RHAMNACES. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 45 
CEANOTHUS VELUTINUS, var. ARBOREUS. 
BrancueEs slightly angled. Inflorescence compound on more or less leafy branches. 
Leaves alternate, glandular-crenate, densely tomentose on the lower surface. 
Ceanothus velutinus, var. arboreus, Sargent, Garden CC. arboreus, Greene, Bull. Cal. Acad. ii. 144.— Trelease, 
and Forest, ii. 364. Proc. Cal. Acad. ser. 2, i. 110.— Brandegee, Proc. Cal. 
C. sorediatus, Lyon, Bot. Gazette, xi. 204, 333 (not Hooker Acad. ser. 2, i. 208. — Parry, Proc. Davenport Acad. 
& Arnott). v. 169. 
A small round-headed tree, twenty to twenty-five feet high, with a straight trunk six to ten inches 
in diameter, dividing, four or five feet from the ground, into many stout spreading branches; or often a 
shrub. The bark of the trunk is dark brown, an eighth of an inch thick, and broken into small square 
plates which separate into thickish scales. The branchlets when they first appear are slightly angled, 
pale brown, and covered with short dense tomentum. In their second season they are terete, nearly 
glabrous, roughened with scattered lenticular excrescences, and marked with large elevated leaf-scars. 
The leaves are broadly ovate or elliptical, acute, conspicuously glandular-crenate, dark green and softly 
puberulent on the upper surface, and pale and densely tomentose on the lower; they are two and a half 
to four inches long and an inch to two and a half inches broad, with prominent veins, and are borne on 
stout pubescent petioles half an inch to nearly an inch in length. The stipules are subulate from a 
broad triangular base, a quarter of an inch long, and early deciduous. The pale blue flowers, which 
open in July and August, are borne on slender hairy pedicels half an inch to an inch in length, 
produced from the axils of large scarious caducous bracts; they are arranged in ample compound 
densely hoary-pubescent thyrsoidal clusters three or four inches long and one and a half to two inches 
broad, on lateral leafy or naked axillary peduncles which appear at the extremities of young branches. 
The fruit is a quarter of an inch across and black at maturity. 
Ceanothus velutinus, var. arboreus, inhabits Santa Catalina, Santa Cruz, and Santa Rosa in the 
Santa Barbara group of islands off the coast of California. It reaches its best development on the 
northern slopes of Santa Cruz, where it is abundant at the highest elevation. On the other islands it is 
usually a bush branching from the ground with many slender stems. The insular plant appears to pass 
into C. velutinus? of the mainland, a species widely distributed from northern California to the Colum- 
bia River, and in the region east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, differmg from it in habit, in its 
pubescent shoots, in the more constant pubescence of the leaves, in its long slender pedicels, and in the 
color of its flowers. 
The wood of Ceanothus velutinus, var. arboreus, is heavy, hard, and close-grained, with thin very 
obscure medullary rays. The layers of annual growth are clearly marked with broad bands of minute 
open ducts, having irregular groups of ducts between them. Its color is hght reddish brown, while the 
sapwood, composed of seven or eight layers of annual growth, is nearly white. The specific gravity of 
the absolutely dry wood is 0.7781, a cubic foot weighing 48.49 pounds.’ 
This handsome tree was discovered in 1835 on Santa Catalina by Thomas Nuttall.’ 
1 Ceanothus velutinus, Douglas ; Hooker, Fl. Bor-Am. i. 125, t. 102. — Trelease, Proc. Cal. Acad. ser. 2, i. 110.— Parry, Proc. 
45; Bot. Mag. t. 5165. — Torrey & Gray, Fl. N. Am. i. 265, 686.— Davenport Acad. v. 169. 
Watson, Proc. Am. Acad. x. 334.— Brewer & Watson, Bot. Cal. i. 2 Garden and Forest, iii. 332. 
3 Trelease, /. c. 115. 
