Keyed Out #059 — Ilex crenata

Question 1

It is {dioecious}: male and female flowers sit on separate individuals, so only some plants in a group ever carry fruit, and the tiny white blooms have their parts in fours.

Accepted Answer

holly family

Question 2

Leaves are simple and set one to a {node}, stepping singly along the twig rather than facing each other in pairs.

Accepted Answer

Aquifoliaceae

Question 3

Winter thrushes strip the crop clean and leave nothing on the twigs but bare stalks, with no split husks and no empty shells still hanging on.

Accepted Answer

fruit fleshy, with several bony stones inside

Question 4

Piano makers dyed its timber black for two centuries to stand in for a tropical import, and the trunk it comes from is speckled with pale {lenticels} from base to crown.

Accepted Answer

wood pale and fine-grained beneath thin, unbroken bark

Question 5

Each small blade is edged with shallow rounded teeth running its whole length, neither drawn out into stiff spines nor left almost smooth with a few nicks near the tip.

Accepted Answer

Ilex crenata

Question 6

It builds a dense many-stemmed evergreen mound of fine twigs 5 to 10 feet (1.5 to 3 m) high that holds a clipped shape, never rising on a single pyramidal trunk and never running out into a bare-stemmed suckering thicket.

Accepted Answer

Ilex crenata