Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Each small white flower opens five separate petals behind five sepals, with {stamens} too many to count quickly, all springing from the rim of a shallow cup rather than straight from the stem. New shoots carry their leaves singly rather than in pairs, and each young leafstalk base is flanked at first by two narrow {stipules} that wither and drop within weeks. Turn a leaf over and a pair of raised dark {nectaries} sits at the base of the blade where the stalk joins, paying ants in sugar that no flower supplied. Its genus name is simply the classical Latin word for the plum tree, taken in turn from a Greek name that probably came out of Anatolia, the same corner of the world where this shrub grows wild. It grows wild in the damp {understory} of forests ringing the Black Sea, from Albania and Bulgaria east through Turkey to the Caucasus and northern Iran. Its two-part species epithet welds the Latin name of the aromatic Mediterranean evergreen whose leaves flavour stews onto the Latin name of the small red stone fruit, describing a shrub with the foliage of one and the fruit of the other. Almost alone among the many relatives in its genus, it holds its thick, {glossy}, dark leathery leaves right through winter. Its white flower spikes stand stiffly upright among the foliage, 3 to 6 inches (7 to 15 cm) long, and ripen into small purple-black {drupes} about half an inch (1.3 cm) across. Tear a leaf and it smells sharply of bitter almond, because the {cyanogenic} tissue releases hydrogen cyanide the moment it is damaged. A late-nineteenth-century German nursery selection of it stays under about 4 feet (1.2 m) tall while spreading 8 to 12 feet (2.4 to 3.6 m) wide on nearly horizontal branches set with narrow, willow-like leaves. Amateur entomologists once charged their killing jars with its crushed leaves, and the hedging shrub it forms, planted by the mile across Britain and the Pacific Northwest, is now {naturalized} in woodlands there as a smothering evergreen weed.

Accepted Answer

Prunus laurocerasus 'Zabeliana'

Name That Plant #060