368 WOODY PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 



ries are oval, a third of an inch long, pointed, compressed, oval, 

 blue-black when ripe, and very disagreeable to the taste. The 

 nut is of the same shape, slightly grooved. 



Section Second. — The flowers in the margin of the cymes much 

 larger than the others and sterile. 



Sp. 1 . The High Cranberry. Cranberry Tree. V. opulus. L. 



A handsome, low tree, five to ten feet high, ornamented 

 throughout the year with flowers or fruit. In May or early in 

 June, it spreads open, at the end of every branch, a broad cyme 

 of soft, delicate flowers, surrounded by an irregular circle of 

 snow-white stars, scattered, apparently, for show. From the 

 common axil of the upper pair of leaves, a stout, furrowed 

 footstalk, one or two inches long, separates into five, six, or 

 more, radiating branches, from each of which, after successive 

 similar sub-divisions, proceed a number of crowded flowers, 

 diverging, on short, partial footstalks, from a single, central 

 point. Each perfect flower is a white cup of a single piece, 

 with a border of five round lobes, sitting in a green calyx with 

 a few obsolete teeth, and bearing, from its base, within, five 

 upright stamens, twice as long as itself, which support whitish 

 anthers, opening from the top. The germ is a short, white, 

 conical body, terminating in two or three minute stigmas, and 

 seeming, when the corolla is gone, immediately to surmount the 

 calyx. At the base of the flower-stems and branches, are long, 

 linear, brown, fugacious bracts. The outer florets are on longer 

 stalks, barren, salver-shaped, of five larger, unequal, obovate, 

 rounded lobes. 



The leaves are opposite, from two to five inches long, straight, 

 rounded or acute at base, three-nerved, and with three very 

 divergent, acuminate lobes, and large, unequal, obtuse teeth, 

 strongly veined, paler beneath. The footstalks are three fourths 

 of an inch to an inch in length, with one or two glandular sti- 

 pules below, and a few glands near the base of the leaf and 

 towards the bottom, the lower ones hair-like. 



The fruit, which is red when ripe, is of a pleasant acid taste, 

 resembling cranberries, for which it is sometimes substituted. 



