CUPULIFER-E. 



SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 



109 



QUEROUS TOMENTELLA. 



Leaves oblong-lanceolate, acute, crenate-dentate or entire, conspicuously veined, 

 pubescent on the lower surface, persistent. 



Quercus tomentella, Engelmann, Trans. St. Louis Acad. 

 iii. 393 (1877) ; Brewer & Watson Bot. CaL ii- 97, 



Sargent, Garden and Forest^ ii. 471. — Franceschi, Zoe^ 

 iv. 138. 



Wenzig, Jahrh. Bot. Gart. Berlin, iii. 209. — Greene, Quercus chrysolepis, Watson, Proc. Am. Acad. xi. 119 



Bull. Gal. Acad. i. 218 ; West Am. Oaks, 45, pt. ii. 57, 

 t. 26. — Brandegee, Froc. CaL Acad. ser. 2, i- 217. 



(not Liebmann) (1876). 



A tree, as now known, thirty or forty or occasionally sixty feet in height, with a trunk from one 

 to two feet in diameter and a shapely round-topped head.^ The bark of the trunk is thin, reddish 

 brown, and broken into large closely appressed scales. The branchlets are slender and roughened with 

 small elevated lenticels, and at first are coated with hoary tomentum which sometimes entirely disap- 

 pears during the summer, or continues to cover vigorous shoots until their second year, when they are 

 light brown tinged with red or orange-color. The winter-buds are ovate, acute or obtuse, nearly a 

 quarter of an inch long, and covered by numerous loosely imbricated light chestnut-brown scales more 

 or less clothed with pale pubescence. The leaves are involute in the bud, oblong-lanceolate, broad and 

 rounded or gradually narrowed and abruptly wedge-shaped at the base, acute and sometimes cuspidate 

 or occasionally rounded at the apex, and remotely crenate-dentate with small acute spreading or incurved 

 callous-tipped teeth, or entire ; when they unfold they are light green tinged with red, covered above 

 with scattered pale stellate hairs, and below and on the petioles with dense hoary tomentum, and at 

 maturity they are thick and coriaceous, dark green, glabrous and lustrous on the upper surface, and 

 pale and covered with stellate hairs on the lower surface which, however, especially on vigorous shoots^ 

 is sometimes clothed with close pale pubescence sparingly mixed with articulate hairs ; they are from 

 two to four inches long and from one to two inches wide with thickened and strongly revolute 

 margins, stout pubescent midribs, and numerous prominent primary veins which are often forked and 

 which run to the points of the teeth or are arcuate and united within the entire margins and are 

 connected by inconspicuous cross veinlets ; borne on stout flattened pubescent petioles about half an 

 inch in length, the leaves remain during at least two years on the branches. The stipules are oblong- 

 obovate or linear-lanceolate, brown and scarious, covered with pale hairs, and caducous. The flowers 

 appear in April ; the staminate are borne in the axils of linear-lanceolate scarious bracts on pubescent 

 aments which are from two and a half to fourteen inches in length and are produced from the axils 

 of the scales of the terminal bud or from those of young leaves, and the pistillate are subsessile or 

 in few-flowered spikes on short or elongated pubescent peduncles. The calyx of the staminate flower 

 is light yellow, stellate-pubescent, and divided into from five to seven ovate acute lobes shorter than the 

 nine or ten stamens composed of slender filaments and oblong acute cuspidate glabrous yellow anthers. 

 The involucral scales and the calyx of the pistillate flower are coated with stellate hairs, and the stigmas 

 are red. The fruit ripens at the end of the second season, and is subsessile or borne on a short stout 



^ It is probable that under favorable conditions this tree once ago a company of United States soldiers was stationed on Santa 



grew to a much larger size. The only plants I have seen are in a Catalina, and a great deal of wood is said to have been cut at this 



sheltered canon opening toward the sea on the eastern side of the time, when the tree whose stump produced these suckers was prob- 



island of Santa Catalina south of Avalon, where there is a small ably destroyed. Had this great tree been spared, it would have 



grove of stems about thirty feet high growing in a regular circle given a better idea of the species than can be obtained from the 



twelve feet in diameter and evidently shoots from the stump of a small and often stunted individuals scattered over the California 



large tree, the remains of which can still be traced. Thirty years islands, which preserve it from extinction. 



