704 



TREES OF NORTH AMERICA 



angled at first, often marked with minute pale spots and dark red-brown, becoming 

 in their second year terete, light reddish brown or orange color, thickened at the 

 nodes, and marked by conspicuous ovate leaf-scars; or northward in Florida a low 

 shrub. Bark of the trunk %' thick, brown slightly tinged with red, the surface 



broken into long ridge-like scales. Wood heavy, hard, strong, close-grained, dark 

 yellow-brown, with lighter colored sapwood of 10-12 layers of annual growth. The 

 bark contains a large amount of tannic acid and is sometimes used in tanning leather, 

 and is astringent and tonic. 



Distribution. Muddy tidal shores of bays and lagoons; common in southern 

 Florida from Cape Canaveral and Cedar Keys to the southern islands; of its largest 

 size in Florida on the shores of Shark River; common in Bermuda, the Bahamas, 

 the Antilles, tropical Mexico and Central America, tropical South America and 

 western Africa. 



XLVII. ARALIACE^E3. 



Trees, shrubs, or herbs, with watery juice and scaly buds. Leaves alter- 

 nate, compound, petiolate, with stipules. Flowers in racemose or panicled 

 umbels; parts of the flower in 5's ; disk epigynous; ovule solitary, suspended 

 from the apex of the cell, anatropous. Fruit baccate. Seeds with albumen. 



The Aralia family with fifty genera is chiefly tropical, with a few genera 

 extending beyond the tropics into the northern hemisphere, especially into 

 North America and eastern Asia. The widely distributed and largely extra- 

 tropical genus Aralia is represented by one arborescent species in the flora of 

 the United States. Hedera, the Ivy, of this family, is commonly cultivated in 

 the temperate parts of the United States, and some species of Panax and 

 Acanthopanax from eastern Asia are found in gardens in the northeastern 

 states. 



1. ARALIA, L. 



Aromatic spiny trees and shrubs, with stout pithy branchlets, and thick fleshy roots, 

 or bristly or glabrous perennial herbs. Leaves alternate, digitate or once or twice 

 pinnate, the pinnae serrulate ; stipules produced on the expanded and clasping base 

 of the petiole. Flowers perfect, polygamo-moncecious or polygamo-dicecious, on 



