THE WITCH-HAZEL AND ARALIA FAMILIES. 



IN the Witch-hazel family, Distylium racemosum, an evergreen tree of the southern islands 

 and of southern China, with peculiar and exceedingly hard dark-colored valuable wood, will 

 require in this country the mild climate of the extreme southern states and of California. 

 The Japanese Hamamelis, however, is already an inhabitant of our gardens, where, unlike the 

 American species which flowers in the autumn, it produces its orange or wine-colored flowers 

 in March. Hamamelis Japonica is one of the common forest-shrubs or small trees in its native 

 country, where specimens occasionally occur thirty or forty feet in height, with stout straight 

 trunks and broad shapely heads. In the autumn the leaves turn bright clear yellow ; but on 

 one form which we found on Mount Hakkoda, near Aomori, with small thick often rounded 

 leaves (Hamamelis arborescens of Hort., Veitch), they were conspicuous from their deep rich 

 vinous red color. This may, perhaps, prove to be a second Japanese species. 



We were fortunate in securing a good supply of ripe seeds of the little known Disanthus 

 cercidifolia of Maximowicz, a curious and interesting member of the Witch-hazel family (see 

 Plate xv.). Disanthus, of which only one species is known, is a shrub with slender spreading 

 branches, eight or ten feet high, stout terete red-brown branchlets conspicuously marked with 

 pale lenticels,and obtuse buds covered with chestnut-brown imbricated scales. The leaves are 

 suborbicular, rounded and minutely mucronate at the apex, or rarely orbicular-ovate and 

 sharp-pointed, cordate or rarely truncate at the base, entire, palmately five or seven nerved, 

 dark blue-green on the upper surface, pale on the lower, thick and firm, or ultimately sub- 

 coriaceous, and three or four inches long and broad, with reticulated veinlets and stout 

 petioles one or two inches long and thickened at the base. In the autumn they turn deep 

 vinous red or red and orange. The flowers appear in October, when the fruit developed from 

 the flowers of the previous year ripens ; they are dark purple, sessile, base to base, in two- 

 flowered heads on slender-ridged peduncles produced from scaly buds, and are each surrounded 

 by three thick ovate obtuse woolly closely imbricated bracts which form the apparent connec- 

 tive between the two flowers. The calyx is five-parted ; the divisions which are imbricated 

 in aestivation are ovate, obtuse, latitudinally unequal, reflexed, and much shorter than the 

 five lanceolate acute petals imbricated in estivation, spreading into a star-shaped corolla, and 

 slightly incurved at the apex. The stamens are as long as the lobes of the calyx and are 

 inserted on its base opposite the petals ; the filaments are short and broad, and as long as the 

 anthers, which are nearly as broad as long, attached on the back, two-celled, and extrorse, the 

 cells opening longitudinally. The ovary is superior, ovate, compressed, two-celled, gradually 

 contracted into two short spreading styles stigmatic at the apex ; the ovules are numerous in 

 each cell, suspended from its apex, and anatropous. The fruit is a woody ovoid two-celled 

 capsule, which opens loculicidally, with a thin cartilaginous inner coat separable from the 

 thick hard outer covering. The seed, of which there are a number in each cell, is ovate, 



