ROSACEZ:. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 75 
CRATAiGUS SORDIDA. 
Haw. 
STAMENS 20; anthers rose color. Leaves rhombic to obovate, subcoriaceous, dark 
green and lustrous on the upper surface. 
Cratzgus sordida, Sargent, Bot. Gazette, xxxiii. 114 (1902). 
A slender tree, from twenty to twenty-five feet in height, with a tall stem five or six inches in 
diameter covered with dark furrowed and scaly bark, and often armed with long branched spines, 
and small ascending branches forming a narrow oval head. The branchlets are very slender, nearly 
straight or slightly zigzag, marked by large oblong pale lenticels, and armed with numerous thin nearly 
straight bright chestnut-brown shining spines from one inch to two inches and a half in length, or 
often unarmed ; when they first appear they are dark orange-green and villose, with long scattered pale 
hairs which sometimes do not entirely disappear until autumn, and in their second season they are 
bright chestnut-brown and lustrous, becoming dull reddish-brown the following year. The leaves are 
rhombic, acute, or occasionally obovate and very rarely rounded at the apex, cuneate and entire below, 
serrate above, with narrow straight or incurved glandular teeth, and rarely irregularly divided above 
the middle into short acute lobes; about half grown when the flowers open during the first week of 
May, they are then membranaceous, bright, lustrous, and glabrous with the exception of a few 
short caducous hairs on the upper surface, particularly along the midribs and principal veins; and at 
maturity they are subcoriaceous, dark green and lustrous on the upper surface, paler on the lower 
surface, and generally about an inch and a half long and an inch and a quarter wide; they are borne 
on stout grooved petioles slightly winged toward the apex by the decurrent leaf-blades, at first villose 
but soon glabrous, about half an inch long, and in the autumn often bright red. The stipules are linear, 
acuminate, glandular, with minute bright red glands, and caducous. On vigorous leading shoots the 
leaves are sometimes oblong-obovate or oval, coarsely dentate, usually divided above the middle into 
short broad acute lobes, from three to four inches long, from two inches to two inches and a half wide, 
and decurrent on the stout glandular petioles. The flowers, which vary from an inch to an inch and a 
quarter in diameter and are very fragrant, are produced on slender pedicels, in few-flowered compact 
compound slightly villose corymbs, with linear glandular-serrate caducous bracts and bractlets. The 
calyx-tube is narrowly obconic and the lobes are narrow, acuminate, villose on the inner surface, and 
reflexed after the flowers open. The petals are dull sordid white, and there are twenty stamens with 
slender elongated filaments and small rose-colored anthers, and two or three styles surrounded at the 
base by a narrow ring of pale hairs. The fruit, which ripens about the middle of September and soon 
falls, is borne on short pedicels, in few-fruited drooping clusters; it is globose, from one third to one 
half of an inch in diameter, and dark dull red; the calyx is prominent, with a broad shallow cavity, 
and elongated coarsely serrate appressed or incurved lobes; the flesh is thin, yellow, dry, and mealy. 
The two or three nutlets are broad, rounded and ridged on the back, with low wide ridges, and a 
quarter of an inch long. 
Crategus sordida inhabits low woods and the gravelly banks of streams in Ripley County, 
southeastern Missouri, where it was discovered at Pleasant Grove in August, 1899, by Mr. B. F. Bush. 
