ROSACEA. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 149 
CRATZiGUS ASHEI. 
Haw. 
STAMENS 20; anthers yellow. Leaves broadly ovate or obovate, lustrous, dark 
green, thick, and firm. 
Cratzgus Ashei, Beadle, Bot. Gazette, xxx. 339 (1900). 
A tree, rarely more than twenty feet in height, with a slender trunk covered with smooth hight 
gray or red-brown bark which becomes fissured and scaly on old individuals, and stout ascending 
branches forming a pyramidal or oval head; or often shrubby with numerous stems. The branchlets 
are slender, somewhat zigzag, marked by small oblong pale lenticels, and armed with straight or slightly 
curved thin dark red-brown shining spines from an inch to an inch and a half in length; when they 
first appear they are light red-brown and coated with long pale matted reflexed hairs which gradually 
disappear, and during their first season they become nearly glabrous, lustrous, and orange-brown or red- 
brown, and light gray or gray tinged with red during their second season. The leaves are broadly 
ovate or occasionally obovate, acute, and generally short-pointed at the apex, gradually or abruptly 
narrowed and cuneate and usually entire at the base, coarsely and occasionally doubly serrate above, 
with straight or incurved teeth tipped with small dark glands, roughened on the upper surface by short 
pale hairs and pubescent below, particularly on the thin midribs and slender primary veins; nearly fully 
grown and membranaceous when the flowers open, at maturity they are thin but firm in texture, dark 
green and lustrous on the upper surface, pale on the lower surface, and about two inches long and an 
inch and a half wide. They are borne on stout petioles which are broadly winged above by the 
decurrent bases of the leaf-blades, glandular, pubescent at first but ultimately nearly glabrous, and about 
half an inch long. The stipules are narrowly lanceolate, straight or falcate, and glandular-serrate. On 
vigorous leading shoots the leaves are usually broadly oval or nearly orbicular, rounded or short-pointed 
at the apex, from two inches and a half to three mches long and from two inches to two inches and a 
half wide. The flowers, which open early in May and are three quarters of an inch in diameter, are 
produced in three to ten-flowered simple or compound thin-branched villose corymbs, with large wide 
conspicuous glandular bracts and bractlets. The calyx-tube is broadly obconic, thickly coated with 
long matted reflexed white hairs, and the lobes are foliaceous, broad, acute, nearly glabrous on the outer 
surface, villose on the inner surface, glandular, with small dark long-stalked glands, and strongly reflexed 
after the petals fall. There are twenty stamens with elongated slender filaments and small yellow 
anthers, and from three to five styles surrounded at the base by a narrow ring of pale hairs. The fruit, 
which ripens and falls late in September or in early October, is borne on stout villose or glabrous 
pedicels, in few-fruited drooping clusters; it is globose or often rather longer than broad, bright red, 
marked by large scattered dots, more or less villose toward the ends, and about an inch im diameter ; 
the calyx-cavity is broad and deep and the lobes are elongated, coarsely glandular-serrate, erect, and 
incurved or reflexed; the flesh is thick and yellow. The nutlets, which vary from three to five in 
number, are deeply grooved and ridged on the back, rather thin, and a third of an inch in length. 
Crategus Ashei inhabits abandoned fields and woods, growing usually on clay soils in the neigh- 
borhood of Montgomery, Alabama, where it was first collected in September, 1899, by Mr. C. M. 
Boynton of the Biltmore Herbarium. It has been named for Mr. W. W. Ashe.’ 
1 William Willard Ashe (June 4, 1872), a descendant of a family _ born in Raleigh, in that state. He was educated at the University 
famous in North Carolina during the Revolutionary period, was of North Carolina, where he was graduated in 1891, and at once 
