812 TREES OF NOKTII AMERICA 



ill their first winter gray tinged with red, covered with a slight bloom, and marked 

 by orange-colored lenticels and by the large lunate leaf-scars displaying 3 fibro-vas- 

 cular bundle-scars, and ultimately dark brown tinged with red; or often a low intri- 

 cately branched shrub. Winter-buds short-pointed or obtuse, rufous-pubescent, 

 those containing tlower-bearing branches about ^' long and \' wide, and about twice 

 as large as those containing sterile branchlets; axillary buds acute, flattened, much 

 smaller than the terminal buds. Bark of the trunk J'-^' thick, and broken into 

 thick irregularly shaped plate-like red-brown scales. Wood heavy, hard, strong, 

 brittle, close-grained, brown tinged with red, with thick nearly white sap wood of 

 20-30 layers of annual growth. 



Distribution. Dry rocky hillsides, and fence-rows and the sides of roads; Fair- 

 field County, Connecticut, and the valley of the lower Hudson River, New York, 

 southward along the Alleghany Mountains to northern Georgia, and westward to 

 southern Missouri. 



Often cultivated as an ornament of parks and gardens in the eastern United 

 States, and occasionally in western and northern Europe. 



