ROSACEA. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 49 
CRATAIGUS ERECTA. 
Haw. 
STAMENS usually 10; anthers pale yellow. Leaves oval to obovate, acute, thin, 
dull green. 
Cratzgus erecta, Sargent, Bot. Gazette, xxxi. 218 (1901). 
A nearly glabrous tree, usually from twenty-five to thirty feet in height, with a trunk a foot in 
diameter, but occasionally much larger, and thick ascending branches which form a wide open but 
rather symmetrical head. The bark of the trunk is divided irregularly into thick plate-like scales, 
and is dark gray-brown, or nearly black near the base of large trees. The branchlets are spreading, 
slender, slightly zigzag, marked by numerous large oblong pale lenticels, and armed with thin straight 
chestnut-brown spines from one to two inches in length; more or less tinged with red when they first 
appear, they are orange or reddish brown during their first season and gray or gray-brown during their 
second year. The leaves are oval or obovate, or on leading vigorous shoots nearly orbicular, acute and 
short-pointed at the apex, cuneate and entire at the base, and finely glandular-serrate ; when they unfold 
they are often villose, with a few short caducous pale hairs on the upper side of the midribs, and are 
nearly fully grown and dull green when the flowers open; in the autumn they are thin but firm in 
texture, dark dull green on the upper surface, pale on the lower surface, from an inch and a half to 
two inches long and from an inch to an inch and a quarter wide, with slender midribs and thin but 
prominent primary veins; they are borne on slender deeply grooved petioles which are often wing- 
margined above, glandular, with minute dark glands, usually dark red after midsummer, and from one 
quarter to one half of an inch in length. The stipules are linear, glandular-serrate, about half an inch 
long, caducous, and turn red before falling. On vigorous leading shoots the leaves are coarsely dentate, 
with broad nearly straight glandular teeth, and are sometimes three inches long and two inches and 
a half wide. In the autumn the leaves become a dull orange color. The flowers, which vary from 
one half to five eighths of an inch in diameter and open about the tenth of May, are produced 
in broad loose many-flowered very thin-branched compound corymbs, with linear glandular-serrate 
caducous bracts and bractlets. The calyx-tube is narrowly obconic, and the lobes are narrow, elongated, 
acuminate, entire, or occasionally obscurely and irregularly serrate. There are usually ten but occa- 
sionally from eleven to thirteen stamens with slender filaments and small pale yellow anthers, and three 
or four styles which are surrounded at the base by a narrow ring of short pale hairs. The fruit is 
borne in few-fruited drooping clusters, on slender elongated pedicels ; it 1s subglobose and usually a 
little longer than broad, full and flattened at the ends, dark dull crimson, marked by occasional dark- 
colored dots, and from one quarter to one third of an inch in length; the calyx-tube is short, with a 
broad shallow cavity and closely appressed lobes which are gradually narrowed from broad bases and are 
usually persistent on the ripe fruit ; the flesh is thin, yellow, dry, and mealy. The three or four nutlets 
are broad, prominently and doubly ridged on the back, and about three sixteenths of an inch long. 
Crategus erecta inhabits the rich bottom-lands of the Mississippi River in Illinois opposite the 
city of St. Louis, where it was first noticed by me in October, 1899, and where it is common at least as 
far south as Fish Lake. 
1 In a field near Fish Lake, four miles south of the village of divides into a number of large ascending branches, which is three 
Cahokia, Illinois, there is a tree of Crategus erecta which is at least feet in diameter at a point three feet above the surface of the 
forty feet in height, with a trunk now somewhat injured where it ground. 
