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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 Elaeagnus

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1 Flowering in the fall (Oct-Nov) and fruiting in the spring (Mar-Apr); leaves evergreen; branches usually thorny
1 Flowering in the spring and fruiting in late summer or fall; leaves deciduous (somewhat coriaceous in texture and semi-persistent); branches thorny or not.
  2 Leaves 3-8× as long as wide; leaves with only silver scales beneath; twigs with silver scales only; fruit orangish-yellow at maturity, lepidote with silver scales
  2 Leaves 1.5-3× as long as wide; leaves with a mixture of silver and bronze scales beneath (the bronze scales may be few); twigs with a mixture of silver and bronze scales (the bronze scales turning dingy or blackish with age); fruit reddish-brown, pinkish, or silver at maturity, lepidote with silver and brown scales.
    3 Leaves remaining silvery on the upper surface; fruit silver at maturity
    3 Leaves becoming glabrescent and green above at maturity; fruit red at maturity
      4 Fruit 10-15 mm long, bright red; fruiting pedicel 15-25 mm long; hypanthium tube about as long as the separate calyx lobes
      4 Fruit 6-8 mm long, silvery red; fruiting pedicel 8-12 mm long; hypanthium tube about 2× as long as the separate calyx lobes