ULMACE^. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 



57 



ULMUS CRASSIFOLIA. 



Cedar Elm. 



Flowers autumnal, short-pedicellate. Fruit hirsute. Leaves ovate, scabrous on 

 the upper, soft-pubescent on the lower surface. Bud-scales puberulous. Branchlets 

 usually furnished with corky wings. 



Ulmus 



ix. 122. — Koehne, Deutsche Dendr. 135, f. 27 B. 

 Dippel, Handb. Lauhholzk. ii, 35. — Coulter, Contrib. U. 



V. 169 (1837). — Planchon, Ann. ScL Nat. s6v. 3, x. 279 ; Dippel, 



De Candolle Prodr, xvii. 162. — Walpers, Ann. iii. S. Nat. Herb. ii. 406 {Man. PL W. 



426. 



N 



Ulmus 



A tree, often eighty feet in height, with a tall straight trunk two to three feet in diameter, 

 sometimes free of branches for thirty or forty feet, and dividing into numerous stout spreading limbs 

 which form a broad inversely conical round-topped head vdth long pendulous branches, or while young, 

 or when growing on dry uplands, a compact round head of drooping branches. The bark of the trunk, 

 which is sometimes nearly an inch in thickness, is light brown slightly tinged with red, and deeply 

 divided by interrupted fissures into broad flat ridges, broken on the surface into thick scales. The 

 branchlets are slender and often furnished with corky wings, and, when they first appear, are tinged with 

 red, and coated with soft pale pubescence ; during their first winter they are light reddish brown, 

 puberulous, and marked vdth scattered minute pale lenticels, and with small elevated semiorbicular leaf- 

 scars, in which appear the ends of three small fibro-vascular bundles ; the two corky wings with which 

 they are frequently furnished are covered with lustrous red-brown bark, and when fully grown are a 

 quarter to a half of an inch broad 3 they are sometimes continuous, except when abruptly interrupted by 

 lateral branchlets, or are often irregularly developed. The leaf-buds are broadly ovate, acute, an eighth 

 of an inch long, and covered with closely imbricated chestnut-brown scales, slightly puberulous on the 

 outer surface ; those of the inner ranks are at maturity oblong, concave, rounded at the apex, thin, 

 bright red, and sometimes three quarters of an inch in length. The leaves are oblong-oval, acute or 

 rounded at the apex, unequally rounded or wedge-shaped and often oblique at the base, and coarsely 

 and unequally doubly serrate with callous-tipped teeth ; when they unfold, which is in February and 

 March, they are thin, light green, tinged with red, pilose above, and covered below with soft pale 

 pubescence, and at maturity are thick and subcoriaceous, dark green and lustrous on the upper surface, 

 which is roughened with crowded minute sharp-pointed tubercles, pale yellow-green and coated with 

 soft pubescence on the lower surface, one to two inches long, and one half of an inch to an inch wide, 

 with stout yellow midribs shghtly impressed above, prominent straight veins, often forked near the 

 margin, obscure on the upper side, and connected by conspicuous more or less reticulate cross veinlets. 

 The stipules, which are half an inch long, linear-lanceolate, and red and scabrous above, clasp the stem 

 by their abruptly enlarged cordate green and hairy bases, and fall when the leaves are about half grown. 

 The leaves turn bright yellow, and fall late in October or early in November, or turn brown and wither 

 on the branches in years of exceptional dryness. The inflorescence-buds appear early in the season in 

 the axils of leaves of the year ; the flowers, which usually open in August,^ are produced in three to 

 five-flowered pedunculate fascicles, and are borne on slender pedicels a third to a half of an inch in 

 length, covered with long white hairs, and furnished with linear-lanceolate acute scarious bracts and 

 bractlets. The calyx is divided to below the middle into oblong narrow pointed lobes, and is hairy at 



^ In favorable seasons a second crop of flowers sometimes appears in October from which seeds often ripen a month later. 



