DAHOON (Rex cassine, Linn.). Shrub to 35 feet. Ever green shrub or tree with persistent, silky, white down on the last three years of growth. Branches at length smooth, brown. Bark gray, roughened by numerous slits, the lenticets. Wood light, soft, close-grained, pale brown, with white sap wood. Leaves e to 3 inches long, to 1 inch wide, plain margined, or with faint teeth near the acute apex, narrowing gradually to base, lustrous above, sparingly downy on broad midrib beneath, and on stout, short petiole. Flowers in axillary cymes, minute, with pointed, hairy calyx lobes.
Fruit in late autumn, persistent till spring, red, rarely yellow, berries, solitary or in clusters of 3, about inch in diameter. Dist.: Cold swamp borders and coast pine barrens, or sandy ridges, Virginia to Tampa Bay, west to Louisiana, not far from the Gulf. A white-stemmed, narrow-leaved variety, reduced in size throughout, is the distinct variety, nzyrti folia, Sarg., of the pine barrens and cypress swamps, North Carolina to Louisiana.