Page:Manual of the New Zealand Flora.djvu/623

Atriplex.] ate. Perianth 3–5-partite; segments oblong or obovate, obtuse. Stamens 3–5. Female flowers 2-bracteate; bracts small at first, erect and appressed, distinct or more or less connate, enlarged in fruit and forming a variously shaped 2-valved covering to the utricle. Perianth wanting or very rarely of 2–5 hyaline segments. Ovary small; styles 2, filiform. Utricle entirely concealed within the base of the greatly enlarged and thickened bracts; pericarp thin, membranous. Seed compressed, vertical or very rarely horizontal; testa thin, crustaceous or coriaceous; embryo annular, surrounding the copious mealy albumen.

1. A. cinerea, ''Poir. Encycl. Suppl.'' i. 471.—A small branching shrub 1–4 ft. high, clothed in all its parts with densely appressed white or grey scurfy tomentum; stem woody; branches stout, angled, leafy. Leaves 1–2 in. long, linear-oblong or lanceolate, obtuse, narrowed into a short petiole, quite entire, midrib prominent beneath. Flowers dioecious or almost so; males in dense many-flowered simple or branched oblong spikes, which are often panicled at the ends of the branches. Females in small axillary clusters on the female plant, with occasionally 1 or 2 solitary in the axils of the upper leaves 01 the male plant. Fruiting-bracts greatly enlarged, about ¼ in. long, broadly ovate-rhomboid, subacute; disc thick and corky, swollen over the utricle, smooth or rarely tuberculate; margins thin. Utricle compressed, at the base of the bracts.—''Hook. f. Fl. Nov. Zel. i. 214; Handb. N.Z. Fl. 232; Benth. Fl. Austral.'' v. 171.