OLEACER, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 29 
FRAXINUS CUSPIDATA. 
Ash. 
PANICLES usually terminal on short leafy lateral branches of the year. Flowers 
perfect; corolla deeply 4-parted. Leaflets 3 to 7, lanceolate or ovate-lanceolate, long- 
pointed, sharply serrate or entire. 
Fraxinus cuspidata, Torrey, Bot. Mex. Bound. Surv. 166 gle, Garden and Forest, i. 142. — Sargent, Garden and 
(1859). — Gray, Syn. Fl. N. Am. ii. pt. i. 74. — Hemsley, Forest, ii. 447. — Coulter, Contrib. U. S. Nat. Herb. ii. 
Bot. Biol. Am. Cent. ii. 304.— Wenzig, Bot. Jahrb. iv. 259 (Man. Pl. W. Texas). — Wesmael, Bull. Bot. Soc. 
171. — Havard, Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus. viii. 510. — Prin- Belg. xxx. 80. 
A tree, rarely twenty feet in height, with a short trunk six to eight inches in diameter; or more 
often a shrub sending up from the ground a number of slender spreading stems six or eight feet tall. 
The branches are slender and terete, and when they first appear are light red-brown, soon becoming 
darker and marked with scattered pale lenticels; in their second year they are ashy gray and rough- 
ened by the dark elevated lunate leaf-scars. The winter-buds are acute and nearly half an inch long, 
with dark reddish brown glutinous scales. The leaves are five to seven inches long, with slender pale 
petioles sometimes slightly wmg-margined, and three to seven leaflets; these are lanceolate or ovate- 
lanceolate, gradually narrowed at the apex into long cuspidate tips, wedge-shaped at the base and coarsely 
and remotely serrate above the middle with recurved teeth, or entire; when they unfold they are 
slightly puberulous on the lower surface, and at maturity they are thin, dark green above, paler and 
covered with minute black dots below, an inch and a half to two inches long and a quarter of an inch to 
nearly an inch wide, with pale midribs and obscure veins, and are sessile or borne on slender petiolules 
which are sometimes nearly an inch in length. The flowers, which are extremely fragrant, appear in 
April and are produced in open glabrous panicles three or four inches long and broad, terminating 
lateral leafy branchlets developed from the axils of leaves of the previous year. The calyx is cup- 
shaped, and a sixteenth of an inch long, with acute apiculate teeth. The corolla is two thirds of an 
inch long, thin and white, and divided to below the middle into four linear-oblong lobes pointed at the 
apex and much longer than the nearly sessile oblong anthers. The ovary is two-celled and crowned 
with a thick two-lobed nearly sessile stigma. The fruit is spatulate-oblong or obovate-oblong, and an 
inch long; the body is flat and nerveless, the margined edges gradually broadenmg upward into the 
shorter wing, which is rounded or often slightly emarginate at the apex and a quarter of an inch wide.’ 
Frazinus cuspidata is distributed from the great cation of the Rio Grande in southwestern Texas, 
through southern New Mexico to the Grand Cafion of the Colorado River in Arizona,’ and ranges 
southward to the mountain slopes of Cohahuila and Nuevo Leon and to the cafons of the Santa Eulalia 
Mountains in Chihuahua. An inhabitant of rocky slopes and dry ridges, Fraxinus cuspidata grows as 
a shrub within the territory of the United States, and only attains the size and habit of a tree on the 
mountains of Chihuahua. 
Fraxinus cuspidata was discovered in June, 1851, at Eagle Spring, in western Texas by Mr. 
Charles Wright.’ Its abundant clusters of fragrant white flowers, the beauty of its foliage and its 
graceful habit, make this little tree a desirable ornamental plant, and it is occasionally seen in the 
streets and gardens of the cities of Nuevo Leon. 
1 I have been unable to examine the bark and wood of this rare Colorado River in Arizona in June, 1892, by Professor J. W. Toumey 
and still imperfectly known species. of the University of Arizona. 
2 Frazinus cuspidata was discovered in the Grand Caiion of the 8 See i. 94. 
