^ THE 8TYRAX FAMILY. 51 



New England, and fully as trying to plant life ; it fruits in southern Yezo, and decorates 

 every garden in the elevated provinces of central Japan, where the winter climate is intensely 

 cold. There appears, therefore, to be no reason why it should not flourish in New England 

 if plants of a northern race can be obtained ; and, so far as climate is concerned, the tree, 

 which, in the central mountain districts of Hondo, covers itself with fruit year after year, will 

 certainly succeed in all our Alleghany region from Pennsylvania southward. In this country 

 we have considered the Kaki a tender plant, unable to survive outside the region where the 

 Orange flourishes. This is true of the southern varieties which have been brought to this 

 country, and which may have originated in southeastern Asia, in a milder climate than that 

 of southern Japan, for the Kaki is a plant of wide distribution, either natural or through 

 cultivation. But the northern Kaki, the tree of Peking and the gardens of central Japan, 

 has probably not yet been tried in this country. If it succeeds in the northern and middle 

 states, it will give us a handsome new fruit of good flavor, easily and cheaply raised, of 

 first-rate shipping quality when fresh, and valuable when dried, and an ornamental tree of 

 extraordinary interest and beauty. 



Diospyros Lotus, which is probably a north China species, and which is naturalized or 

 indigenous in northwestern India, and naturalized in the countries bordering the Mediterra- 

 nean, is occasionally cultivated in northern Japan, where, however, as it does not appear to be 

 more hardy than the Kaki, it does not seem to be much esteemed. The fruit is small and of 

 an inferior quality. Diospyros Lotus may be expected to endure the climate of our northern 

 states. 



In Japan, Styracese is represented by Symplocos with half a dozen species, all shrubs 

 rather than trees, by Pterostyrax, which replaces our Mohrodendron, from which the Japanese 

 genus only differs in its terminal paniculate inflorescence, five-parted flowers, and small fruits ; 

 and by Styrax with two species. Neither of the two species of Pterostyrax equals in size our 

 Mohrodendron Carolinum, which, under favorable conditions, becomes a tree eighty to a hun- 

 dred feet high on the southern Alleghany Mountains, and neither of them approaches our two 

 arborescent Mohrodendrons in the beauty of their flowers, which, although produced in ample 

 clusters, are individually small. Pterostyrax corymbosum, which I believe to be almost exclu- 

 sively a southern species, I saw only in the Botanic Garden in Tokyo, where there is a bushy 

 plant eighteen or twenty feet in height. Pterostyrax hispidum, which is now beginning to 

 be known in our gardens, where it is hardy from Boston to Philadelphia, is a bushy tree or 

 shrub, which we saw wild in Japan only on the banks of a stream among the mountains above 

 Fukushima, on the Nakasendo, where we found a single plant twenty or twenty-five feet in 

 height. 



As an ornamental plant, the most valuable of this family, as represented in Japan, is cer- 

 tainly Styrax Obassia, a tree which grows as far north as Sapporo, in Yezo, and which may 

 therefore be expected to be as hardy as Cercidiphyllum, Syringa Japonica, Magnolia Kobus, 

 or any of the Yezo trees, with which it grows and which flourish here in New England. 

 Styrax Obassia, as it appears in Yezo and on the mountains of central Hondo, where it is 

 common between 3,500 and 4,000 feet above the sea, is a tree twenty to thirty feet in height, 

 with a straight slender stem, long and graceful branches well clothed with nearly circular 



