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Article from Bean's Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles
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'Neillia sinensis' from the website Trees and Shrubs Online (treesandshrubsonline.
A deciduous shrub 5 or 6 ft high, with glabrous, brown, peeling bark. Leaves ovate, 2 to 4 in. long, 11⁄4 to 21⁄2 in. wide, the apex long drawn out, the margins set with coarse teeth or small lobes which are again sharply toothed; there is down on the main veins and in their axils at first, but both surfaces become almost or quite glabrous. Flowers nodding, produced in a slender, terminal raceme 1 to 21⁄2 in. long, carrying twelve to twenty flowers; pedicels 1⁄8 to 5⁄16 in. long. The main feature of the flower is the smooth cylindrical white calyx-tube, 1⁄2 in. long and 1⁄8 in. wide, dividing at the end into five narrow triangular lobes. Petals small, broadly ovate, about as long as the calyx-lobes.
Native of Central China; discovered by Henry, and introduced to cultivation by Wilson in 1901. It is a shrub of elegant habit allied to N. thibetica but not so decorative, the racemes being usually shorter and fewer-flowered, though the individual flowers are larger.
Synonyms
N. ribesioides Rehd