SCIADOPITYS
- Sciadopitys, Siebold et Zuccarini, Fl. Jap. ii. i, tt. 101, 102 (1844); Bentham et Hooker, Gen. Pl. iii, 437 (1880); Masters, Journ. Linn. Soc. (Bot.) xviii. 502 (1881), xxvii. 276, 320 (1889), XXX, 21 (1893), and Journ. Bot. xxii. 97 (1884).
An evergreen tree, belonging to the tribe Taxodineæ of the order Coniferæ, attaining in Japan a height of 120 feet and a girth of 12 feet. Bark reddish brown, scaling off in long strips. Branches sub-verticillate. Branchlets brown, glabrous, bearing minute scales, which represent true leaves, and cladodes, which are long, green, and leaf-like, performing the functions of true leaves, but differing from them in structure. The scales are borne spirally on the internodes, and are dry, brown, membranous, ovate-lanceolate, and decurrent. At the apex of the shoot there is a ring of similar scales, deltoid in shape, and densely pubescent on their inner surface, out of the axils of which arise a whorl of cladodes, ten to thirty in number, spreading all round the branchlet. These are 2 to 5 inches long, averaging ⅛ inch in width, linear, rigid, narrowed towards the base, obtuse and minutely rigid at the apex; upper surface dark green, shining, with a median groove; lower surface green on each side of a deep white stomatiferous central furrow. Buds globose, composed of numerous spirally imbricated greenish scales; terminal bud, at the apex of the shoot, in the centre of the whorl of cladodes, continuing the growth of the main axis in the following year; a smaller bud, often present at the side of the terminal bud, developing into a lateral branch in the next season. As a rule, the main axis is bare, except for the scales, below the apex, which bears the whorl of cladodes and the buds; but on strong-growing shoots a lateral branch is occasionally developed half-way up the internode. The cladodes are leaf-like shoots, and not true leaves, each representing an axillary branch with two coherent leaves; but their true nature has given rise to a great deal of discussion; and the elaborate papers of Dr. Masters cited above may be consulted on this subject.
Male flowers in a terminal compact raceme, about an inch in length; each flower ⅜ inch long, subsessile; anthers numerous, spirally arranged, short-stalked, with an acute and reflexed crest and two pendulous cells, opening by a vertical slit; pollen-grains globular, minutely tuberculate. Female flowers, terminal small cones composed of spirally arranged lanceolate bracts, which are serially continuous with the true leaves, empty at the base of the cone, higher up with fleshy semi-lunar ovular scales in their axils, half the size of the bracts and bearing one to nine ovules in a transverse series on their inner surface. As the cones increase in size, the
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