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Manual of the New Zealand Flora.

2. Aralia, Linn

2. Aralia, Linn.

Perennial herbs or shrubs, glabrous or setose or prickly. Leaves alternate, rarely simple, usually digitate or pinnate or pinnately decompound. Umbels solitary or in racemes or panicles, rarely compound; pedicels usually jointed under the flowers. Flowers polygamo-monœcious. Calyx-margin truncate or 5-toothed. Petals 5, slightly imbricate. Stamens 5. Ovary 2–5-celled; styles 2–5, free or connate at the base, at length spreading. Fruit 3–5-celled and 3–5-angular, or subglobose and 2–3-celled.

A well-known genus of about 30 species, mainly natives of the Northern Hemisphere, stretching from Malaya and India to Japan and North America.

1.A. Lyallii, T. Kirk in Trans. N.Z. Inst. xvii. (1885) 295. —A stout herb 1–4 ft. high, often forming extensive patches. Rhizome prostrate or arcuate, creeping. Stems stout, as thick as the little finger, pilose. Leaves radical, crowded, 6–18 in. diam. or more, orbicular-reniform, lobed and deeply toothed, usually glabrous and shining above, more or less clothed with soft bristles beneath; petiole terete, fistulose, with a broad membranous sheathing ligule at the base. Umbels large, compound, forming globose masses 6–12 in. diam. Flowers monœcious or polygamous, ¼ in. diam., reddish-purple. Calyx-margin truncate. Petals 5, linear or linear-oblong. Ovary 2-celled, crowned by two broad and fleshy stylopodia; styles 2, free. Fruit globose, ⅙ in. diam., 2-celled, black and shining; seeds 1 in each cell.—Students' Fl. 216. Stilbocarpa Lyallii, Armst. in Trans. N.Z. Inst. xiii. (1881) 336.

Var. robusta, Kirk, Students' Fl. 216.—More robust and less pubescent. Leaves with the teeth strongly mucronate; petioles plano-convex, solid or nearly so. Flowers smaller, with yellowish petals.

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South Island: Coal Island, Preservation Inlet, Kirk! Stewart Island and adjacent islets, Lyall, Petrie! Kirk! Var. robusta: The Snares, Kirk! Punui. December–February.

Has precisely the habit of Stilbocarpa polaris, and in a flowerless state may easily be taken for it. The leaves are less fleshy and coriaceous, and want the bristles on the upper surface; the petioles are terete; the flowers reddish, with narrower petals; the ovary 2-celled, crowned with the very evident stylopodia; and the fruit is not hollowed at the apex.