THE CORNELS, HONEYSUCKLES, AND PERSIMMONS, THE STYRAX 



FAMILY, THE ARBORESCENT MEMBERS OF THE HEATH 



FAMILY, THE ASHES, AND THEIR ALLIES. 



CORNUS, which is exceedingly common in North America, where sixteen or seventeen 

 species are distinguished, is less abundant in Japan than in the other great natural botan- 

 ical divisions of the northern hemisphere. In the northern regions of eastern America 

 different species of Cornus often form a considerable part of the shrubby undergrowth which 

 borders the margins of the forest or lines the banks of streams, lakes, and swamps. In Japan 

 these shrubby species, or their prototypes, do not exist. High up among the Nikko Moun- 

 tains, on rocks under the dense shade of Hemlocks, we saw a few dwarf sprawling plants of 

 the Siberian and north China Cornus alba, but did not encounter in any other part of the 

 empire a shrubby Cornel. High up on these mountains, too, the ground is carpeted with the 

 little Bunch-berry, the Cornus Canadensis of our own northern woods, which is also common 

 in some parts of Yezo, and on the Kurile Islands, where a second herbaceous Cornel, with 

 large white floral scales, Cornus Suecica, is found. This is a common plant, too, in all the 

 boreal regions of North America from Newfoundland and Labrador to Alaska, and in north- 

 ern Europe and continental Asia. Of arborescent Cornels the flora of Japan possesses only 

 two species, Cornus Kousa and Cornus macrophylla, and neither of these is endemic to the 

 empire. 



Cornus Kousa represents in Japan the Cornus florida of eastern America and the Cornus 

 Nuttallii of the Pacific states. From these trees it differs, however, in one particular ; in our 

 American Flowering Dogwoods, the fruits, which are gathered into close heads, are indi- 

 vidually distinct, while in the Japan tree and in an Indian species they are united into a 

 fleshy strawberry-shaped mass, technically called a syncarp. Owing to this peculiarity of the 

 fruit, botanists at one time considered these Asiatic trees generically distinct from the Amer- 

 ican Flowering Dogwoods, and placed them in the genus Benthamia, which has since been 

 united with Cornus. In Japan, Cornus Kousa is apparently not common ; certainly it is not 

 such a feature of the vegetation in any part of the empire which we visited as Cornus florida 

 is in our middle and southern states. Indeed, we only saw it in one place among the Hakone 

 Mountains, and on the road between Nikko and Lake Chuzenji, where it was a bushy, flat- 

 topped tree, not more than eighteen or twenty feet high, with wide-spreading branches. The 

 leaves are smaller and narrower than those of our eastern American Flowering Dogwood ; the 

 involucral scales are acute and creamy white, and the heads of flowers are borne on longer 

 and much more slender peduncles. Cornus Kousa also inhabits central China ; it was intro- 

 duced into our gardens several years ago, and it now flowers every year in the neighborhood 

 of New York, where it was first cultivated in the Parsons' Nursery at Flushing. As an orna- 



