VERBENACEJE 865 



lobes of the limb, and covered on the inner surface of the tube with pale hairs; stamino- 

 dium minute. Fruit subglobose to oblong-ovoid, light red-brown, very lustrous, f in 



Fig. 764 



diameter, with thin sweet rather juicy flesh, and inclosed nearly to the middle in the cup- 

 like pale brown slightly and irregularly lobed or sometimes nearly entire calyx; seeds 

 oblong, narrowed at the rounded ends, about ' long. 



A tree, in Florida rarely more than 30 high, with a trunk 4 '-7' in diameter, slender up- 

 right branches forming a narrow irregularly shaped head, and slender slightly many-angled 

 branchlets light yellow and covered with pale simple caducous hairs or pubescent when they 

 first appear, becoming in their second year terete and ashy gray; or often a shrub, with 

 numerous low stems. Winter-buds globose, nearly immersed in the bark, and covered 

 with hoary pubescence. Bark of the trunk jV~i' thick, light brown tinged w r ith red, the 

 surface separating into minute appressed scales. Wood heavy, exceedingly hard, strong, 

 close-grained, clear bright red, with thin lighter colored sapwood. 



Distribution. Florida, Cape Canaveral to the southern keys; common and of its largest 

 size in the United States on the shores of Bay Biscay ne near the mouth of the Miami River, 

 Dade CJounty; northward usually a low shrub; on the Bahama Islands and on many of the 

 Antilles. 



2. AVICENNIA L. 



Trees, with coriaceous persistent leaves, stout pithy branches thickened at the nodes and 

 marked by interpetiolar lines, and long thick horizontal roots producing numerous short 

 vertical thick and fleshy leafless stems rising above the surface of the soil. Flowers oppo- 

 site, cymose, in centripetal pedunculate spikes or heads, closely invested by a bract and 2 

 bractlets, the peduncles solitary or in pairs in the axils of upper leaves and ternate on the 

 end of the branches, their bracts and bractlets concave, acute, apiculate, keeled on the 

 back, scarious, slightly ciliate on the margins, shorter than the corolla, persistent under the 

 fruit; calyx cup-shaped, coated like the bracts and bractlets with canescent pubescence, 

 divided nearly to the base into 5 concave ovate rounded lobes imbricated in the bud; corolla 

 campanulate, white, with a straight cylindric tube shorter than the glabrous or tomentose 

 spreading 4-lobed limb, the posterior lobe usually larger than the others; stamens exserted; 

 filaments short, filiform, slightly thickened at base; anthers ovoid; ovary ovoid, pubescent, 

 I -celled, gradually narrowed into an elongated slender style divided at apex into 2 lobes 

 stigmatic on their inner face; ovules 4, suspended from the summit of a free central pla- 

 centa, orthotropous, naked. Fruit an ovoid oblique compressed 1-seeded capsule apiculate 



