Notes on some Western Cherries 



Cerasus demissa, Nutt. in Torr. & Gray, FL i, 411. Although 

 this western Choke-Cherry has everywhere been received as 

 distinct from its eastern analogue, C. Virginiana, there is 

 evidence that herbarium specimens of the western shrub have 

 been referred to the eastern species, and that so C. Virginiana 

 has come to be credited wTth a westerly range which I am 

 confident it does not take. In my more than twenty years' 

 botanical experience between the Avestern base of the Rocky 

 Mountains and the shores of the Pacific Ocean, I have seen 

 nothing which I could call C. Virginiana; and, while that 

 species is said to occur on the eastern slope of the Rocky 

 Mountains, the western shrub which, all points considered, 

 makes the nearest approach to it is not that of Colorado and 

 Moatana, but that of the Pacific coast, namely, the very type 

 of 0. demissa. 



While apprehending that we may have, in the far West, two 

 distinct species, one belonging to the Rocky Mountain region 

 only, the other as exclusively restricted to the Pacific slope 

 proper, I am not in possession of data sufficient for their segre- 

 gation ; but I can at least offer points by which the perhaps 

 composite O. deniissa^-the aggregate Western Choke-Cherry 



may be more clearly distinguished from the eastern, and 

 the name of C. Virginiana be expunged from the list of Rocky 

 Mountain shrubs, as I doubt not it should be. 



True a Virginiana, as I used to know it, was a rather 

 graceful arborescent shrub or small tree, with smooth bark 

 and slender divergent or spreading branches and twigs, thin 

 foliage, and short racemes of small flowers ; and its favorite 

 tabitat was shady ravines and river-banks. The open arbo- 

 rescent mode of growth, and the thinness of the foliage, 



PlTTOMA, Vol. 11. ^^^ ^' 1^^' P^' ^•''^'^- 



