524 



TREES OF NORTH AMERICA 



A tree, with strong-scented bark and leaves, rarely 30-35 high, with a short 

 often crooked or inclining trunk sometimes a foot in diameter, small erect or hori- 

 zontal branches, and stout branchlets light brown or bronze-green and glabrous, 



puberulous, or sometimes pubescent at first, becoming light brown or brown tinged 

 with red and marked by large oblong lenticels during their first winter, and darker 

 brown in their second year; more often a low shrub. Winter-buds acute or obtuse, 

 with pale chestnut-brown scales more or less scarious on the margins and rounded at 

 the apex, those of the inner rank becoming lanceolate or ligulate, sharply and often 

 glandular-serrate, and ^'-V long. Bark about ^' thick, slightly and irregularly 

 fissured, broken on the surface into small persistent dark red-brown scales, and often 

 marked by irregular pale excrescences. Wood heavy, hard, close-grained, although 

 not strong, light brown, with thick lighter colored sap wood of 15-20 layers of annual 

 growth. 



Distribution. Low valleys and slopes of mountain ranges, northern British 

 Columbia over the mountain ranges of western North America and eastward to 

 western Nebraska and Kansas. 



12. Prunus serotina, Ehrh. Wild Black Cherry. Rum Cherry. 



Leaves oval, oblong to lanceolate-oblong, gradually or sometimes abruptly acumi- 

 nate or rarely rounded at the apex, cuneate or occasionally rounded at the base, 

 finely serrate, with appressed incurved callous teeth, and furnished at the very base 

 with 1 or more dark red conspicuous glands, when they unfold slightly hairy below 

 on the midribs and often bronze-green, and at maturity glabrous, thick and firm, 

 subcoriaceous, dark green and very lustrous above, paler below, 2'-5' long, I'-l^' 

 wide, with thin conspicuous midribs and slender veins, in the autumn turning clear 

 bright yellow before falling; their petioles slender, ^'-f long; stipules lanceolate, 

 acuminate, glandular-serrate, ^-f in length, early deciduous. Flowers appearing 

 when the leaves are about half grown, from the end of March in Texas to the first 

 week of June in the valley of the St. Lawrence River, ^ i" diameter, on slender 

 glabrous or puberulous pedicels from the axils of minute scarious caducous bracts, 

 in erect or ultimately spreading narrow many-flowered racemes 4^-6' long; calyx- 

 tube cup-shaped, glabrous or puberulous, the lobes short, ovate-oblong, obtuse. 



