Trees or shrubs, with broad leaves and lateral cymose racemose or solitary flowers, the pistillate commonly solitary, the staminate usually clustered. Calyx 4-6-cleft, enlarging in fruit. Corolla urceolate in our species, 4-6-lobed. Stamens 8-20 in the sterile flowers, few or several and mostly imperfect or none in the pistillate ones. Styles 2-6 in the pistillate flowers; ovary globose or ovoid, its cavities twice as many as the styles. Ovary rudimentary in the sterile flowers. Berry large, pulpy. Seeds 4-12, flat, oblong. [Greek, Zeus' wheat.]

About 160 species, abundant in Asia. Type species: Diospyros Lotus L.

1. Diospyros Virginiàna L. Persimmon. Date-Plum. Lotus-Tree

Fig. 3307

Diospyros virginiana L. Sp. Pl. 1057. 1753.

A tree with maximum height of about 100° and trunk diameter of 2°, usually much smaller; bark hard, dark, furrowed. Leaves ovate or oval deciduous, pubescent when young, becoming glabrous, acute or acuminate, narrowed, rounded 01 subcordate at the base, dark green above, pale beneath, 2'-5' long; petioles 3 -10" long, loosely jointed with the twigs, the leaves falling away in drying; flowers mostly 4-parted; corolla greenish yellow, that of fertile flowers 5"-7" long, about twice as large as that of the sterile; stamens of sterile flowers about 16, those of pistillate 8 or fewer; fruit globose, about 1' long, reddish yellow and sweet when ripe, astringent when green, ripening after frost in the northern states.

In fields and woods, Connecticut to Iowa, Kansas, Florida and Texas. Wood hard, brown; weight per cubic foot 49 lbs. Jove's-fruit. Winter- or seeded-plum. Possum-wood. May-June. Fruit Sept.-Xov.