ROSACEA 



517 



dividing into numerous erect rigid branches, and branchlets at first coated with pale 

 caducous pubescence, becoming dark red and rather lustrous in their first winter, and 

 ultimately nearly black, and unarmed, or sometimes armed with stout spinescent 

 lateral spur-like branchlets. Winter-budS acuminate or obtuse, Jg' long, their inner 

 scales accrescent, scarious, oblong, acute, |' long, bright red at the apex. Bark 1' 

 thick, dark brown, fissured and broken on the surface into thin persistent scales. 

 Wood heavy, hard, close-grained, brown tinged with red, with thin pale sapwood 

 of 10-12 layers of annual growth. The fruit is made into preserves, jellies, and 

 jams. 



Distribution. Low moist soil, often forming shrubby thickets sometimes of con- 

 siderable extent, and dry ridges; slopes of Tussey's Mountain in the northwestern 

 part of Huntingdon County, and over the main range of the Alleghany Mountains 

 into Clearfield and Elk counties, Pennsylvania; of its largest size on limestone bluffs 

 south of the Little Juniata River, 



6. Prunus subcordata, Benth. Wild Plum. 



Leaves broadly ovate or orbicular, usually cordate, sometimes truncate or rarely 

 cuneate at the base, and sharply and often doubly serrate, when they unfold puberu- 

 lous on the upper and pubescent on the lower surface, and at maturity glabrous or 



pubernlous below, l'-3' long, ^-2' broad, slightly coriaceous, dark green above and 

 pale below, with broad midribs and conspicuous veins, northward turning brilliant 

 scarlet and orange or red and yellow in the autumn before falling; their petioles slen- 

 der, usually with glands, ^'-f long; stipules lanceolate, acute, glandular-serrate. 

 Flowers appearing before the leaves in March and April, |' in diameter, on slender 

 glabrous or pubescent pedicels \'-h' long, in 2-4-flowered umbels; calyx-tube cam- 

 panulate, glabrous or pubernlous, the lobes oblong-obovate, rounded at the apex, pu- 

 bescent on the outer, more or less clothed with pale hairs on the inner surface, half 

 as long as the obovate white petals rounded above and narrowed below into short 

 claws. Fruit ripening in August and September, on stout pedicels ^'-f long, oblong, 

 ^'-1^' long, with dark red or sometimes bright yellow skin, more or less subacid flesh, 

 and a flattened or turgid stone, acute at the ends, ^-1' long, narrowly wing-margined 

 on the ventral, conspicuously grooved on the dorsal suture. 



