English: Cinnamon bark; Wild cinnamon; White cinnamon.
Genus: 1 species.
Region: Caribbean.
Habitat: grows under the shade in dense forests composed of Sideroxylon, Lysiloma, Swietenia, Bursera, Hypelate, Dipholis, and Nectandra.
Use: bark as a spice, similar to cinnamon.
BotanyType: tree; up to 10 m tall.
Stem: bark white, light gray; scaly aromatic bark, stout ashy gray branchlets conspicuously marked with large orbicular leaf-scars; wood very heavy, exceedingly hard, strong, close-grained, with numerous thin, inconspicuous medullary rays; dark red-brown, and the thick sapwood consists of 25 to 30 layers of annual growth, light brown or yellow in color; 30 cm in diameter.
Leaves: brilliant deep green; smelling of cloves; petiolate; alternate; destitute of stipules; penniveined; entire; pellucid-punctate; coriaceous.
Inflorescence: many-flowered subcorymbose terminal or subterminal panicle composed of several dichotomously branched cymes.
Flowers: perfect; regular.
Sepals: 3, imbricated, persistent, suborbiculate, concave, coriaceous, erect, margins ciliate.
Petals: 5, imbricated, hypogynous, in a single row on the slightly convex receptacle, oblong, concave, rounded at the extremity, fleshy, twice the length of the sepals, white or rose-colored.
Stamens: ± 20, hypogynous; filaments connate into a tube crenulate at the summit, and slightly extended above; monadelphous.
Ovary: free; included in the androecium; cylindrical or oblong-conical; one-celled, with two parietal placentas; few-ovuled; style short, fleshy, the summit two or three-lobed, stigmatic; ovules arcuate, horizontal or descending, imperfectly anatropous, attached by a short funiculus.
Fruit: crimson, bright crimson; soft; fleshy; baccate; indehiscent; 2 to 4-seeded; globular or slightly ovate, fleshy, minutely pointed with the base of the persistent style.
Seeds: reniform, suspended; testa thick, crustaceous, shining black; tegmen soft, membranaceous; embryo curved, near the summit of the copious oleo-fleshy albumen, its radicle next the hilum; cotyledons oblong.