ROSACEZE, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 81 
CRATAiGUS PRATENSIS. 
Red Haw. 
STAMENS 10; anthers rose color. Leaves oblong-obovate, subcoriaceous, dark green, 
and lustrous. 
Crategus pratensis, Sargent, Bot. Gazette, xxxi. 6 (1901). 
A tree, occasionally twenty feet in height, with a tall stem from three to seven inches in diameter 
covered with dark brown scaly bark, and often armed with long slender much-branched ashy gray 
spines, and spreading branches forming a broad round-topped symmetrical head. The branchlets are 
slender, somewhat zigzag, marked by many small pale lenticels, and furnished with numerous thin 
straight or slightly curved shining chestnut-brown spines from two inches to two inches and a half in 
length ; light yellow-green and occasionally slightly villose when they first appear, they soon become 
glabrous, and are light chestnut-brown or orange-brown and lustrous during their first summer, and 
dark gray-brown during their second year. The leaves are oblong-obovate, acute or rounded at the 
apex, gradually narrowed below from near the middle and cuneate and entire at the base, sharply and 
often doubly serrate, usually only above the middle, with straight or incurved teeth tipped early in the 
season with minute dark red caducous glands, and often more or less deeply divided toward the apex 
into short broad acute lobes; when they unfold they are bright bronze-yellow or dark red, and covered 
on both surfaces with short pale hairs; these soon disappear, and when the flowers open at the end 
of May the leaves are almost smooth, nearly fully grown, and membranaceous; in the autumn they 
are glabrous, thick and firm in texture, dark green and lustrous 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 half wide, with 
thin midribs and four or five pairs of primary veins which, extending obliquely toward the apex of the 
leaf, are deeply impressed on the upper side and raised and prominent on the lower side ; they are borne 
on slender grooved glabrous petioles usually about half an inch long and more or less winged above. 
The stipules are linear, straight or faleate, and finely glandular-serrate. On vigorous leading shoots the 
leaves are often oval or broadly ovate, and frequently three inches long and two and a half inches 
wide, with foliaceous, lunate, stalked, coarsely glandular-dentate stipules often an inch in length. 
The flowers are one third of an inch in diameter, and are produced on slender elongated pedicels, in 
broad loose thin-branched many-flowered compound corymbs which are pubescent or puberulous at 
first but soon become glabrous, and are furnished with small linear glandular-serrate caducous bracts 
and bractlets. The calyx-tube is narrowly obconic, coated particularly toward the base with long matted 
pale hairs, and the lobes are narrow, acuminate, coarsely glandular-serrate, glabrous on the outer 
surface, villose on the inner surface, and reflexed when the flowers open. There are ten 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 tomentum. The fruit, which ripens early in October but does not fall 
until November, hangs on the elongated pedicels, in loose drooping many-fruited clusters ; it is globose, 
bright scarlet, slightly pruinose, marked by occasional large pale dots, and about a third of an inch 
in diameter ; the calyx-cavity is deep and narrow, and the lobes are much enlarged, coarsely glandular- 
serrate, and often deciduous before the fruit becomes entirely ripe; the flesh is thin, yellow, dry, and 
mealy. The two or three nutlets are thick and broad, rounded and conspicuously ridged on the back, 
with prominent grooved ridges, and about a quarter of an inch long. 
Crategus pratensis grows in open woods near the banks of small streams in the prairie region of 
