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Article from New Trees by John Grimshaw & Ross Bayton
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'Exbucklandia' from the website Trees and Shrubs Online (treesandshrubsonline.
Exbucklandia comprises four species of evergreen trees in southeast Asia. The branchlets are stout, with distinct nodes, and bear alternate leaves subtended by conspicuous stipules which leave a large scar on falling. The leaves are simple or palmately three- to five-lobed on young growth, thickly leathery, with palmate venation and an entire margin. The flowers are borne in small (7– to 16-flowered) pedunculate capitate or racemose inflorescences in the leaf axils, and are either hermaphrodite or only female, with or without small white linear petals; in hermaphrodite flowers there are numerous stamens bearing two-locular anthers, but female flowers are composed only of the gynoecium with three styles. The infructescence is rounded, with several loculicidal capsules, each locule bearing five to seven seeds of which only the lower one to two are fertile and bear a narrow wing.
The curious name results from the original name Bucklandia having been invalidly published by Robert Brown. William Buckland (1784–1856) was both Dean of Westminster and Professor of Mineralogy at Oxford; the change to Exbucklandia, by the American botanist Roland W. Brown (Veldkamp 1998, Zhang 1999), seems entirely appropriate for the notoriously eccentric Buckland. (His son Frank was even worse.) Only one species, E. populnea, is established in cultivation, although seed of E. tonkinensis (Lecomte) H.T. Chang has been collected recently in Vietnam (D. Hinkley, pers. comm. 2006).