughs of considerable extent to the exclusion of other woody plants.^ 



1 < 



* Apparently suckers arise from some of the roots, as in the rately from the soil or water, so that the plant lacks the clustered 



case with the Ailanthus and White Poplar ; but I have not been bushy habit which distinguishes a shrub from a small tree, and it 



able to actually trace these young shoots to the older plants, though not infrequently attains a height of fifteen or twenty feet and 



their root system is usually developed out of proportion to their forms n trunk from three to five inches thick toward the base, 



size. The impression made on one by such a Leitneria swamp is where it gradually increases in thickness as do many other swamp 



that of m, tangle of coarse bushes from five to ten feet in height, trees." (Trelease, Rep. Missouri Bat. Gard, vi.) 

 but on closer observation it is evident that each stem rises sepa- 



