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Support the Flora of the Southeastern US

2024 has been a banner year for making the best flora we can imagine. We've created:
With financial support from people like you, we are aiming even higher in 2025. Together we can accomplish all this: Vote on our 2025 priorities
  • Add Global Conservation Ranks (GRanks) vote
  • Professional graphic keys (polyclaves) to individual families/genera vote
  • 2 new FloraQuest apps: Florida & Mid-South vote
  • Image overlays highlighting diagnostic characters with arrows vote
  • iNaturalist integration in FloraQuest vote
Write-in vote: vote
We've set a goal of recruiting 200 ongoing supporters to donate $15 or more each month in 2025. Please help us reach this goal and make next year's flora even better:

Click the number at the start of a key lead to highlight both that lead and its corresponding lead. Click again to show only the two highlighted leads. Click a third time to return to the full key with the selected leads still highlighted.

Key to Lyonia

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1 Lower leaf surfaces stipitate-peltate with rusty scales; [s. SC southward].
  2 Ultimate branches not rigidly ascending, flowers nearly always restricted to branches of the previous year, the leaves not conspicuously reduced toward the branch tips; leaves with distal margin usually revolute, sometimes strongly so; major veins usually depressed; lower leaf surface with some scales often large and with irregular margins, others smaller and more nearly entire, at least the smaller scales more-or-less persistent; shrub or small tree to 6 (-12) m tall
  2 Ultimate branches rigidly ascending, flowers frequent on branches of the current year (though also on older growth), the leaves conspicuously reduced toward the branch tips; leaves with distal margin at most slightly revolute; major veins not depressed; lower leaf surface with scales usually all large and with irregular margins, the scales often deciduous; shrub to 1.5 (-3) m tall
1 Lower leaf surfaces glabrous or pubescent (with simple hairs); [collectively widespread].
    3 Leaves evergreen (some leaves present on wood of the previous year), coriaceous, and shining
    3 Leaves deciduous (no leaves present on wood of the previous year), subcoriaceous, and dull.
      4 Young twigs angled; leaf margin entire; corolla 7-14 mm long; inflorescence umbellate-racemose, in fascicles along previous year's (leafless) growth; capsule 4-6 mm long; leaf surfaces with tiny, red, short-stalked capitate glands (also often with spreading, translucent hairs on the main veins)
      4 Young twigs terete; leaf margin minutely serrulate; corolla 3-5 mm long; inflorescence a terminal panicle; capsule 2.5-3 mm long; leaf surfaces with appressed, strigillose hairs, pale or white, with a red base.
        5 Inflorescences (at least the lower) with conspicuous bracts; [mainly Coastal Plain and lower Piedmont, also Interior Highlands]
        5 Inflorescences naked, or with only a few leafy bracts; [Mountains, Piedmont, and (less commonly) Coastal Plain, especially northwards]