SALICACER, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 137 
SALIX MISSOURIENSIS. 
Willow. 
LEAvEs lanceolate or oblanceolate, long-pointed, pale and often silvery white below. 
Salix Missouriensis, Bebb, Garden and Forest, viii. 373 graphia Salicum) (not Salix vestita, Pursh) (1867); De 
(1895). Candolle Prodr. xvi. pt. ii. 252. 
Salix cordata, subspec. rigida, d vestita, Andersson, Salix cordata, var. vestita, Sargent, Forest Trees N. Am. 
Svensk. Vetensk. Akad. Handl. ser. 4, vi. 159 (Mono- 10th Census U. S. ix. 170 (1884). 
A tree, often forty or fifty feet in height, with a tall straight trunk ten or twelve or rarely eighteen 
inches in diameter, and rather slender upright slightly spreading branches which form a narrow open 
symmetrical head. The bark of the trunk is thin, smooth, light gray slightly tinged with red, and covered 
with minute closely appressed plate-like scales. The branchlets are slender and marked with small scat- 
tered orange-colored lenticels, and when they first appear are light green and coated with thick pale 
pubescence ; this continues to cover them during their first year, when they are reddish brown, and in 
their second winter they are brown tinged with green and glabrous or puberulous. The buds are ovate, 
rounded on the back, flattened or acute at the apex, closely pressed against the stem, bright reddish 
brown, clothed with a thick coat of hoary tomentum, and nearly an inch long. The leaves are involute 
in the bud, lanceolate or oblanceolate, gradually narrowed from above the middle to the wedge-shaped or 
rounded base, acuminate and long-pointed at the apex, and finely serrate with minute incurved glandular 
teeth ; in the bud they are furnished with a fringe of long silky lustrous caducous white hairs, and 
when they unfold are coated with pale hairs on the lower surface and are pilose on the upper; they 
soon become smooth, with the exception of the upper side of the stout yellow midribs, which are often 
puberulous during the season, and at maturity they are thin and firm in texture, dark green above, pale 
and. often glaucous below, from four to six inches long and from an inch to an inch and a half wide, with 
slender veins forked and united within the margins and connected by reticulate cross veinlets, and stout 
pubescent or tomentose petioles from one half to three quarters of an inch long ; those of the first pair 
are ovate, acute, clothed with long silky white hairs, about an eighth of an inch long when full grown, 
and united at the base to the membranaceous light green glabrous stipular separable inner coat of the 
bud-scale. The stipules are foliaceous, semicordate and pointed, or rarely reniform and obtuse, serrate 
with incurved teeth, dark green and glabrous on the upper side, coated on the lower with hoary 
tomentum, reticulate-venulose, often half an inch long, and deciduous or persistent during the season. 
The aments are oblong-cylindrical, erect and densely flowered, and appear before the foliage early in 
February on short leafy branches; the staminate is an inch and a half in length and nearly half an 
inch in width and rather longer than the more slender ament of the pistillate plant, which at maturity 
is somewhat lax and from three to four inches long; their scales are oblong-obovate, light green, and 
clothed on the outer surface with long straight silvery hairs. The stamens are two in number, with 
elongated free glabrous filaments. The ovary is short-stalked, cylindrical, rostrate from a thick base, 
glabrous, and crowned by a short style and spreading entire or slightly emarginate stigmas. The 
capsule is narrow, long-pointed, light reddish brown, and raised on a slender stalk about the length of 
the persistent scale. 
Saliz Missouriensis grows on the deep sandy alluvial bottom-lands of the Missouri River in 
the extreme western part of Missouri,! where it is associated with the Red Maple, the Green Ash, the 
1 Salix Missouriensis has been collected by Mr. B. F. Bush at at Fort Osage, where it is abundant on the Missouri River bottoms, 
Courtney in Jackson County, twenty miles from its original station and near Watson, Atchison County. 
