ROSACEZL. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 27 
CERCOCARPUS BREVIFLORUS. 
Mountain Mahogany. 
Leaves oblong-obovate to narrowly elliptic, rounded or acute at the apex. 
Cercocarpus breviflorus, Gray, Smithsonian Contrib. v. 
54 (Pl. Wright. ii.) (1853). — Walpers, Ann. iv. 665.— 
Hemsley, Bot. Biol. Am. Cent. i. 373. 
Cercocarpus parvifolius, Hemsley, Bot. Biol. Am. Cent. 
i. 374 (in part) (not Nuttall) (1879). — Sargent, Silva N. 
Am. iv. 65 (in part). 
Cercocarpus parvifolius, var. breviflorus, M. E. Jones, 
Zoé, ii. 245 (1891) ; iii. 295. 
Cercocarpus paucidentatus, Britton & Kearney, Trans. 
N. Y. Acad. xiv. 31 (probably not Cercocarpus parvifo- 
lius, var. paucidentatus, Watson) (1894). 
A tree, from twenty to twenty-five feet tall, with a long straight stem sometimes six or eight 
inches in diameter, and erect rigid branches forming a narrow open or irregular head ; or frequently 
shrubby with numerous clustered stems often only a few feet in height.! The bark of the trunk is 
about one eighth of an inch in thickness, divided by shallow fissures and broken on the surface into 
small light red-brown scales. The branchlets are slender, rigid, bright red-brown, lustrous, marked 
irregularly by large scattered pale lenticels, and when they first appear are covered with a thick coat of 
hoary tomentum which, gradually disappearing, leaves them villose or pubescent for two or three years, 
and ultimately ashy gray or gray tinged with red, the spur-like lateral branchlets being much roughened 
by the ring-like scars of fallen leaves. The leaves vary from oblong-obovate to narrowly elliptic, and 
are acute or rounded and often apiculate at the apex, gradually narrowed from above the middle and 
acute at the base, with margins which are revolute, often undulate, and entire or dentate toward the 
apex, with few small straight or incurved apiculate teeth ; when they unfold they are coated with hoary 
tomentum, and at maturity they are thick, gray-green on the upper surface, pale on the lower surface, 
covered with soft pale hairs which are most abundant on the under side of the stout midribs and 
primary veins, from one half of an inch to an inch long, and usually about one quarter of an inch 
wide; they are borne on stout tomentose petioles which ultimately sometimes become light red in 
color and are pubescent or nearly glabrous. The stipules are linear-lanceolate, tomentose, about as long 
as the petioles, and caducous. The flowers, which appear from March to May, and often again in 
August, are nearly sessile, and solitary or in pairs in the axils of the crowded leaves. The calyx-tube 
is slender and varies from one sixteenth to one quarter of an inch in length, and like the short rounded 
calyx-lobes is coated on the outer surface with dense white tomentum. The mature calyx-tube is 
stalked, spindle-shaped, light red-brown, pubescent above, tomentose toward the base, deeply cleft at the 
apex, and about a quarter of an inch long. The akene is nearly terete and covered with long white 
hairs, which also clothe the persistent style.’ 
Cercocarpus breviflorus grows in forests of Pines and Oaks on the dry ridges of the mountains of 
southern Arizona and New Mexico, and of the extreme western part of Texas,’ usually at elevations of 
1 The wood specimen of Cercocarpus breviflorus in the Jesup 
Collection of North American Woods in the American Museum 
of Natural History, New York, is six inches in diameter inside 
the bark, and shows forty-seven layers of annual growth, the sap- 
wood being one sixteenth of an inch in thickness, with sixteen layers 
of annual growth. 
* Since the fourth volume of this work was published I have 
revisited southern Arizona and restudied the peculiar Cercocarpus 
which grows in the mountain forests of this region, and, finding its 
characters constant and the trees always easily distinguishable 
from those growing in other parts of the country, I believe that it 
can be best treated as a species; or if it is still to be considered 
only a geographical variety of the extremely variable Cercocarpus 
parviflorus, that it is worthy of a plate in The Silva of North 
America. 
8 Foothills of the Guadaloupe Mountains, Havard, 1882 (No. 
246 in Herb. Gray). 
