Arbutus
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Arbutus. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
ar'bu-tus, Trailing, a fragrant ground plant of the heath family. The trailing arbutus is to be sought in early spring in sandy or rocky woods under the evergreens. The runners are slightly woody. The whole plant is hairy. The corolla is salver-shaped with a five-parted spreading border. The flowers are apt to be hid in old leaves but their fragrance cannot be overlooked. This hardy little plant is found in favoring localities east of a line drawn from Florida by way of Kentucky, Michigan, and northeastern Minnesota to northwestern Canada. One authority credits Texas with being the home of the plant. A near relative is to be found in Japan. The botanical name, Epigaea, means "on the earth" and is quite appropriate. I wandered lonely where the pine trees made Against the bitter East their barricade, And, guided by the sweet Perfume, I found, within a narrow dell, The trailing spring flower tinted like a shell Amid dry leaves and mosses at my feet.--Whittier, The Trailing Arbutus.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a genus of plants belonging to the order of ericaceæ (heath worts). A species, the A. unedo, or austere strawberry tree, is found, apparently wild, in in the neighborhood of the Lakes of Killarney. It has panicles of large, pale greenish-white flowers and red fruit, which, with the evergreen leaves, are especially beautiful in the months of October and November. Trailing arbutus is a creeping or trailing plant (epigza repens) with rose-colored blossoms, found chiefly in New En England in the spring. Commonly called May flower, or sometimes ground laurel.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Botanically the two accounts still hold: Epigaea repens is a trailing heath-family plant of eastern North America, and the strawberry tree Arbutus unedo of Aiton's 1910 note about "a near relative in Japan" was right — the genus has just three species, E. repens, E. asiatica of Japan, and E. gaultherioides of the Caucasus and northeast Turkey. What has changed is the plant's fortunes. The fragrance Whittier followed made it a target for pickers, and because its roots depend on soil fungi it neither transplants nor recovers quickly; by the mid-twentieth century it had been stripped from much of its old range and is now legally protected in several states, including Massachusetts, whose state flower it is. Aiton's suggestion that "one authority credits Texas with being the home of the plant" has not survived; the accepted range runs from Newfoundland and the Great Lakes south through the Appalachians to Georgia and Mississippi.
Written for this edition, 2026.