Alpine flora of the Canadian Rocky Mountains

Chapter 36: Celastraceæ Staff-Tree Family

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About This Book

A concise field manual that surveys the alpine and subalpine plants encountered along the Canadian Rockies and the Selkirks accessible by the trans-mountain railway, emphasizing distinct regional assemblages and plant adaptations to differences in moisture and exposure. Species are arranged by botanical families with general keys to families and genera; treatments include ferns, conifers, shrubs and the majority of herbaceous flowering plants while excluding grasses, sedges, and willows. Descriptions are accompanied by plates, watercolour illustrations and photographs, and the text relates local taxa to comparable mountain floras while noting characteristic species, habitats and elevational ranges.

Celastraceæ
Staff-Tree Family

Shrubs with simple evergreen leaves, and regular perfect flowers, sepals, petals, and stamens each 4 in our species.

Pachystima myrsinites (Pursh) Raf. Mountain Lover.

Low evergreen shrub, densely branched or nearly simple, 1—3 feet high. Leaves opposite, smooth, ovate to oblong or lanceolate, cuneate at the base, the upper half serrate or serrulate ½—1 inch long on very short petioles. Flowers small in axillary cymes; petals 4, stamens 4, inserted at the edge of the broad disc.

In gravelly and stony situations extending from the Valley of the Columbia River at Beavermouth, westward throughout the Selkirks, the minute blossoms appearing in the latter part of May; a pretty but very variable shrub in habit and leaf form.

Pachystima myrsinites (Pursh) Raf. (½ Nat.)
Mountain Lover.

Viola adunca longipes (Nutt.) Rydb. (⅔ Nat.)
Dog Violet.