PLATANACE^ 



345 



below, 4'-7' long and broad, or twice as large on vigorous shoots and then frequently 

 furnished with dentate basal lobes, with stout yellow midribs and veins ; their petioles 

 stout, terete or slightly angled, puberulous; stipules I'-l^' long, entire or sinuate- 

 toothed. Flowers: peduncles coated with pale tomentum, bearing 1 and sometimes 

 2 heads of flowers. Fruit: heads 1' in diameter, on slender glabrous stems 3'-6' in 

 length; akene about |' long and truncate or obtusely rounded at the apex. 



A tree, occasionally 140-170 high, with a trunk sonietimes 10-11 in diameter 

 above its abruptly enlarged base, often divided near the ground into several large 

 secondary trunks, or rising 70-80, with a straight column-like shaft free of 



branches and with little diminution of diameter, massive spreading limbs forming a 

 broad open irregular head sometimes 100 in diameter, their extremities usually erect 

 or more or less pendulous, and slender branchlets coated at first like the leaves, peti- 

 oles, and stipules with thick pale deciduous tomentum, during their first summer dark 

 green and glabrous, marked by minute oblong pale lenticels, becoming dark orange- 

 brown and rather lustrous during their first winter and light gray in their second year. 

 "Winter-buds ^'-f ' long. Bark of young trunks and large branches rarely more 

 than ^' thick, dark reddish brown, broken into small oblong thick appressed plate- 

 like scales, smooth, light gray, and separating higher on the tree into large thin 

 scales, in falling exposing large irregular surfaces of the pale yellow, whitish, or 

 greenish inner bark, becoming at the base of large trunks 2'-3' thick, dark brown, 

 and divided by deep furrows into broad rounded ridges covered by small thin ap- 

 pressed scales. Wood the favorite material for tobacco boxes, ox-yokes, and butcher's 

 blocks, and now largely used for furniture and the interior finish of houses. 



Distribution. Borders of streams and lakes on rich bottom-lands; southeastern 

 New Hampshire, northern Vermont and the northern shores of Lake Ontario, west- 

 ward to eastern Nebraska and Kansas, and southward to northern Florida, central 

 Alabama and Mississippi, and the valley of the Brazos River, and through Texas to 

 the valley of the Devil's River, everywhere common but most abundant and of its 

 largest size on the bottom-lands of streams in the basin of the lower Ohio and Mis- 

 sissippi rivers. The most massive if not the tallest deciduous-leaved tree of North 

 America. 



Rarely planted in the eastern states or in Europe as an ornamental tree. 



