296 



TREES OF NOKXn AMERICA 



September on slender conspicuously jointed pedicels often ^' long, in many-flowered 

 glabrous racemes from I'-l^' in length; calyx G-parted to the base, with oblong- 

 obovate red-brown divisions rounded at the apex; ovary sessile, narrowed below, 

 villous. Fruit ripening early in November, stipitate, cblong-ellii)tical, deeply divided 

 at the apex, fringed on the margins with long silvery white hairs, about ^' long. 



A tree, 50-60'^ bigh, with a trunk 2-3" in diameter and comparatively small 

 spreading or pendulous branches often forming a broad handsome head, and slender 



Pl(^. 2JC) 



pendulous branchlets glabrous or occasionally puberulous when they first appear, 

 brown, lustrous, and marked by occasional oblong white lenticels during their first 

 year, becoming darker the following season and ultimately dark gray-brown, and 

 often furnished with 2 or 3 thick corky wings developed during their second or third 

 years. Winter-buds ovate, acute, Y long, their outer scales oblong-obovate, dark 

 chestnut-brown, glabrous, the inner often scarious on the margins, pale yellow-green, 

 lustrousp and sometimes |' long when fully grown. Bark ^-f ' thick, light brown 

 slightly tinged with red, and divided by shallow fissures into broad flat ridges broken 

 on the surface into large thin closely appressed scales. "Wood hard, close-grained, 

 very strong and tough, light red-brown, with pale yellow sap wood. 



Distribution. Limestone hills and river banks; southern Kentucky to northern 

 Alabama and northeastern Georgia. 



Occasionally planted as a shade-tree in the streets of cities in northern Georgia 

 and northern Alabama. 



2. PLANERA, Gmel. 



A tree, with scaly puberulous branchlets roughened by scattered pale lenticels, 

 and at the end of their first season by small nearly orbicular leaf-scars marked by a 

 row of fibro-vascular bundle-scars, minute subglobose winter-buds covered by numer- 

 ous thin closely imbricated chestnut-brown scales, the outer more or less scarious 

 on the margins, the inner accrescent, becoming at maturity ovate-oblong, scarious, 

 bright red, ^'-^' long, marking in falling the base of the branchlet with pale ring- 

 like scars. Leaves alternate, 2-ranked, ovate-oblong, acute or rounded at the nar- 

 rowed apex, unequally wedge-shaped or rounded at the base, coarsely crenately 

 serrate, with unequal gland-tipped teeth, petiolate, with slender terete puberulous 



