ROSACEA SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 131 
CRATAIGUS SILVICOLA. 
Haw. 
STAMENS 10; anthers purple. Leaves ovate, acute or acuminate, membranaceous, 
yellow-green. 
Cratzwgus silvicola, Beadle, Bot. Gazette, xxviii. 414 (1899).— Mohr, Contrib. U. S. Nat. Herb. vi. 549 (Plant Life of 
Alabama). 
A tree, sometimes thirty feet in height, with a tall straight stem six or eight inches in diameter 
covered with close or slightly fissured bark broken into small gray or red-brown scales, and often armed 
with long stout branched gray spines, and ascending or spreading branches forming a narrow irregular 
or round-topped head ; or on the dry soil of upland forests usually a shrub with several stems. The 
branchlets are slender, nearly straight, marked by small pale lenticels, and armed with few or many 
thin straight or somewhat curved bright chestnut-brown spines from an inch and a half to nearly two 
inches in length ; when they first appear they are dark green more or less tinged with red and covered 
with long pale scattered white hairs; soon becoming glabrous, they are bright red-brown during their 
first year, and then gradually growing lighter colored they are ultimately ashy gray. The leaves are 
ovate, acute or acuminate at the apex, full and rounded at the entire base, sharply and often doubly 
serrate, with gland-tipped teeth, and slightly and irregularly divided into short acute lateral lobes ; when 
they unfold they are dark red and coated with short soft pale hairs which are most abundant on the 
upper surface, and are about half grown when the flowers open at the end of April, when they are 
nearly glabrous, and in the autumn they are thin, dark yellow-green and smooth or scabrous above, pale 
and glabrous below or occasionally villose along the under side of the slender midribs and three or 
four pairs of thin primary veins extending to the points of the lobes, about two inches long and from an 
inch and a half to an inch and three quarters wide ; they are borne on very slender grooved glandular 
petioles which are about an inch in length.’ The stipules are narrow, acuminate, straight or falcate, 
conspicuously glandular-serrate, and bright red like the inner bud-scales. On vigorous leading shoots 
the leaves are often deltoid and truncate or slightly cordate at the base, more coarsely serrate and 
more deeply lobed than the leaves of lateral branchlets, and frequently two inches and a half long and 
broad. The flowers are about three quarters of an inch in diameter, and are produced on slender 
pedicels, in compact few-flowered thin-branched compound glabrous corymbs, with linear glandular 
caducous bright red bracts and bractlets. The calyx-tube is narrowly obconic and glabrous, and the 
lobes are gradually narrowed, acuminate, glabrous, and entire or glandular-serrate. There are ten 
stamens with long filaments and large purple anthers, and from three to five styles surrounded at 
the base by a narrow ring of short pale hairs. The fruit, which ripens late in September and soon 
falls, is borne on short pedicels, in erect few-fruited clusters, and is subglobose but often a little 
broader than it is long, red or greenish yellow with a rosy cheek, and about half an inch in diameter, 
with a broad shallow calyx-cavity and spreading calyx-lobes which usually disappear before the fruit 
ripens ; the flesh is thin, yellow, dry, and mealy. The nutlets vary from three to five in number, and 
are thick, prominently ridged and grooved on the back, with a high broad ridge, and about a quarter 
of an inch in length. 
Crategus silvicola is common in the low moist flat woods of northern Alabama and northwestern 
1 Mr. C. D. Beadle has observed that the leaves from the lower branches and of young plants are much rougher to the touch than the 
leaves from upper branches and of large and old trees. 
