ULMACE. SILVA OF NORTH AMERI CA. 41 
ULMUS SEROTINA. 
Red Elm. 
FLowers autumnal, long-pedicellate. Fruit ciliate on the margins. Leaves oblong 
to oblong-obovate, acuminate. Bud-scales glabrous. Branchlets often furnished with 
corky wings. 
Ulmus serotina, Sargent, Bot. Gazette, xxvii. 92 (1899).— Ulmus racemosa, Chapman, Fl. ed. 2, Suppl. 649 (not 
Mohr, Contrib. U. S. Nat. Herb. vi. 474 (Plant Life of Borkhausen nor Thomas) (1883) ; ed. 3, 444. — Sargent, 
Alabama). — Gattinger, Fl. Tennessee, 69. Silua N. Am. vii. 47 (in part). 
A tree, with a trunk forty or fifty feet in height, and from two to three feet in diameter, and 
comparatively small spreading or pendulous branches which often form a broad and handsome head. 
The bark of the trunk is from one quarter to three eighths of an inch in thickness, light brown slightly 
tinged with red, and divided by shallow fissures into broad flat ridges broken on the surface into large 
thin closely appressed scales. The branchlets are slender and pendulous, and when they first appear 
are glabrous or occasionally puberulous; during their first year they are light reddish brown, lustrous 
and marked by occasional oblong white lenticels, darker the following season, ultimately dark gray- 
brown, and often furnished with two or three thick corky wings which are developed during their 
second or third years. The winter-buds are ovate, acute, and a quarter of an inch long; their outer 
scales are oblong-obovate, dark chestnut-brown, and glabrous, and the inner scales are accrescent, often 
scarious on the margins, rounded or acute at the apex, pale yellow-green, lustrous, and sometimes 
three quarters of an inch long when fully grown. The leaves are oblong or oblong-obovate, acuminate - 
at the apex, very oblique at the base, and coarsely and doubly crenulate-serrate; when they unfold 
they are coated below with shining white hairs and puberulous above, and at maturity they are thin 
but firm in texture, yellow-green, glabrous and lustrous on the upper surface, pale and puberulous 
along the midribs and principal veins on the lower surface, from two to four inches long and from an 
inch to an inch and three quarters wide, with prominent yellow midribs and about twenty pairs of 
primary veins extending obliquely to the points of the principal teeth and often forked near the margin 
of the leaf, and numerous reticulate veinlets; they are borne on stout petioles about a quarter of an 
inch long, and in the autumn turn clear orange-yellow before fallmg. The stipules are abruptly 
narrowed from broad clasping’ bases, linear-lanceolate, usually about a quarter of an inch long, and 
persistent until the leaves are nearly fully grown. The inflorescence buds appear early in the season 
in the axils of leaves of the year, and the flowers open in September; they are borne on slender 
conspicuously jointed pedicels often an eighth of an inch long, in many-flowered glabrous racemes from 
an inch to an inch and a half in length. The calyx is six-parted to the base, with oblong-obovate 
reddish brown divisions rounded at the apex. The ovary is sessile, narrowed below, and villose. The 
fruit ripens early in November, and is stipitate, oblong-elliptical, deeply divided at the apex, frmged on 
the margins with long silvery white hairs, and about half an inch long. 
Ulmus serotina inhabits limestone hills and river banks from central Tennessee to northern Ala- 
bama and northeastern Georgia.’ 
1 Ulmus serotina was collected by Rugel (see ix. 110) on the its autumnal flowers, it was referred by him to Ulmus racemosa. 
French Broad River near the boundary between North Carolina It was distributed without flowers or fruit as Ulmus racemosa from 
and Tennessee in October, 1842; it was found near Nashville by the Biltmore herbarium (No. 3634b) from collections made at Nash- 
Dr. A. Gattinger as early at least as 1879, and, although he noticed _ville in 1897. On the 9th of October, 1898, a single large tree 
