ROSACE. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 181 
CRATAIGUS ATRORUBENS. 
Red Haw. 
STAMENS 20. Leaves ovate, acute, membranaceous. 
Cratzgus atrorubens, Ashe, Jour. Elisha Mitchell Sci. Soc. xvi. pt. ii. 78 (1900). 
A tree, sometimes thirty feet in height, with a tall trunk from twelve to eighteen inches in 
diameter covered with dark red-brown scaly bark, and comparatively thin erect and spreading branches 
forming a compact rather narrow head. The branchlets are slender, nearly straight, marked by 
occasional oblong dark lenticels, and usually unarmed; dark green and more or less tinged with red 
when they first appear, during their first season they become dark chestnut-brown and very lustrous, 
and bright reddish brown in their second year. The leaves are ovate, acute, usually full and rounded 
but sometimes broadly cuneate or truncate at the entire base, coarsely and usually doubly serrate, and 
often divided into two or three pairs of short acute lobes ; about half grown when the flowers open late 
in April or early in May, they are then slightly roughened above by short scattered white hairs, and are 
furnished below with conspicuous tufts of pale tomentum in the axils of the principal veins; and at 
maturity they are very thin, glabrous, dark dull green and smooth on the upper surface, light yellow- 
green on the lower surface, and about two inches long and an inch and a half wide, and on leading 
shoots frequently three inches long and two inches and a half wide, with thin midribs and four or five 
pairs of slender primary veins only slightly impressed on the upper side; they are borne on slender 
nearly terete slightly grooved petioles which, more or less densely villose at first, soon become glabrous 
and vary from an inch to an inch and a half in length. The flowers are about five eighths of an inch 
in diameter, and are produced on slender elongated villose pedicels, in broad loose compound glabrous 
or villose corymbs, with oblong-obovate acute minutely glandular-serrate bracts and bractlets. The 
calyx-tube is narrowly obconic, coated throughout or only at the base with hoary tomentum, and the 
lobes are short, acute, finely glandular-serrate, villose particularly on the inner surface, and reflexed 
after the flowers open. There are twenty stamens with slender filaments and small anthers, and four 
or five styles surrounded at the base by a narrow ring of pale tomentum. The fruit ripens and falls 
early in October, and is borne in drooping few-fruited clusters ; it is subglobose or short-oblong, full 
and rounded at the ends, and dark red; the calyx-cavity is broad and shallow, and the lobes are 
spreading and usually disappear before the fruit ripens. The four or five nutlets are thin, rounded, 
and sometimes obscurely grooved on the back, and about three sixteenths of an inch in length. 
Crategus atrorubens inhabits the rich bottom-lands of the Mississippi River in Kast St. Louis, 
Illinois,’ where it is not common, and where it was first collected in 1882 by Mr. G. W. Letterman. 
1 Crategus atrorubens was described by Mr. Ashe as growing in and I have not been able to find any specimen of this tree from 
St. Louis County, Missouri. This is probably a mistake, as his Missouri. 
type specimen was collected by Eggert in East St. Louis, Illinois, 
