ERICACEAE 



797 



handles of tools and the bearings of machinery. The leaves have a pleasant acidulous 

 taste, and are reputed to be tonic, refrigerant, and diuretic, and are occasionally used in 

 domestic practice in the treatment of fevers. 



Distribution. Well-drained gravelly soil on ridges rising above the banks of streams; 

 coast of Virginia (Norfolk County) to that of North Carolina (near Newbern, Craven 



Fig. 711 



County), southwestern Pennsylvania to southern Ohio and Indiana (Perry County), and to 

 western Kentucky and Tennessee, along the Appalachian Mountains and their foothills, 

 and southward to western Florida, the shores of Mobile Bay, the coast region of Missis- 

 sippi, and West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana; up to altitudes of 3500 on the southern moun- 

 tains; of its largest size on the western slopes of the Big Smoky Mountains, Tennessee. 



Often cultivated as an ornamental plant in the eastern states and hardy as far north as 

 eastern Massachusetts, and occasionally in western and central Europe. 



5. LYONIA Nutt. 



Trees or shrubs, with slender terete branchlets, and fibrous roots. Leaves petiolate, 

 thin or coriaceous". Flowers on slender pedicels from the axils of ovate acute bracts, in axil- 

 lary and terminal umbellate fascicles or panicled racemes; calyx persistent, 4-5-toothed or 

 parted, the divisions valvate in the bud; corolla globular, 4 or 5-toothed or lobed, the lobes 

 imbricated in the bud; stamens 8-10, included; filaments flat, incurved, usually slightly 

 adnate to the base of the corolla, dilated and bearded at base, geniculate; anthers oblong, the 

 cells opening below the apex by large oblong pores; disk 10-lobed; ovary 5-celled, depressed 

 in the centre; style columnar, stigmatic at apex; ovules attached to a placenta borne near 

 the summit of the axis, anatropous. Fruit ovoid, many-seeded, loculicidally 5-valved, the 

 valves septiferous and separating from the placentiferous axis, 5-ribbed by the thickening 

 of the valves at the dorsal sutures, the ribs more or less separable in dehiscence. Seeds 

 minute, pendulous, narrow-oblong; seed-coat loose, thin, reticulate, produced at the ends 

 beyond the nucleus into short fringe-like wings; embryo axile in fleshy albumen, cylindric, 

 elongated: cotyledons much shorter than the terete radicle turned toward the hilum. 



Lyonia with about twenty species is confined to North America, the West Indies, and 

 Mexico. Of the four or five species which occur in the United States one is occasionally 

 a small tree. 



The genus is named in honor of John Lyon, an English gardener who made important 

 collections of plants in the United States early in the nineteenth century. 



