ROSACEA. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 127 
CRATAiGUS LACERA. 
Haw. 
STAMENS 20; anthers rose color. Leaves rhombic to broadly ovate. 
Crataegus lacera, Sargent, Bot. Gazette, xxxiii. 123 (1902). 
A slender tree, from twenty-five to thirty feet in height, with a tall trunk only four or five inches 
in diameter covered with pale gray-brown scaly bark, and small short branches forming a narrow head. 
The branchlets are slender, shghtly zigzag, marked by small oblong pale lenticels, and armed with thin 
straight bright chestnut-brown lustrous spines from three quarters of an inch to an inch and three 
quarters in length; when they first appear they are dark olive-green and villose, becoming light red- 
brown and glabrous during their first summer, and ultimately dull light gray. The leaves vary from 
rhombic to broadly ovate or rarely to obovate, and are acute at the apex, broadly cuneate and entire at 
the base, divided above the middle into numerous acute lobes, and coarsely and often doubly serrate, 
with straight glandular teeth ; coated below with thick hoary tomentum and villose above when they 
unfold, they are nearly fully grown when the flowers open about the twentieth of April, and are then 
glabrous on the lower surface and covered on the upper surface with short scattered pale hairs; and at 
maturity they are glabrous, light yellow-green, paler below than above, thin but firm in texture, about 
an inch and a half long and an inch and a quarter wide, with thin yellow midribs and few remote 
primary veins only slightly impressed on the upper side; they are borne on slender grooved villose 
ultimately glabrous or puberulous petioles slightly winged at the apex, often red toward the base, and 
from one quarter to one third of an inch in length. The stipules are linear, acuminate, villose, and 
caducous. On vigorous leading shoots the leaves are broadly ovate, often deeply three-lobed, very 
coarsely serrate, and from three to four inches long and broad, with lunate long-pointed coarsely glan- 
dular-serrate villose stipules sometimes a quarter of an inch in length. The flowers are three quarters 
of an inch in diameter, and are produced in somewhat villose many-flowered compound corymbs, with 
linear caducous bracts and bractlets. The calyx-tube is narrowly obconic and glabrous, and the lobes 
are linear lanceolate, elongated, coarsely glandular-serrate, glabrous on the outer surface, villose on the 
inner surface, and reflexed after the flowers open. There are twenty stamens with small rose-colored 
anthers, and four or five styles. The fruit, which ripens toward the end of October, is borne on short 
stout glabrous pedicels, in erect few-fruited clusters ; it is oblong, full and rounded at the ends, bright 
cherry-red, lustrous, marked by occasional large dark dots, and half an inch long; the calyx-cavity 
is broad and shallow, and the lobes are small, nearly triangular, villose above, spreading, and mostly 
deciduous before the fruit ripens; the flesh is thick and orange color. The nutlets, which vary from 
three to five in number, are thin, broad, only slightly ridged on the rounded back, light brown, and five 
sixteenths of an inch in length. 
Crategus lacera inhabits the low rich glades between the rolling hills which rise above the bottoms 
of the Red River near Fulton, Arkansas, where I first found this handsome and distinct tree on the 
second of October, 1900. 
