Addisonia 1 



(Plate 225) 

 LIBRA** 

 NEW YORK 

 BOTANICAL 



Native of central Europe 



ARIA LATIFOLIA 

 Broad-leaved Beam-tree 



Family Malaceae Apple Family 



Pyrus rotundifolia Moench, (?Verz. 29. 1785) Meth. 680. 1794. 

 Mespilus latifolia Poir. in Lam. Encyc. 4 : 444. 1797. 

 Aria latifolia Roem. Syn. Mon. 3 : 128. 1847. 



Although of the mountain ash group of the apple family, the 

 beam or white beam trees differ from their bright-fruited cousins 

 in that they have simple rather than compound leaves; and their 

 fruits are not as attractive or as numerous. To look at an old, 

 white-barked specimen of beam gives one a composite impression 

 of mountain ash, apple, and beech. 



The white beam, Aria Aria, is commonly cultivated as a speci- 

 men and forest tree in Europe, and our present subject, the broad- 

 leaved be'am, is so used to a lesser extent. It is thought to be a 

 hybrid, originally found in the forest of Fontainebleau in the 18th 

 century. 



The tree of our illustration has been grown in the Arboretum of 

 the New York Botanical Garden, near the Japanese cherry collec- 

 tion, for twenty years. It has now reached a height of twenty-five 

 feet, a substantial well-branched tree with light gray bark, flowering 

 each spring and bearing many clusters of its brownish, spotted fruits. 



The broad-leaved beam is a deciduous tree, twenty-five feet high 

 and upwards, compactly branched from a gray, scaly trunk, with 

 reddish-gray branches and twigs. The leaves are round to ovate 

 in outline, three inches long on one inch woolly stalks; they are 

 smooth above, dull or satiny, but beneath soft white or brown 

 woolly; their margins are sharply toothed and divided into shallow 

 lobes. The flowers are in roundish clusters having corollas of five 

 white-clawed rounded petals, subtended by woolly five-lobed calyxes, 

 which are persistent in fruit. The fruits are in clusters, on smooth 

 reddish pedicels, round, brown and spotted, and about one inch in 

 diameter. 



Kenneth R. Boynton. 



Explanation op Plate. Fig. 1. — Flowering branch. Fig. 2. — Fruiting 

 branch. 





