Taxus (taks us)

[NL. (Tournefort, 1700), ly diœcio us flowers, the female solitary and consisting of a single erect ovule on a small annular disk, which soon becomes cup-shaped and fleshy, and finally forms a pulpy berry inclosing the seed, but free from it and open at the truncate apex. The small globular male flowers are solitary in the axils, surrounded by a few imbricated scales, with a short stalked stamen-column, five to eight roundish depre ed and furrowed anthers, which become almost umbrella-shaped and four to six-lobed after maturity, and bear three to eight cells connate into a ring. The ripened seed is hard, woody, and nut-like, somewhat viscous when fresh, and contains an embryo of two cotyledons. There are 6 or 8 species, by some considered all varieties of one, natives all of the northern hemisphere and widely dispersed. They are evergreen trees or shrubs, bearing short-petioled flat linear rigid leaves which are somewhat spirally inserted, but usually spread falcately into ranks. The genus is remarkable for the great variation within the same species, T. baccata, the yew, seldom exceeding 15 or 20 feet in height in England, but in the Him a lay as becoming a naked trunk 30 feet high and often 16 in girth, its top reaching 70 or, it is said, sometimes 100 feet in height. T. brevifolia is similarly a low shrub in Montana, but a stately tree sometimes 75 feet high near the Pacific. T. Can a dens is, the ground-hemlock, formerly regarded as a variety of the British species, usually a prostrate shrub, extends from New Jersey and Iowa northward, generally under evergreens. The other North American species, T. Florid an a of West Florida and T. globosa of cuspid at a is cultivated and many curious varieties have been produced. The genus is similar to Taxodium in its are small trees, as as are those of Japan, where T. slow growth, and remarkable for the great bulk attained by older trees, as the celebrated Ankernyke yew near Staines, in England, within sight of which the Magna Charta was signed, which is 27g feet in girth; the Tisbury yew in Wilts, 37 feet; and the Forting all yew in Perth shire, 564; the first of these was estimated by Asa Gray to be at least 1,100 years old, and the second 1,600. See yew, and compare hemlock - spruce.