TAXACER. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 67 
TAXUS FLORIDANA. 
Yew. 
LEAVES elongated, usually falcate, dark green. 
Taxus Floridana, Chapman, F7. 436 (1860). — Carriére, 
Traité Conif. ed. 2, 741. — Hoopes, Evergreens, 384. — 
Sargent, Forest Trees N. Am. 10th Census U. S. ix. 
186. 
A bushy tree, rarely twenty-five feet in height, with a short trunk, occasionally a foot in diameter, 
and numerous stout spreading branches; or more often shrubby in habit, and twelve or fifteen feet tall. 
The bark of the trunk is an eighth of an inch in thickness, dark purple-brown, smooth and compact, 
occasionally separating into large thin irregular plate-like scales. The branchlets are slender and lght 
yellow-green, and in their second or third year turn dark dull brown tinged with red. The buds are 
about one sixteenth of an inch long, and covered with loosely imbricated pale yellow scales. The leaves 
are usually conspicuously faleate, from three quarters of an inch to nearly an inch in length, from one 
sixteenth to one twelfth of an inch in width, dark green above and pale below, with rather obscure 
midribs,and slender petioles nearly one sixteenth of an inch long. The flowers appear in March and 
April, and the fruit, which is very sparingly produced, ripens in October.’ 
Taxus Floridana, growing with Tumion taxifolium, inhabits the bluffs and ravines of the eastern 
bank of the Appalachicola River in Gadsden County, western Florida, where it is distributed from 
Aspalaga to the neighborhood of Bristol, a distance of about thirty miles, and eastward to the woody 
borders of Flat Creek, six miles from Aspalaga. 
The wood of Taxus Floridana is heavy, hard, and very close-grained. It is dark brown tinged 
with red, with thin nearly white sapwood, and contains thin dark-colored inconspicuous bands of small 
summer cells and numerous obscure medullary rays. The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 
0.6340, a cubic foot weighing 39.51 pounds.’ 
Taxas Floridana was discovered near Aspalaga in 1833 by Mr. Hardy B. Croom.? One of the 
rarest of the trees of North America, and, except by its habit, not easily distinguishable from the 
northern Taxus Canadensis, it is still untried in gardens.* 
1 Ripe fruit of Taxus Floridana was first collected by Dr. 
Charles Mohr in October, 1895. The pistillate flowers were gath- 
ered by W. M. Canby and C. S. Sargent, March 16, 1890. 
2 The log specimen in the Jesup Collection of North American 
Woods in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, 
is three inches and three quarters in diameter inside the bark, and 
has two hundred and seventy-five layers of annual growth, five of 
which are of sapwood. 
8 The first notice of this tree, without description or specific 
name, was published in 1834 in the American Journal of Science 
(xxvi. 314) by Mr. Croom, who considered it probably identical 
with the European Yew. It was next mentioned by Nuttall in 
1849 (Sylva, iii. 92), who doubtfully attached to it the name of 
Taxus montana, although Croom’s specimen in the herbarium of 
the Philadelphia Academy was, he says, marked Taxus Floridana, 
the name adopted by Chapman when the species was finally de- 
scribed in 1860. 
* During the winter of 1896 living plants of Taxus Floridana 
have been introduced into Mr. George W. Vanderbilt’s Arboretum 
on his estate of Biltmore in North Carolina. 
