ROSACEA. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 153 
CRATAIGUS VAILIA. 
Haw. 
STAMENS 20; anthers yellow. Leaves oval or rarely obovate, acute, coriaceous, 
dark green, and lustrous. 
Crategus Vailiz, Britton, Bull. Torrey Bot. Club, xxiv. 53 (1897). — Britton & Brown, Jil. FI. ii. 245, £. 2005. — Britton, 
Man. 522. — Gattinger, FU. Tennessee, 100. 
A shrub, sometimes eight or nine feet in height, but usually much smaller, with intricately branched 
stems covered with thin bark which near their base is ashy gray and broken into small plate-like scales. 
The branchlets are slender, nearly straight, marked by occasional pale lenticels, and armed with 
numerous thin straight or slightly curved bright chestnut-brown lustrous spines from an inch and a 
half to two inches and a half in length; dark green and coated with long matted pale hairs when they 
first appear, they are dark red-brown and puberulous during their first year, and then gradually become 
dark gray-brown or reddish brown and glabrous. The leaves are oval or rarely obovate, acute, 
gradually or abruptly narrowed to the entire base, and crenulate-serrate generally only above the middle, 
with glandular teeth ; they are villose on the upper surface and tomentose on the lower surface as they 
unfold; more than half grown when the flowers open about the middle of May, they are then thin, 
dark yellow-green, and covered above with short appressed hairs and paler below; and at maturity 
they are coriaceous, dark green and lustrous on the upper surface, pale yellow-green on the lower 
surface, from an inch to an inch and a half long and about three quarters of an inch wide, with stout 
midribs and usually four pairs of primary veins only slightly impressed above and pubescent or 
puberulous below, and conspicuous reticulate veinlets; they are borne on stout grooved petioles more 
or less winged toward the apex, at first tomentose but ultimately puberulous, and from an eighth to a 
quarter of an inch in length. The stipules are narrow-obovate, usually somewhat falcate, very oblique 
at the base, bright red, coarsely glandular-serrate, about a quarter of an inch long, and caducous. 
On vigorous leading shoots the leaves often vary from broadly ovate to nearly orbicular, and are 
generally divided into several short broad acute lobes; they are more coarsely serrate than the leaves 
of lateral branchlets and are frequently two inches long and broad, with stout midribs often tinged 
with red on the lower side toward the base, and foliaceous lunate coarsely glandular-serrate stipules 
sometimes half an inch in length. The flowers are about three quarters of an inch in diameter, and are 
produced on short stout pedicels in sessile compact simple four or five-flowered tomentose corymbs, 
with small lanceolate glandular-serrate caducous bracts and bractlets. The calyx-tube is broadly obconic 
and villose, particularly toward the base, and the lobes are broad, foliaceous, acute, laciniately divided, 
glandular, with minute dark red glands, glabrous on the outer surface, villose on the inner surface, 
and reflexed after the flowers open. There are twenty stamens with stout filaments and large pale 
yellow anthers, and five styles surrounded at the base by a broad ring of hoary tomentum. The fruit, 
which ripens at the end of September, is borne in erect compact clusters, on short stout villose pedicels, 
and is subglobose, red sometimes more or less tinged with green, and about a third of an inch in 
diameter, with thin bright yellow flesh; the calyx is much enlarged, with a broad deep cavity and 
reflexed persistent glandular-serrate lobes. The five nutlets are thick, rounded, and slightly grooved 
on the back, and about a quarter of an inch long. 
Crategus Vailie, which was long confounded with Crategus uniflora, grows in dry soil along 
the borders of woods and fields, and is distributed from southwestern Virginia to western North 
