ROSACEA. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 171 
CRATAKGUS OPIMA. 
Haw. 
STAMENS 20; anthers purple. Leaves oval to ovate or nearly orbicular, acute, 
membranaceous, bright green. 
Cratzgus opima, Beadle, Biltmore Bot. Studies, i. 40 (1901). 
A nearly glabrous tree, from twenty to twenty-five feet in height, with a tall slender often spiny 
stem covered with ashy gray bark generally blackened near the base of old trunks, and spreading or 
ascending branches forming a round or oval usually open head. The branchlets are small, nearly 
straight, marked by minute pale lenticels, and armed with numerous thin nearly straight bright chestnut- 
brown lustrous spines from an inch to an inch and a half in length; green more or less tinged with 
red when they first appear, they soon become bright red-brown, and during their second season grow 
gray tinged with red or brown. The leaves vary from oval to ovate or to nearly orbicular, and are 
acute at the apex, gradually or abruptly narrowed and cuneate at the entire base, finely serrate above, 
with incurved teeth, and usually divided above the middle into several short acute acuminate or rounded 
lobes ; they are half grown when the flowers open about the middle of April, and are then glabrous with 
the exception of a few short caducous hairs along the midribs and veins, which are most abundant on the 
upper side; and at maturity they are thin but firm in texture, light green on the upper surface, pale on 
the lower surface, about an inch and a half long and an inch and a quarter wide, with slender midribs 
only slightly impressed above, and five or six pairs of arcuate primary veins spreading to the points of 
the lobes; they are borne on very slender grooved glandular petioles narrowly winged at the apex by the 
decurrent bases of the leaf-blades, and usually about three quarters of an inch in length. The stipules 
are linear, straight or falcate, glandular-serrate, and caducous. On vigorous leading shoots the leaves 
are sometimes rounded or nearly truncate at the base, and from an inch and a half to two inches long 
and broad. The flowers are about two thirds of an inch in diameter, and are produced on short slender 
pedicels, in compact few-flowered thin-branched compound corymbs, with linear glandular bracts and 
bractlets. The calyx-tube is broadly obconic and glabrous, and the lobes are gradually narrowed from 
broad bases, acute, entire, or sparingly glandular-serrate, tipped with dark red glands, puberulous on 
the inner surface, and reflexed after the flowers open. There are twenty stamens with purple anthers, 
and from three to five styles surrounded at the base by a narrow ring of snowy white tomentum. The 
fruit is borne on short stout pedicels, in compact few-fruited erect or drooping clusters, and, ripening 
about the first of October, hangs on the branches for several weeks before falling ; it is subglobose but 
often rather longer than it is wide, bright red, and about a quarter of an inch in diameter ; the calyx is 
prominent, with a well-developed tube, a broad deep cavity, and much enlarged closely appressed lobes 
which often fall with the tube before the fruit becomes entirely ripe; the flesh is thin, yellow, dry, and 
mealy. The nutlets vary from three to five in number, and are thin, slightly grooved and ridged on the 
back, and an eighth of an inch in length. 
Crategus opima is abundant in the neighborhood of Greenville, Alabama, where it grows in open 
woods in clay soil and where it was discovered in April, 1900, by Mr. C. L. Boynton. 
