ROSACEA, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 89 
CRATZIGUS BRACHYACANTHA. 
Pometite Bleue. Hog’s Haw. 
Fruit bright blue. Leaves lanceolate-oblong to ovate. 
Crateegus brachyacantha, Sargent & Engelmann; Engel- Crateegus spathulata, Hooker, Compan. Bot. Mag. i. 25 
mann, Bot. Gazette, vii. 128. — Sargent, Forest Trees NV. ‘(not Michaux). 
Am. 10th Census U. S. ix. 75.— Otto Kuntze, Rev. Gen. 
Pil. i, 215. 
A tree, forty to fifty feet in height, with a straight trunk eighteen or twenty inches in diameter, 
dividing, five or ten feet from the ground, into stout spreading light gray branches which form a broad 
compact round head. The bark of the trunk is a quarter of an inch thick, dark brown, deeply 
furrowed, and broken into long persistent scales. The branchlets are at first light green and slightly 
pubescent, but soon become glabrous and pale red-brown, and in their second year are stout, more or 
less zigzag, and ashy gray ; they are armed with numerous short stout generally curved or sometimes 
straight and slender spines, from one third to two thirds of an inch in length, which often terminate 
lateral branchlets on vigorous shoots. The winter-buds are obtuse, nearly globose, one sixteenth of an 
inch across, and protected by chestnut-brown suborbicular scales ciliate on the margins and rounded on 
the back, those of the inner ranks being acerescent with the young shoots, and at maturity foliaceous, 
obovate, rounded above, nearly entire, and from one third of an inch to nearly an inch in length. The 
leaves are deciduous, and are lanceolate-oblong to ovate or rhombic, acute or rounded at the apex, grad- 
ually contracted into short broad petioles, and crenulate-serrate with minute appressed apiculate teeth ; 
when they unfold they are slightly puberulous on the upper, and glabrous on the under surface, and at 
maturity are thick, subcoriaceous, dark green, and lustrous, with thin inconspicuous midribs and veins, 
and are one inch to two inches in length and half an inch to nearly an inch in breadth. The stipules are 
minute, subulate, one eighth of an inch long, and caducous. On vigorous shoots the leaves are some- 
times broadly ovate or almost triangular, wedge-shaped, truncate, or heart-shaped at the base and more 
or less deeply three-lobed, and are two and a half inches long and two inches broad, with foliaceous 
broadly ovate to triangular-oblong acute stalked stipules an inch in length, and early deciduous. The 
flowers, which appear toward the end of April and early in May, when the leaves are nearly fully 
grown, are one third of an inch across when expanded, and are produced in great profusion on lateral 
spur-like branchlets in glabrous umbellate corymbs with long slender branches. The bracts and bract- 
lets, which are narrowly lanceolate, acuminate, from one quarter to one half of an inch in length and 
tinged with red, fall when the flower-buds are half grown, leaving minute gland-like scars. The pedicels 
are half an inch long, or four or five times the length of the glabrous obconic calyces, which has broadly 
lanceolate acute entire deciduous lobes. The petals are white, nearly orbicular, and contracted below 
into short claws, and in drying turn a bright orange-color. The styles vary in number from three to 
five. The fruit, which matures and falls in the middle of August, is subglobose or occasionally some- 
what pyriform, and from one third to one half of an inch in diameter, with a deep cavity and thin flesh, 
and is bright blue and covered with a glaucous bloom ; the nutlets, which are a quarter of an inch long, 
pointed at the apex, rounded at the base, nearly triangular in section, and slightly two-grooved on the 
rounded and nearly smooth back, are composed almost entirely of the thick hard walls which inclose 
minute compressed seeds; these are not more than half a line thick and are covered with a pale brown 
testa. 
Crategus brachyacantha is distributed from the valley of Bayou Dorcheat in northwestern Lou- 
isiana through the western part of that state to the valley of the Sabine River in eastern Texas. It 
