GINSENG FAMILY 



Flowers. — July, August. Perfect or polygamo-moncecious, cream 

 white, borne in many-flowered umbels arranged in compound pani- 

 cles, forming a terminal racemose cluster, three to four feet in length 

 which rises, solitary or two or three together, above the spreading 

 leaves. Bracts and bractlets lanceolate, acute, persistent. 



Calyx. — Calyx tube coherent with the ovary, minutely five- 

 toothed. 



Corolla. — Petals five, white, inserted on margin of the disk, acute, 

 slightly inflexed at the apex, imbricate in bud. 



Stamens. — Five, inserted on margin of the disk, alternate with the 

 petals ; filaments thread-like ; anthers oblong, attached on the 

 back, introrse, two-celled ; cells opening longitudinally. 



Pistil. — Ovary inferior, five-celled ; styles five, connivent ; stig- 

 mas capitate. 



Fruit. — Berry-like drupe, globular, black, one-fourth of an inch 

 long, five-angled, crowned with the blackened styles. Flesh thin, 

 dark. 



The habit of growth and general appearance of the Her- 

 cules' Club are unique. It is usually found as a group of 

 unbranched stems, rising to the height of twelve to twenty 

 feet, which bear upon their summits a crowded cluster of 

 doubly compound leaves, thus giving to each stem a certain 

 tropical palm-like appearance. This slender, swaying, palm- 

 like character is in the north only true of the young plants, 

 for after a single stem has buffeted the storms of many win- 

 ters it becomes a scrubby, deformed, little tree whose great 

 leaves can scarcely cover its ugliness even in summer. In 

 the south it is said to reach the height of fifty feet, still re- 

 taining its palm-like aspect. 



The young stem is stout, thickly covered with sharp spines 

 and for the most part branchless or slightly branching, so that 

 when denuded of its leaves it looks very like a club, whence 

 its common name Hercules' Club. The leaves are the largest 

 produced by any tree of our flora, although the casual observer 

 might not think so, as the leaflets are but two to three inches 

 long. The leaves, however, are so compound, in this case 

 doubly pinnate and sometimes pinnate again, that when one 

 measures from the swollen base of the prickly petiole to the 

 apex of the farthest leaflet the tape frequently records three 

 feet and the spread of the pinnae from side to side is often 



1 66 



