LEGUMINOS. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 97 
CERCIS TEXENSIS. 
Redbud. 
FLowers fascicled or slightly racemose. Leaves reniform. 
Cercis Texensis, Sargent, Garden and Forest, iv. 448. C. occidentalis, var. Texensis, Watson, [ndez, i. 209. 
C. occidentalis, var., Gray, Jour. Bost. Soc. Nat. Hist. vi. C. reniformis, Watson, Proc. Am. Acad. xvii. 348. — 
177 (Pl. Lindheim. ii.). — Walpers, Ann. ii. 440. Sargent, Forest Trees N. Am. 10th Census U. S. ix. 
C. occidentalis, Torrey, Bot. Mex. Bound. Surv. 58 (in 61. — Coulter, Contrib. U. S. Nat. Herb. ii. 91 (Man. 
part). — Hemsley, Bot. Biol. Am. Cent. i. 340 (in part). Pl. W. Texas). 
A small slender tree, occasionally twenty or nearly forty feet in height, with a trunk six to twelve 
inches in diameter ; or more often a shrub sending up many stems and forming dense thickets only a 
few feet high. The bark of the trunk and branches is thin, smooth, and light gray. The branchlets 
are glabrous and covered with minute white lenticels, and are light reddish brown during their first and 
second years and dark gray in their third. The leaves, which appear soon after the opening of the 
flowers in March, are at first light green and slightly pilose; at maturity they are subcoriaceous, dark 
green and lustrous on the upper, and paler and glabrous or pubescent on the lower surface, and are 
borne on petioles an inch and a half to two inches long and abruptly contracted at both ends. 
The flowers are half an inch or rather less in length, and are borne on slender pedicels fascicled in 
sessile clusters or occasionally racemose, and as long or sometimes twice as long as the flowers, which are 
rosy pink with a darker colored calyx. The legumes are from two to four inches long and from half 
an inch to almost an inch broad, and in form and color are hardly to be distinguished from those of 
Cercis Canadensis. 
Cercis Texensis is distributed from the neighborhood of Dallas in eastern Texas to the Sierra 
Madre in Nuevo Leon.’ It is very common in the valley of the upper Colorado River, and attains 
its greatest size on the mountains of northeastern Mexico,’ and here and in many parts of western 
Texas is a conspicuous feature of vegetation, often forming extensive thickets on the limestone hills and 
ridges on which the Texas Redbud is found. 
The wood of Cercis Texensis is heavy, hard, and close-grained, with numerous rather obscure 
medullary rays, and rows of open ducts marking the layers of annual growth. It is brown streaked 
with yellow, with thin lighter colored sapwood consisting of five or six layers of annual growth. The 
specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.7513, a cubic foot weighing 46.82 pounds. 
Cercis Texensis was discovered by Jean Louis Berlandier’ at Comancheries, in the valley of the 
lower Rio Grande, in November, 1828.* 
1 In the specimen (No. 2080) collected by Pringle in 1888 on 8 See i. 82. 
the Sierra Madre near Monterey the lower surface of the leaves, * Cercis Texensis was named by Engelmann in MSS. Cercis reni- 
the petioles, and the branchlets are coated with hoary canescent formis, bunt was not published. See Scheele, Roemer Texas, 428, 
tomentum. and Brewer & Watson, Bot. Cal. i. 161. 
2 C. G. Pringle, Garden and Forest, ui. 362. 
