862 TREES OF NORTH AMERICA 



undulate margins, a slender orange-colored midrib, thin primary veins and conspicuous 

 reticulate veinlets more prominent above than below; usually persistent through their 

 second summer; petioles slender, covered when they first appear like the very young branch- 

 lets with long white hairs, very soon glabrous, '-!' in length. Flowers opening in spring 

 and late in autumn on pedicels \' long and furnished near the middle with an acuminate 

 scarious bractlet f ' in length and caducous from a persistent base, in open glabrous 15-20- 

 flowered long-stalked cymes 3'-4' in diameter, with slender branches, and small bracts; 

 calyx gradually narrowed into a stipe-like base, the lobes acuminate, ciliate on the margins; 

 corolla subcampanulate, creamy white, with a short tube somewhat enlarged in the throat, 

 and broad-ovate spreading lobes f across when expanded; stamens rather longer than the 

 tube of the corolla, anthers much shorter than the filaments; ovary conic, glabrous, gradu- 

 ally contracted into a slender exserted style divided only toward the apex or sometimes 

 nearly entire, and crowned with 2 capitate stigmas. Fruit ripening in early autumn or 

 early spring from autumnal flowers, bright orange-red, \' in diameter, with a thick tough 

 skin and thin dry flesh inclosing the 4 nutlets, the enlarged spreading calyx becoming some- 

 times \' across. 



A tree, in Florida occasionally 40-50 high, with a buttressed and often fluted trunk 

 8 '-10' in diameter, and slender branchlets light red and pilose with caducous hairs when 

 they first appear, becoming in their first winter dark red, orange color or ashy gray, and 

 sometimes roughened by pale lenticels, their thin bark often separating into delicate scales; 

 usually much smaller and often a shrub, with numerous spreading stems. Winter-buds 

 minute, globose, covered with hoary tomentum, nearly immersed in the bark. Bark of the 

 trunk tV'~i' thick, light brown tinged with red, more or less fissured and divided on the sur- 

 face into thick plate-like irregular scales. Wood hard, strong, very close-grained, brown 

 streaked with orange, with thick hardly distinguishable sapwood. 



Distribution. Florida, Cocoanut Grove, Dade County (Miss 0. Rodham), and on the 

 southern keys; common; on the Bahama Islands and on many of the Antilles. 



3. EHRETIA P. Br. 



Trees or shrubs, with entire or dentate leaves, and scaly buds. Flowers small, in termi- 

 nal and axillary scorpioid clusters; calyx open or closed in the bud, the divisions imbricated, 

 ovate or linear; corolla usually white, with a short or cylindric tube and spreading obtuse 

 lobes; ovary oblong-conic, 1-celled before anthesis, becoming incompletely 4-celled by the 

 development of the 2 parietal placentas; style columnar, parted into 2 divisions terminating 

 in capitate stigmas; ovules attached laterally near the middle on the inner face of the re vo- 

 lute placentas, anatropous; raphe ventral; micropyle superior. Fruit fleshy, small, glo- 

 bose, with thin flesh; stone separable into 2 2-celled thick- walled bony nutlets rounded on 

 the back, plane on the inner face, and attached to a thin axile column. Seed terete, usually 

 erect, filling the longitudinally incurved seminal cavity; seed-coat thin, membranaceous, 

 light brown; embryo axile in thin albumen; cotyledons ovate, plane, shorter than the elon- 

 gated superior radicle turned toward the hilum. 



Ehretia with about forty species is widely distributed through tropical and warm extra- 

 tropical regions of the two hemispheres, with a single species extending into southeastern 

 Texas. 



The generic name commemorates the artistic and scientific labors of the German botani- 

 cal artist, George Dionysius Ehret (1708-1770). 



1. Ehretia elliptica DC. Anaqua. Knackaway. 



Leaves oval or oblong, pointed and apiculate at apex, gradually rounded or cuneate at 

 base, entire or occasionally furnished above the middle w r ith a few broad teeth, conspicu- 

 ously reticulate-venulose, unfolding late in winter and then thin, light green, lustrous, mi- 

 nutely tuberculate and pilose above, and covered below like the branches of the inflores- 

 cence, the outer surface of the calyx, and the young branchlets with rigid pale hairs, often 

 furnished with axillary tufts of white hairs, and at maturity subcoriaceous, dark green and 



