ROSACE. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 29 
CERCOCARPUS TRASKIA. 
LEAVES broadly oval to orbicular, cinereo-tomentose on the lower surface. 
Cercocarpus Traskizw, Eastwood, Proc. Cal. Acad. ser. 3, i. 136, t. 11, £. Ta—7e (1898). 
A tree, occasionally twenty-five feet in height, with stout wide-spreading branches, and with a trunk 
which is often inclining, usually much contorted, from two to ten inches in diameter and from six to 
eight feet long to the first branches, and which is covered with smooth light gray-brown bark sometimes 
slightly broken by shallow fissures and marked by irregular cream-colored blotches. The branchlets 
are stout, marked by numerous small scattered lenticels, coated at first with hoary tomentum, bright 
reddish brown during two or three years, ultimately dark gray-brown and conspicuously roughened by 
the enlarged ring-like leaf-scars. The leaves are oval or semiorbicular, rounded or acute at the apex, 
cuneate, rounded, or occasionally somewhat cordate at the narrow base, and revolute at the margins, which 
are entire below the middle and coarsely sinuate-dentate above, with slender teeth tipped with minute dark 
glands ; when they unfold covered above with soft pale hairs and below with thick hoary tomentum, 
at maturity they are coriaceous, dark green and lustrous on the upper surface, cinereo-tomentose on 
the lower surface, from an inch and a half to two inches long and from an inch to an inch and a 
half wide, with prominent primary veins running obliquely to the points of the teeth and, like the 
stout midribs, conspicuously impressed on the upper side, and stout tomentose petioles about a 
quarter of an inch long. The flowers, which are nearly sessile in axillary many-flowered umbels and 
appear early in March, are coated on the outer surface with thick white tomentum, and vary from one 
half to three quarters of an inch in length. The calyx is broad and abruptly enlarged into the broad 
campanulate five-toothed border which is glabrous on the inner surface. The anthers are tomentose, 
with short-oblong cells united by a broad connective. The fruiting calyx is spindle-shaped, light 
reddish brown, villose-pubescent, deeply cleft at the apex, and about half an inch in length. The akene 
is slightly ridged on the back, one third of an inch long, covered with long lustrous white hairs, and 
tipped with the persistent hairy style which varies from an inch and a half to two inches in length. 
Cercocarpus Traskie inhabits the south coast of Santa Catalina Island, southern California, where 
it grows only on the steep sides of a deep narrow hot arroyo with walls only a few feet apart and rising 
to a height of from one hundred to five hundred feet, in a broken volcanic and inaccessible region. 
Here forty or fifty individuals of this tree, growing at elevations varying from two hundred to three 
hundred feet above the sea-level, with Adenostoma fasciculatum, Rhus integrifolia, Rhus ovata, and 
Ceanothus cuneatus, var. macrocarpus, were discovered in March, 1897, by Mrs. Blanche Trask.’ 
Cercocarpus Traskic, with its large leaves dark green and lustrous above and white below, and its 
numerous clusters of snow-white flowers, is the most beautiful species of the genus.’ 
1 Luella Blanche Trask was born Engle, July 25, 1865, at Wa- 
terloo, Iowa. For seven years Mrs. Trask has lived at Avalon, on 
Santa Catalina Island, which she has explored with enthusiasm and 
In 1897 she made a collection of plants on San Nicholas, 
a small reef-bound island fifty miles to the westward of Santa 
success. 
Catalina, which she was the first woman to visit ; and on San Cle- 
mente she made interesting discoveries in 1896. (See Erythea, viii. 
107.) Mrs. Trask has written The Heart of Catalina, published in 
The Land of Sunshine, and has made several other contributions to 
that magazine. 
2 Very unlike the other species which inhabit the United 
States, Cercocarpus Traskie most resembles the Mexican Cerco- 
carpus fothergilloides, from which it differs in its broader often 
orbicular thicker and more coarsely dentate leaves, in its larger 
and more tomentose flowers with stouter calyx-tubes and broader 
calyx-lobes, and in its tomentose anthers. 
