OLEACEA. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 37 
FRAXINUS BILTMOREANA. 
Ash. 
LEAFLETS 7 to 9, ovate-oblong or lanceolate, acuminate, pale and pubescent below, 
long-petiolulate. 
Fraxinus Biltmoreana, Beadle, Bot. Gazette, xxv. 358 (1898). — Mohr, Contrib. U. S. Nat. Herb. vi. 666 (Plant Life of 
Alabama). — Britton, Man. 725. 
A tree, forty or fifty feet in height, with a trunk seldom more than a foot in diameter covered with 
dark gray slightly furrowed rough bark, and stout ascending or spreading branches which form an open 
symmetrical head. The branchlets are stout, light or dark gray, soft-pubescent usually during two 
seasons and much roughened during the winter, and often for two or three years, by the large elevated 
mostly obcordate or sometimes orbicular leaf-scars which display a marginal line of fibrovascular bundle- 
scars." The terminal winter-buds are ovate and usually broader than they are long and covered with 
bright brown scales, the two outer scales being keeled on the back and apiculate at the apex, and the 
others rounded, accrescent, and slightly villose. The leaves are from ten to twelve inches long, with 
stout pubescent or puberulous petioles and seven or nine leaflets raised on stout elongated pubescent 
petiolules ; the leaflets are ovate-oblong or lanceolate, often faleate, acuminate at the apex, rounded or 
broadly cuneate and often inequilateral at the base; when they unfold they are yellow-bronze color, 
nearly glabrous above, coated below particularly on the midribs and veins with long white hairs, and at 
maturity they are from three to four inches long and from two thirds of an inch to an inch wide, thick 
and firm in texture, dark green and slightly lustrous on the upper surface, pale or glaucous and puberu- 
lous on the lower surface along the slender yellow midribs and primary veins which are arcuate near the 
slightly thickened and incurved entire or remotely and obscurely toothed margins. The flowers appear 
with the leaves about the first of May, the males and females on different trees in rather compact 
glabrous or pubescent panicles, with scarious caducous bracts and bractlets, from the axils of leaves of 
the previous year. The staminate flower is composed of a minute cup-shaped very obscurely dentate 
calyx and nearly sessile oblong acute anthers. The calyx of the pistillate flower is much larger and 
deeply lobed, and the oblong ovary is gradually narrowed into the slender style which is divided at the 
apex into two short stigmatic lobes. The fruit, which is produced in elongated glabrous or puberulous 
clusters, is from an inch and a half to an inch and three quarters long, with a wing which is only 
slightly narrowed at the ends, emarginate at the apex, about a quarter of an inch wide, and from two 
and a half to three times longer than the short elliptical marginless many-nerved body. 
Fraxinus Biltmoreana inhabits the banks of streams and rarely low river benches, and is dis- 
tributed from northern West Virginia? through the foothill region of the Appalachian Mountains to 
northern Georgia ® and Alabama,’ and to middle Tennessee.’ It was first distinguished in 1893 by Mr. 
C. D. Beadle ® in the neighborhood of Biltmore, North Carolina, where it is the common Ash-tree. 
1 Until the plants are about four years old their stems and 
branches are quite glabrous. The branches, which are developed 
later, are covered with the pubescence which is one of the best 
characters by which this tree can be distinguished from Fraxinus 
Americana. 
2 In 1897 Frazinus Biltmoreana was found by Professor A. D. 
Hopkins near Easton, Monongalia County, West Virginia. 
8 In Georgia Frazinus Biltmoreana has been collected by J. K. 
Small near Tacoa, Habersham County, in August, 1895, and by 
C. L. Boynton on Little Stone Mountain, De Kalb County. 
‘In Alabama Frazinus Bilimoreana has been collected by T. G. 
Harbison in Marshall, Jackson, and De Kalb counties ; and near 
Gadsden, where this tree is common, by C. D. Beadle. 
5 In the Herbarium of the Arnold Arboretum there is an un- 
dated specimen of Fraxinus Biltmoreana collected by Dr. A. Gat- 
tinger at Nashville. 
6 See xiii. 66. 
