OLEACE^E 857 



ventral. Fruit a fleshy 1-seeded ovoid or globose drupe tipped with the remnants of the 

 style; flesh thin and succulent; stone hard and bony. Seed filling the cavity of the stone; 

 cotyledons flat, much longer than the short superior radicle turned toward the hilum. 



Osmanthus with ten species inhabits eastern North America, the Hawaiian Islands, 

 Polynesia, Japan, China, and the Himalayas. Osmanthus fragrans Lour., a native of China 

 and the temperate Himalayas, is cultivated in China for its fragrant minute cream-colored 

 or yellow flowers used by the Chinese to perfume tea, and is everywhere a favorite garden 

 plant. 



The generic name, from 6<rp.-fj and &v0os, relates to the fragrance of the flowers. 



1 . Osmanthus americanus B. & H. Devil Wood. 



Leaves oblong-lanceolate or obovate, acute or rarely rounded and occasionally emargi- 

 nate at apex, and gradually narrowed and cuneate at base, with thickened revolute mar- 

 gins, when they unfold coated beneath with pale tomentum, and at maturity thick and 

 coriaceous, glabrous, bright green, lustrous above, obscurely reticulate-venulose, 4'-5' long 



Fig. 759 



and |'-2|' wide, with a broad pale midrib and remote forked primary veins arcuate near the 

 margins; persistent until their second year; petioles stout, |'-f' in length. Flowers open- 

 ing in March from pilose inflorescence-buds formed the previous autumn in the axils of the 

 leaves of the year, the staminate, pistillate, and perfect flowers on different individuals in 

 3-flowered clusters, sessile or short-pedicellate, in pedunculate cymes or short racemes, 

 with scale-like nearly triangular acute persistent bracts; calyx puberulous, with acute rigid 

 lobes, and much shorter than the creamy white corolla |' long when expanded, with an 

 elongated tube and short spreading ovate rounded lobes; stamens inserted on the middle of 

 the tube of the corolla, included or slightly exserted, small and often rudimentary in the 

 pistillate flower; ovary abruptly contracted into a stout columnar style crowned with a 

 large exserted capitate stigma, reduced in the staminate flower to a minute point. Fruit 

 ripening early in the autumn, oblong or obovoid, 1' long, dark blue, with thin flesh and a 

 thick or sometimes thin-walled brittle ovoid pointed stone; seed ovoid, covered with a 

 chestnut-brown coat marked by broad conspicuous pale veins radiating from the short 

 broad ventral hilum and encircling the seed. 



A tree, occasionally 60-70 high, with a trunk sometimes a foot in diameter, and slender 

 slightly angled ultimately terete branchlets light or red-brown and marked by minute pale 

 lenticels, becoming ashy gray in their second year and roughened by the small elevated 

 orbicular leaf-scars displaying a ring of minute fibro- vascular bundle-scars; usually much 



