SALICACE^E 



159 





cylindric, villose; with long silky white hairs, gradually narrowed at apex, with broad sessile 

 entire or emarginate spreading yellow stigmas; pedicel villose, about ' in length, and 

 about as long as the scale. Fruit elongated-cylindric, gradually narrowed into a long thin 

 beak, and raised on a slender stalk sometimes |' long. 



A bushy tree, occasionally 25 high, with a short trunk 6'-8' in diameter, stout ascending 

 branches forming a broad round head, and slender branchlets coated at first with hoary 

 deciduous tomentum, varying during their first winter from reddish purple to dark orange- 

 brown, marked by scattered raised lenticels and roughened by conspicuous elevated leaf- 

 scars, growing lighter-colored and reddish brown in their second year; usually much smaller 

 and often shrubby in habit. Bark thin, reddish or olive-green or gray tinged with red, and 



Fig. 154 



slightly divided by shallow fissures into appressed plate-like scales. Winter-buds oblong, 

 gradually narrowed and rounded at apex, full and rounded on the back, bright light chest- 

 nut-brown, nearly \' long. 



Distribution. Borders of streams, swamps, and lakes, hillsides, open woods and forest 

 margins, usually in moist rich soil; valley of the St. Lawrence River to the shores of Hud- 

 son's Bay, the valley of the Mackenzie River within the Arctic Circle, Cook Inlet, Alaska, 

 and the coast ranges of British Columbia, forming in the region west of Hudson's Bay al- 

 most impenetrable thickets, with twisted and often inclining stems; common in all the 

 northern states, ranging southward to Pennsylvania and westward to Minnesota and 

 through the Rocky Mountain region from western Idaho and northern Montana to north- 

 ern North Dakota, eastern South Dakota, northeastern and central Iowa, and western 

 Nebraska, and southward through Colorado to northern Arizona; ascending as a low shrub 

 in Colorado to an altitude of 10,000. 



21. Salix discolor Muehl. Glaucous Willow. 



Leaves lanceolate to elliptic, gradually narrowed at the ends, remotely crenulate-serrate, 

 as they unfold thin, light green often tinged with red, pubescent above and coated with a 

 pale tomentum below, at maturity thick and firm, glabrous, conspicuously reticulate- venu- 

 lose, bright green above, glaucous or silvery white below, 3'-5' long, f'-l^' wide, with 

 a broad yellow midrib and slender arcuate primary veins; petioles slender, '-!' long; stip- 

 ules foliaceous, semilunar, acute, glandular-dentate, about j' long, deciduous. Flowers: 

 aments appearing late in winter or in very early spring, erect, terminal on short scale- 

 bearing branchlets coated with thick white tomentum, oblong-cylindric, about 1' long and 

 j' thick, the staminate soft and silky before the flowers open and densely flowered; scales 



