OLEACES. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 51 
shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont through the Appalachian region to northern Florida, and west- 
ward to the valley of the Saskatchewan, the valley of the Colorado River in Texas, the eastern ranges 
of the Rocky Mountains, the Wasatch Range of Utah, and the mountains of eastern and northern 
Arizona. In extreme forms it may be distinguished from the Red Ash by its glabrous leaves and 
branchlets and by its rather narrower and shorter and usually more sharply serrate leaflets, which are 
lustrous and bright green on both surfaces. The leaflets are often pale on the lower surface, however, 
and on trees in Nebraska and North Dakota they are occasionally coated, as well as the branches, with 
pale tomentum. In the territory east of the Mississippi River, where the Red Ash and the Green Ash 
sometimes grow side by side, they retain their individual character, but in the west the two extremes 
are connected by many intermediate forms which can as well be referred to one as to the other. The 
flowers of the two trees are indistinguishable, and the fruit of one shows all the varieties of form of the 
other. 
Fraxinus Pennsylvanica, var. lanceolata, which rarely attains a greater height than sixty feet or 
produces a trunk more than two feet in diameter covered with gray furrowed bark, is a handsome round- 
topped tree with slender spreading branches, ashy gray terete branchlets marked with pale lenticels, 
and bud-scales covered with dark rusty pubescence. It grows on the banks of rivers, and, comparatively 
rare east of the Alleghany Mountains, is most abundant in the Mississippi basin, often covering the 
banks of streams flowing east from the Rocky Mountains and farther west inhabiting elevated canons. 
The wood of Fraxinus Pennsylvanica, var. lanceolata, is heavy, hard, strong, brittle, and rather 
coarse-grained ; it is brown, with thick lighter colored sapwood, and contains numerous obscure medul- 
lary rays and bands of several rows of open ducts marking the layers of annual growth. The specific 
gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.7117, a cubic foot weighing 44.35 pounds. Inferior in quality, 
it is sometimes used as a substitute for the wood of the White Ash. 
The beauty of the dark and lustrous foliage of the Green Ash, its great hardiness and ability to 
flourish in regions of small and uncertain rainfall, the rapid growth of seedling plants and the ease with 
which they may be transplanted, have made it a favorite ornamental tree in many of the western states, 
where it is now more frequently planted in streets, parks, and shelter-belts than any other Ash-tree. 
