Plate XXVII. 



QUERCUS TURBINELLA, Greene. 



Bibliography. 



QuERCUS TURBINELLA, Greene, West Am. Oaks, 37 (1889.) 



Description. Shrub from four to seven feet high, with many rigid divergent branches ; 

 the branchlets rusty-tomentose : leaves oblong, an inch long or more, on petioles of two or 

 three lines, coriaceous, plane, the margin with coarse acutely or spinosely tipped teeth, 

 pale on both faces, somewhat glaucous above, stellate-tomentose beneath, conspicuously 

 feather-veined and with a minute but strong recticulatiou which is most obvious beneath : 

 fructification annual : acorns solitary, on peduncles from one-half to three-fourths of an 

 inch long; cup turbinate, thin, scaly, not tuberculate, from four to six lines broad, 

 embracing the very base only of the very long and slender nut. 



Remarks. Concerning the habitat of the precise type here described and illustrated, 

 nothing is yet to be added to what was given on page 38 preceding. But a specimen closely 

 resembling this was seen by me last summer in the' herbarium of Mr. Samuel Parish of 

 San Bernardino, California. He had collected this somewhere on the borders of the 

 Mojave Desert. The leaves of this specimen are smaller than in the type, relatively 

 broader and not quite plane. The acorns are also shorter. But this Mojave oak is no 

 doubt specifically identical with the Lower Californian type ; and the known range of the 

 species is therefore in so far extended. 



Again : well to the eastward of the Mojave Desert, in the northeastern parts of 

 Arizona, occurs an oak like this in habit, but with a decidedly undulate (not plane) foliage, 

 and clustered acorns whose cups are more nearly hemispherical than turbinate, of thicker 

 texture, and a somewhat tuberculate as well as scaly surface. I found great abundance of 

 this last summer in the neighborhood of Peach Springs, occupying the slopes and beds of 

 heated canons leading down to the Grand Canon of the Colorado. I take this to be the 

 oak which furnishes the small elongated very sweet and palatable acorns which even now 

 find a place, along with the " pifiones " or pine nuts, in the market places of the natives in 

 some parts of Arizona. I suspect it may prove to be the Q. piuigcns of Liebmann : very 

 probably a good species, to which our Q. turbiiiella may possibly have to be referred as a 

 geographical variety or subspecies. 



