ERICACER, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 119 
VACCINIUM ARBOREUM. 
Farkleberry. Sparkleberry. 
FLowERs articulate with the pedicels, axillary and solitary or in terminal racemes ; 
corolla open-campanulate, 5-lobed; anthers tipped with slender tubes, awned on the 
back ; ovary imperfectly 10-celled. Berry globose, dry and astringent. 
Vaccinium arboreum, Marshall, Arbust. Am. 157 87. — Sargent, Forest Trees N. Am. 10th Census U. 8. 
(1785). — Michaux, Fl. Bor.-Am. i. 230. — Persoon, ix. 96. — Watson & Coulter, Gray’s Man. ed. 6, 312. 
Syn. i. 479.— Du Mont de Courset, Bot. Cult. ed. 2, Vaccinium mucronatum, Walter, Fl. Car. 139 (not Lin- 
iii. 511. — Desfontaines, Hist. Arb. i. 270. -— Pursh, FV. nus) (1788). 
alm. Sept. i. 285. — Nuttall, Gen. i. 263. — Elliott, Sk. Vaccinium diffusum, Aiton, Hort. Kew. ii. 11 (1789).— 
i, 495. — Don, Gen. Syst. iii. 853. — De Candolle, Prodr. Bot. Mag. xxxix. t. 1607.— Koch, Dendr. ii. 96. — 
vii. 567. — Dietrich, Syn. ii. 1264. — Loddiges, Bot. Cab. Lauche, Deutsche Dendr. ed. 2, 239. 
xvil. t, 1885. — Gray, Mem. Am. Acad. n. ser. iii. 53 (?) Arbutus obtusifolius, Rafinesque, Fl. Ludovic. 55 
(Chior. Bor. Am.); Syn. Fl. N. Am. ti. 20. — Klotzsch, (1817). 
Linnea, xxiv. 55.— Walpers, Ann. ii. 1096.—Chapman, Batodendron arboreum, Nuttall, Trans. Am. Phil. Soc. 
Fl. 259. — Curtis, Rep. Geolog. Surv. N. Car. 1860, iii. n. ser. viii. 261 (1843) ; Sylva, iii. 43. 
A tree, twenty to thirty feet in height, with a short often crooked trunk occasionally eight or ten 
inches in diameter, and slender more or less contorted branches which form an irregular round head; or 
toward the northern limit of its range generally reduced to a low shrub with many divergent stems. The 
bark of the trunk, which is barely one sixteenth of an inch thick, is light reddish brown and covered 
with minute appressed scales. The branchlets, when they first appear, are light red and coated with 
pale pubescence ; in their first winter they are glabrous or puberulous and bright red-brown, and later 
become dark red, and are marked by the minute elevated nearly orbicular leaf-scars. The winter-buds 
are obtuse, one sixteenth of an inch or less in length, and covered with imbricated ovate-acute chestnut- 
brown scales which often remain on the base of the branchlets throughout the season. The leaves 
are obovate, oblong-oval, or occasionally nearly orbicular, acute, or rounded and apiculate at the apex, 
gradually or abruptly wedge-shaped at the base, obscurely glandular-dentate, or entire with thickened 
slightly revolute margins; when they unfold they are light red and more or less pilose or puberulous, 
and at maturity they are thin, coriaceous, dark green and lustrous above, paler below, glabrous or often 
puberulous along the midribs and veins, which are more prominent on the upper than on the lower 
surface, reticulate-venulose, half an inch to two inches and a half long, a quarter of an inch to an inch 
broad, and sessile or borne on short broad petioles ; in the southern states they remain on the branches 
until after the opening of the flowers in the following year, while farther north they fall during the 
winter. The flowers, which appear in March in Florida and in May at the northern limits of the range 
of the plant, are a quarter of an inch in length and are borne on slender drooping pedicels half an inch 
long and furnished near the middle with two minute acute scarious caducous bractlets; they are solitary 
in the axils of leaves of the year, or are arranged in terminal puberulous racemes two or three inches 
long, and produced from the axils of leafy or mmute acute scarious bracts. The corolla is white, open- 
campanulate, slightly five-lobed, with acute reflexed lobes, and longer than the ten stamens. These are 
inserted on its base under the thick obscurely lobed pulvinate disk which is depressed in the centre; the 
filaments are hirsute and shorter than the anthers, which are long-awned on the back and tipped by two 
long slender tubes with oblique elongated terminal pores. The fruit ripens in October and sometimes 
remains on the branches until the end of winter; it is globose, a quarter of an inch in diameter, 
black, lustrous, and many-seeded, with dry, granular, slightly astringent flesh of a pleasant flavor. 
