RHAMNACES. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. Jo 
RHAMNUS CAROLINIANA. 
Indian Cherry. 
Parts of the flower in 5’s; peduncles shorter than the petioles. Leaves deciduous. 
Rhamnus Caroliniana, Walter, Fl. Car. 101. — Lamarck, 10th Census U. S. ix. 40. — Trelease, Trans. St. Lous 
Ill. ii. 88; Dict. iv. 476. — Michaux, Fl. Bor.-Am. i. Acad. v. 366. — Watson & Coulter, Gray’s Man. ed. 6, 
153. — Nouveau Duhamel, iii. 47.— Persoon, Syn. i. 112. 
239. — Pursh, Fl. Am. Sept. i. 166. — Nuttall, Gen. i. Frangula fragilis, Rafinesque, 27. Ludovic. 97; Sylva 
152; Sylva, ii. 50, t. 59.— Roemer & Schultes, Syst. v. Tellur. 27. 
285. — Elliott, Sk. i. 289. — De Candolle, Prodr. ii. 26. Sarcomphalus Carolinianus, Rafinesque, Sylva Tellur. 29. 
Sprengel, Syst. i. 768. — Don, Gen. Syst. ii. 32. — Torrey Frangula Caroliniana, Gray, Gen. Ill. ii. 178, t. 167; 
& Gray, Fl. N. Am. i. 262. — Dietrich, Syn. i. 807. — Man. ed. 5, 115. — Curtis, Rep. Geolog. Surv. N. Car. 
Koch, Dendr. i. 610.— Sargent, Forest Trees N. Am. iii. 92. — Chapman, F7. 73. 
A slender tree, thirty or thirty-five feet high, with a trunk six or eight inches in diameter, and 
slender spreading unarmed branches; or more often a tall shrub sending up numerous stems to the 
height of fifteen or twenty feet. The bark of the trunk is an eighth of an inch thick, slightly fur- 
rowed, ashy gray, and often marked with large black blotches. That of the branchlets when they first 
appear is light red-brown and puberulent or covered with a glaucous bloom; it becomes gray during 
the second season, when the branches are slightly angled, glabrous, and conspicuously marked with the 
elevated scars left by the falling of the leaves. These are alternate, elliptical, oblong or broadly ellip- 
tical, acute or acuminate, wedge-shaped or somewhat rounded at the base, remotely and obscurely serrate 
or crenulate, and densely coated when they first appear with rusty brown tomentum ; they are borne on 
slender pubescent petioles half an inch to nearly an inch in length, and are membranaceous, two to six 
inches long, an inch to nearly two inches broad, glabrous or somewhat hairy on the lower surface at 
maturity, dark yellow-green above and paler below, with a prominent yellow midrib and about six pairs 
of conspicuous yellow primary veins. The stipules are minute, nearly triangular, and early deciduous. 
The flowers appear from April to June in the axils of the leaves after these are almost fully grown ; 
they are arranged in few-flowered pubescent umbels borne on peduncles varying from an eighth of an 
inch to almost half an inch in length. The pedicels are slender, a quarter of an inch long or half the 
length of the calyx, which has a narrow turbinate tube and triangular lobes. The petals are minute, 
broadly ovate, and deeply notched at the apex, and are folded around the short stamens. The ovary is 
contracted into a long columnar style terminated with the slightly three-lobed stigma. The fruit ripens 
in September, and sometimes remains on the branches during the month of November ; it is globose, a 
third of an inch in diameter, and black at maturity, with thin sweet rather dry flesh and two to four 
indehiscent nutlets. 
Rhamnus Caroliniana is found from Long Island, New York, to northern Florida; it extends 
westward through the valley of the Ohio River to eastern Nebraska, eastern Kansas, and eastern Texas. 
It is found along the borders of streams in rich bottom-lands, and is abundant on those lmestone 
barrens of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee which are covered with thickets of the Red Cedar. In 
western Florida and in Mississippi the Indian Cherry is occasionally tree-hke in habit, but its greatest 
size is reached only in southern Arkansas and the adjacent portions of Texas, where it often develops 
into a small shapely tree. 
The wood of Rhamnus Caroliniana is rather hard, although light, close-grained. and not strong ; 
it contains numerous thin medullary rays, and is light brown, the sapwood, composed of five or six 
