RHAMNACES. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 
RHAMNUS CROCEA. 
Parts of the flower in 4’s. Fruit red; nutlets dehiscent on the inner angle. 
Leaves evergreen, often sharply toothed. 
Brewer & Watson, Bot. Cal. i. 100.— Mary K. Curran, 
Proc. Cal. Acad. ser. 2, i. 251.—Trelease, Trans. St. 
Louis Acad. v. 365. 
R. ilicifolia, Kellogg, Proc. Cal. Acad. ii. 37. 
Rhamnus crocea, Nuttall ; Torrey & Gray, Fl. N. Am. i. 
261. — Lindley, Jour. Hort. Soc. Lond. vi. 217, f. — Pax- 
ton, Brit. Fl. Gard. ii. 821. — Torrey, Pacific R. R. Rep. 
iv. 74; Bot. Mex. Bound. Surv. 46; Bot. Wilkes Explor. 
Haped. 262. — Watson, Proc. Am. Acad. xi. 114. — 
A small tree, rising occasionally to the height of twenty feet, with a slender trunk six or eight 
inches in diameter, and spreading rigid sometimes spinescent branches; or more frequently a low matted 
The bark of the trunk is 
usually from an eighth to a sixteenth of an inch thick, the dark gray surface being slightly roughened 
shrub with stems a few feet high forming thickets of considerable extent. 
The bark of the branchlets when they first appear is puberulous or glabrate and 
The 
winter-buds are obtuse and barely more than a sixteenth of an inch long, with slightly puberulous api- 
with minute tubercles. 
yellow-green, but becomes dark red or reddish brown and quite glabrous in their second season. 
culate scales with ciliate margims. The leaves are alternate, elliptical, broadly ovate or subrotund or 
rarely lanceolate-acuminate, mucronate, rounded or emarginate at the apex, acutely or often glandular- 
denticulate, sometimes revolute, a quarter of an inch to three inches long, with short stout petioles, 
prominent midribs grooved above, and broad conspicuous primary veins. They are persistent, coria- 
ceous, yellow-green, and lustrous on the upper surface, paler or frequently bronzed or copper-colored 
below, glabrous or often puberulous, especially when young, on the under surface of the midribs and 
on the petioles. The stipules are membranaceous, acuminate, and early deciduous. The flowers are 
dicecious and destitute of petals, and are produced on the shoots of the year in small clusters from the 
axils of leaves or of small lanceolate persistent bracts. The pedicels are slender, often puberulous, an 
eighth of an inch long and rather longer than the narrowly campanulate calyx, with acuminate lobes. 
The stamens are included, with short stout incurved filaments and large ovate anthers, which are minute 
and rudimentary in the fertile flowers. The ovary, which is reduced in the staminate flowers to a 
mere rudiment, is ovate and contracted into a long slender style, divided above the middle into two 
wide-spreading acuminate stigmatic lobes. The fruit’ is red, obovoid, slightly grooved or lobed at 
maturity, and a quarter of an inch long, with dry thin flesh and one to three nutlets which open along 
the inner angle. The seed is broadly ovate, pointed at the apex and deeply grooved on the back, 
with a thin membranaceous pale chestnut-colored testa and thick curved fleshy cotyledons.’ 
Rhamnus crocea is widely distributed west of the Sierra Nevada Mountains from the valley of the 
upper Sacramento River to at least latitude 28° on the mainland, and to Guadaloupe Island, Lower 
California.? 
the forest or in sheltered ravines, preferring the northern slopes of mountains, although sometimes 
It usually grows as an undershrub beneath the shade of trees and along the borders of 
1 Brewer & Watson (Bot. Cal. i. 101) state that the ripe fruit of 
Rhamnus crocea is used by the Indians as food ; and that ‘their 
veins are said to become tinged by a deposition of the red coloring 
matter.” 
2 Rhamnus crocea varies in the amount and density of the pubes- 
cence which clothes the foliage and young shoots. A form with 
narrow revolute leaves and densely pilose throughout inhabits Santa 
Maria valley in the mountains near San Diego. It is the variety 
pilosa (Mary K. Curran, Proc. Cal. Acad. ser. 2, i. 251. — Trelease, 
Trans. St. Louis Acad. v. 365). The flowers of this peculiar plant 
have not been seen. 
8 This species has been said to extend into Arizona (Watson, 
Cat. Pl. Wheeler, 7.— Brewer & Watson, Bot. Cul. i. 100), but 
no record of the locality is preserved, and it is perhaps doubtful 
whether it occurs anywhere east of the Sierra Nevada. 
