SALICACEA, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 65 
SALIX ALAXENSIS. 
Feltleaf Willow. 
LEAVES usually elliptical-lanceolate and acute, covered below with a thick coat of 
matted lustrous snow-white hairs. 
Salix Alaxensis, Coville, Proc. Washington Acad. Sct. ii. handl. xv. 119 (Bidr. Nordam. Pilarter); Proc. Am. 
280 (1900) ; iii. 311, t. 34; Bull. N. Y. Bot. Gard. ii. Acad. iv. 59.— Rothrock, Smithsonian Rep. 1864, 454 
164. — Eastwood, Bot. Gazette, xxxiii. 133. (Fl. Alaska). 
Salix speciosa, Hooker & Arnott, Bot. Voy. Beechey, 130 Salix speciosa, 8 Alaxensis, Andersson, De Candolle 
(not Host) (1832).— Hooker, Fl. Bor.-Am. ii. 145. — Prodr, xvi. pt. ii. 275 (1868). 3 
Ledebour, 7. Ross. iii. 625. — Seemann, Bot. Voy. Her- Salix longistylis, Rydberg, Bull. N. Y. Bot. Gard. ii. 163 
ald, 40, t. 10.— Andersson, Ofvers, Vetensk. Akad. Fér- (1901). 
A tree, sometimes thirty feet in height, with a trunk from four to six inches in diameter, often 
shrubby and in the most exposed situations often not more than a foot or two high, with semiprostrate 
stems. The branchlets are stout, and when they first appear are coated with a thick covering of 
white matted hairs; this gradually disappears and in their second season they are usually glabrous, 
dark purple, lustrous, marked by large elevated pale scattered lenticels, and much roughened by the 
large U-shaped scars left by the fallen petioles. The leaves are revolute in the bud, elliptical-lanceolate 
to obovate, acute or occasionally rounded at the apex, and gradually narrowed below into the short 
thick petioles; when they unfold they are often glandular on the margins, coated above with thin pale 
deciduous tomentum, and covered below with a thick mass of snow-white lustrous matted hairs which 
remains on the mature leaves; they are firm in texture, entire and sometimes slightly revolute on 
the margins, often somewhat wrinkled by the reticulate veinlets, dull yellow-green on the upper surface, 
from two to four inches long and from an inch to an inch and a half wide, with low broad yellow 
midribs and many obscure primary veins. The stipules are linear-lanceolate to filiform, entire, from 
one half to three quarters of an inch in length, and usually persistent at least until midsummer. The 
flowers appear about the middle of June when the leaves are nearly half grown, and are produced on 
lateral branchlets whose leaves are well developed or often reduced to small hairy bracts; they are 
borne in stout erect pedunculate tomentose aments, those of the staminate plant varying from an inch 
to an inch and a half in length and being much shorter than those of the pistillate plant which at 
maturity are sometimes five inches long; their scales are oblong-ovate, rounded at the apex, dark- 
colored, and coated with long silvery white soft hairs. The stamens are two in number, with slender 
elongated filaments. The ovary is ovate, acuminate, very short-stalked, covered with soft pale hairs, 
and gradually narrowed into the elongated slender style, crowned by the two-lobed stigmas. The 
capsule is nearly sessile, ovate, acuminate, covered with close dense pale tomentum, and a quarter of an 
inch in length. 
Salia Alaxensis inhabits Alaska, where it is distributed along the coast from the northern part 
of the Alexander Archipelago to Cape Lisbourne, and in the interior to the valley of the Mackenzie 
River and to the shores of Coronation Gulf.2 It has not been found on the wind-swept Aleutian 
Islands, but as far north as the eastern end of Kotzebue Sound it is said to sometimes grow to the 
1 The botanists of the Harriman Alaskan Expedition of 1899 covered with a growth of shrubs it had grown into a handsome 
found Salix Alazensis growing as an almost prostrate shrub on small tree. (See Coville, Proc. Washington Acad. Sci. ii. 281.) 
naked gravels at the Muir Glacier in Glacier Bay, while in the 2 See Richard Arctic Searching Exped. ii. 313. 
same region and only a few miles distant on older gravel deposits 
