LEGUMINOS&. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 95 
CERCIS CANADENSIS. 
Redbud. Judas Tree. 
FLOWERS in sessile clusters. Leaves ovate, acute, cordate, or truncate at the base. 
Cercis Canadensis, Linneus, Spec. 374.— Miller, Dict. Sprengel, Syst. ii. 346. — Guimpel, Otto & Hayne, Abddd. 
ed. 8, No. 2. — Du Roi, Harbk. Baum. i. 147. — Marshall, Holz. 116, t. 92. — Hooker, Fl. Bor.-Am. i. 167. — Don, 
Arbust. Am. 32. — Castiglioni, Viag. negli Stati Uniti, ii. Gen. Syst. ii. 463.— Spach, Hist. Vég. i. 129. — Torrey 
223. — Lamarck, Dict. ii. 586. — Wangenheim, Nordam. & Gray, Fl. N. Am. i. 392. — Dietrich, Syn. ii. 1515. — 
Holz. 84. — Walter, Fl. Car. 135. — Willdenow, Spec. ii. Darlington, 77. Cestr. ed. 3, 67. —Chapman, FV. 114. — 
508 ; Hnum. 439; Berl. Baumz. 84.— Nouveau Duhamel, Curtis, Rep. Geolog. Surv. N. Car. 1860, iii. 50. — Koch, 
i. 19. — Michaux, Fl. Bor.-Am. i. 265. — Schkuhr, Handb. Dendr. i. 14.— Baillon, Hist. Pl. ii. 121. — Ridgway, 
i. 854. — Persoon, Syn. i. 454. — Desfontaines, Hist. Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus. 1882, 65. — Sargent, Forest Trees 
Arb. ii. 254.—Pursh, F7. Am. Sept. i. 308.—Nuttall, Gen. N. Am. 10th Census U. S. ix. 61. — Watson & Coulter, 
i. 283. — Hayne, Dendr. Fl. 53. — Elliott, Sk. i. 470. — Gray’s Man. ed. 6, 147. 
Torrey, Fl. N. Y. i. 188. — De Candolle, Prodr. ii. 518.— Siliquastrum cordatum, Moench, Meth. 54. 
A small tree, sometimes forty or fifty feet in height, with a straight trunk usually separating, ten 
or twelve feet from the ground, into stout branches which form an upright or often a wide flat head. 
The bark of the trunk is half an inch thick, and divided by deep longitudinal fissures into long narrow 
plates, the bright red-brown surface separating into thin scales; that of the branches is smooth and 
light brown or gray. The branches are slender, glabrous, somewhat geniculate, and covered during 
their first summer with lustrous brown bark marked by many minute lenticels, which in the second 
year loses its lustre and grows darker, and in the third becomes a dark or a grayish brown. The 
winter-buds are obtuse, an eighth of an inch long, and covered with ovate chestnut-brown imbricated 
scales rounded on the back and slightly ciliate on the margins. The leaves are broadly ovate, often 
abruptly contracted at the apex into short broad points, truncate or more or less cordate at the base, 
entire, five to seven-nerved, glabrous with the exception of tufts of white hairs on the lower surface in 
the axils of the nerves, or sometimes more or less pubescent below.’ They are from three to five inches 
in length and breadth, and are borne on slender terete petioles abruptly enlarged at the two ends and 
from two to five inches long; the stipules are ovate, acute, membranaceous, an eighth of an inch in 
length, and early deciduous. The leaves turn in the autumn to a bright clear yellow. The flowers, 
which appear in early spring before or contemporaneously with the leaves, are half an inch long with a 
dark red calyx and rosy pink petals, and are borne on pedicels from a third to half an inch in length 
and fascicled four to eight together. The legumes are fully grown in the south by the end of May and 
at the north by midsummer, and are then pink or rose-color ; they are unequally oblong, almost straight 
on the upper, and curved on the lower edge, and are from two and a half to three and a half inches 
long. They are produced in great quantities, and fall late in the autumn or in early winter. The seed 
is bright chestnut-brown and a quarter of an inch long. 
Cercis Canadensis is widely distributed from the valley of the Delaware River in New Jersey? to 
the shores of Tampa Bay, northern Alabama and Mississippi, and ranges westward to Missouri, the 
eastern borders of the Indian Territory, Louisiana, and the valley of the Brazos River in Texas, and 
reappears on the northeastern slopes of the Sierra Madre of Nuevo Leon. It is a common tree in all 
this region in glades by the borders of swamps, and on rich bottom-lands forming, especially west of the 
1 C. Canadensis, var. pubescens, Pursh, Fl. Aim. Sept. i. 308. — 2 Britton, Final Rep. State Geologist, N. J. ii. 90 (Cat. Pl. N.J.). 
Loudon, Arb. Brit. ii. 659. 
