THE JAMAICA DOGWOOD.
Icthyomethia Piscipula, A. S. Hitch.
The Jamaica dogwood is a West Indian tree that grows also in southern Florida and Mexico. It is one of the commonest tropical trees on the Florida West Coast from the shores of Bay Biscayne to the Southern Keys. The leaves are four to nine inches long, with leaflets three to four inches in length, deciduous, vivid green, making a tree fifty feet high an object of tropical luxuriance. Its beauty is greatly enhanced in May by the opening of the pink, pea like blossoms that hang in drooping clusters a foot or more in length. The necklace-like pods are frilled on four sides
with thin papery wings.
The wood of this tree is very durable in contact with water, ides being heavy, close-grained, and hard. It is locally used in boat-building, and for fuel and charcoal. All parts of the tree, but especially the bark of the roots, con tain an acid drug of sleep-inducing properties. In the West Indies the powdered leaves, young branches, and the bark of the roots have long been used by the natives to stupefy fish they try to capture.