Canella winterana (L.) Gaertn.
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Authority
Britton, Nathaniel L. Flora Borinqueña.
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Family
Canellaceae
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Scientific Name
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Description
Species Description - The bark of this small evergreen tree yields a condiment, and is sometimes called Winter's Bark, but is quite different from the more valuable bark properly so-called, which is produced by the South American tree Drimys Winteri of the Magnolia Family, formerly confused with it. Other popular names are Pepper Cinnamon, White-wood Bark, and Barbasco, but the last is more properly applied to Jacquinia Barbasco, also illustrated in this work, it is widely distributed in the West Indies, from Barbados northward, to the Bahamas, westward through the Greater Antilles to Jamaica, reaching also to southern Florida. In Porto Rico it is restricted to the dry, southern and eastern districts, at lower elevations. The genus is monotypic, consisting of only one species. The only relative in our flora is the tree Pleodendron macranthum, of the Sierra de Luquillo forests, there called Chupa gallo which is not well known botanically, and may not be closely allied. Canella Winterana (commemorates Captain John Winter, who brought the true Winter's Bark from the Strait of Magellan in 1577) reaches maximum height of about 10 meters, with a trunk about 25 centimeters in diameter, but is usually much lower, and sometimes shrubby; its gray bark is aromatic, as also the leaves; the foliage of the tree is smooth, quite without hair. The leathery leaves are alternate, close together on the twigs, inversely lance-shaped, without teeth, blunt, from 3 to 10 centimeters long, not strongly veined, with slender stalks about 1 centimeter long. The small, slender-stalked, purple, red, or violet flowers are borne in broad clusters at the ends of branches; there are 3, separate, rounded, slightly hairy-fringed sepals about 3 millimeters long; the 5, separate, broad, blunt petals are nearly twice as long as the sepals; there are from 10 to 20 stamens united by their filaments into a tube 3 or 4 millimeters long, with yellow anthers; the ovary is 1-celled, and contains few ovules, the style short, the stigma 2-lobed or 3-lobed. The fruit is a globular, crimson, or nearly black, few-seeded berry, about 1 centimeter in diameter, the seeds black, in gelatinous pulp.
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Discussion
Wild Cinnamon Family Canella Family Laurus Winterana Linnaeus, Species Plantarum 371. 1753. Winterana Canella Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, edition 10, 1045. 1759. Canella alba Murray, Systema Vegetabilium 443. 1784. Canella Winterana Gaertner, De Fructibus et Seminibus Plantarum 1: 373. 1784