ROSACER. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 173 
CRATZiGUS VULSA. 
Haw. 
STAMENS 20; anthers pale yellow. Leaves oval or ovate, acute, membranaceous, 
bright green. 
Cratzgus vulsa, Beadle, Biltmore Bot. Studies, i. 39 (1901). 
A nearly glabrous tree, occasionally twenty feet in height, with a tall stem five or six inches in 
diameter covered with thin fissured bark broken on the surface into light gray scales tinged with brown, 
and often armed with long compound spines, and ascending or spreading branches forming an oval 
usually compact symmetrical head; or sometimes a shrub with numerous stems. The branchlets are 
slender, nearly straight, marked by small scattered pale lenticels, and armed with thin nearly straight 
bright chestnut-brown shining spines from an inch to an inch and a half in length; dark yellow-green 
and glabrous when they first appear, they are bright reddish brown and lustrous during their first season, 
and light gray-brown in their second year. The leaves are oval or ovate, acute at the apex, full and 
rounded or broadly cuneate at the entire base, irregularly and often doubly serrate above, with straight 
or incurved gland-tipped teeth, and often divided into several short acute lateral lobes; as they unfold 
they are dark bronze-red and pilose, with scattered caducous hairs, and furnished with tufts of pale 
often persistent hairs in the axils of the principal veins ; they are nearly fully grown when the flowers 
open late in April, and at maturity they are thin, bright green on the upper surface, paler on the lower 
surface, about two inches long and an inch and a half wide, with slender midribs and four or five pairs 
of thin pale yellow primary veins; they are borne on slender grooved petioles somewhat villose at first 
but soon glabrous, and about three quarters of an inch in length. The stipules are linear, straight, or 
faleate, finely glandular-serrate, and turn bright red in fading. On vigorous leading shoots the leaves 
are broadly ovate, acute, or acuminate, full and rounded or occasionally truncate or broadly cuneate at the 
base, more coarsely dentate and more deeply lobed than the leaves of lateral branchlets, and often three 
inches long and two inches and a half wide, with stout winged often glandular petioles and narrow 
faleate acuminate glandular stipules. In the autumn before falling the leaves turn yellow or brown. 
The flowers are three quarters of an inch in diameter, and are produced on slender pedicels in compact 
compound three to ten-flowered corymbs, with linear acuminate glandular red bracts and bractlets. 
The calyx-tube is broadly obconic and the lobes are gradually narrowed from broad bases, acuminate, 
and entire or occasionally obscurely serrate toward the apex. There are twenty stamens with small 
pale yellow anthers, and from three to five styles surrounded at the base by a thin ring of pale hairs. 
The fruit ripens at the end of September or early in October, and is borne on slender pedicels, in few- 
fruited drooping clusters ; it is globose, yellow-green flushed with red, and a third of an inch in diameter ; 
the calyx is prominent, with a well-developed tube, a broad and comparatively deep cavity, and closely 
appressed lobes; the flesh is yellow-green, thin, dry, and mealy. The nutlets vary from three to five 
in number, and are thin, rounded, and sometimes slightly ridged and grooved on the back, and about 
three sixteenths of an inch in length. 
Crategus vulsa grows in rich moist soil on the borders of Horseleg Creek at Rome, Georgia, and 
in the low flat woods in the neighborhood of Gadsden on the Coosa River in northeastern Alabama, 
where it was discovered in the spring of 1899 by Mr. C. L. Boynton. 
