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Styrax officinalis L.

Storax

Modern name

Styrax officinalis L.

A shrub or small tree to about 20 ft high in the wild, the young shoots, the undersides of the leaves and the inflorescence parts all covered with a whitish stellate down. Leaves up to 312 in. long, ovate, often broadly so, and sometimes heart-shaped at the base, entire. Flowers white, borne in June in short terminal clusters of three to eight; they are fragrant, about 114 in. wide, recalling those of an orange-tree; segments of the corolla six to eight, narrow-oblong, very downy. Calyx with very short teeth. Fruits globose, 34 in. wide, with the remains of the style at the top and the persistent woolly calyx beneath. Bot. Mag., t. 9653.

Native of the E. Mediterranean and the Near East, with a western limit in S. Italy; naturalised in Italy around Bologna and in France in the department of Var. This beautiful and interesting species has been cultivated in Britain since the end of the 16th century, when Gerard had two plants in his garden ‘the which I have recovered of the seed’. It is not a tender species, but coming from a region of hot and dry summers it needs the extra heat of a south or west wall to ripen its wood thoroughly; in areas where summer temperatures and sunshine are above the average it should succeed in a sheltered spot in the open ground, provided it is not bloated by overfeeding.

The fragrant resin known as ‘storax’ is obtained from this shrub by wounding the stem and used to be imported in small pieces, ‘storax in the tear’, or in larger, masses ‘storax in the lump’. It was used medicinally as an expectorant, and there were also made from it ‘sundry excellent perfumes, pomanders, sweet waters, sweetbags, sweet washing-balls, and divers others sweet chains and bracelets.’ Storax was also used as incense, and it is recorded that the dust cast up by the boring of an insect which attacks the wood was used in Greece for the same purpose.

var. californica (Torr.) Rehd. S. californica Torr. – It is remarkable that this Californian styrax differs so little from S. officinalis that some botanists refuse to give it even varietal rank. See further in the article with Bot. Mag., t. 9653.



From the Supplement (Vol. V)

It has been suggested that the resin imported in earlier times as ‘storax’ did not in fact come from this species but from Liquidambar officinalis (Meikle, Flora of Cyprus, Vol. 2, p. 1089 (1985)). Zohary, in Flora Palaestina, states positively that officinal storax did not come from S. officinalis.

Linnaeus spelt the specific epithet ‘officinale’, thus making the gender of the generic name neuter, but it is usual to amend this to officinalis. Whether the gender should be masculine or feminine is a matter of dispute, though the latter is natural for a genus of trees and has been widely adopted in recent times. The name comes from the Greek ‘sturax’, which is masculine for the gum and either masculine or feminine for the tree. But Herodotus, the first to mention the tree, treated its name as feminine, and it seems reasonable to leave it that way. For a contrary view see Taxon, Vol. 25, pp. 581-7 (1976).

Genus

Styrax

Other species in the genus