CUPULIFER Zi. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 51 
QUERCUS PAGODASFOLIA. 
Swamp Spanish Oak. Red Oak. 
Leaves oval to oblong, deeply 5 to 11-lobed, white-tomentose on the lower 
surface. 
Quercus pagodzfolia, Ashe, Bot. Gazette, xxiv. 875 Quercus falcata, var. b pagodzefolia, Elliott, Sk. ii. 605 
(1897). — Mohr, Contrib. U. S. Nat. Herb. vi. 472 (1821). 
(Plant Life of Alabama). — Britton, Man. 334. Quercus digitata pagodeefolia, Ashe, Handb. N. Car. 47 
(1896). 
A tree, sometimes one hundred and twenty feet in height, with a trunk four or five feet in 
diameter, and heavy branches which in the forest form a short narrow crown; or when the tree has 
grown uncrowded on the bank of a river wide-spreading or ascending and forming a great open head. 
The bark of the trunk is an inch in thickness and is roughened by small rather closely appressed 
plate-like scales which are light gray or gray-brown. The branchlets are slender, coated when they 
first appear with thick hoary tomentum, tomentose or pubescent during their first winter, and dark 
reddish brown and puberulous during their second year. The winter-buds are ovoid, acute, often 
prominently four-angled, and about a quarter of an inch in length, with light red-brown puberulous 
scales sometimes ciliate at the apex. The leaves vary from oval to oblong and are gradually narrowed 
and cuneate or full and rounded or rarely truncate at the base, and deeply divided usually by wide 
sinuses rounded at the bottom into from five to eleven lobes; these are acuminate, bristle-pointed, 
usually entire or rarely repandly dentate toward the apex, often falcate, and spread at right angles to 
the midrib or are pointed toward the apex of the leaf; when they unfold the leaves are coated with 
pale tomentum which is thickest on the lower surface, and are dark red on the upper surface, and at 
maturity they aré dark green and very lustrous above, pale and tomentose below, from six to eight 
inches long and five or six inches wide; they are borne on stout pubescent or tomentose petioles from 
an inch and a half to two inches in length, with stout midribs rounded and usually puberulous on the 
upper side, slender primary veins arching to the points of the lobes, and conspicuous reticulate veinlets. 
The stipules are linear, villose, and caducous. In the autumn the leaves often turn bright clear 
yellow before falling. The flowers appear with the unfolding of the leaves, the staminate in clustered 
slender villose aments two or three inches long, and the pistillate on one to three-flowered tomentose 
peduncles. The calyx of the staminate flower is thin, scarious, pubescent on the outer surface, more 
or less deeply tinged with red, and divided into four or five rounded segments shorter than the 
stamens, which are four or five in number, with oblong emarginate yellow anthers. The involucral 
scales of the pistillate flower are coated with thick hoary tomentum and are about as long as the 
acute calyx-lobes ; the’ stigmas are clavate, slightly lobed at the apex, and dark red. The acorn ripens 
in the autumn of its second year and is short-stalked or nearly sessile; the nut varies from short- 
ovate to subglobose, and is light yellow-brown, puberulous particularly toward the rounded apex, and 
about five eighths of an inch in diameter, with a thin shell lined with pale tomentum tinged with 
red; the cup, which incloses nearly one half of the nut, is flat on the bottom or slightly turbinate, 
with a thin somewhat lobed margin, and is glabrous on the inner surface and covered on the outer 
surface with oblong rather loosely imbricated scales which are rounded at the gradually narrowed apex 
and coated except on their dark margins with pale pubescence.’ 
1 I first saw this tree on the bottoms of the White River near eighth volume of this work published the following year under the 
Mt. Carmel, Illinois, in 1894, and allusion to it was made in the description of Quercus digitata, to which it is closely related. (See, 
