ULMACE^S 



313 



round-topped head, and slender branchlets glabrous or puberulous and light green tinged 

 with red when they first appear, becoming light reddish brown or ashy gray and glabrous, 

 or on vigorous individuals frequently pilose in their first winter, marked by occasional 

 small orange-colored lenticels and by small elevated horizontal semiorbicular leaf-scars, 

 sometimes naked, more often furnished with usually 2 thin corky wings beginning to grow 

 during their first or more often during their second season, abruptly arrested at the nodes, 

 often wide, and persistent for many years. Winter-buds slender, acute, f long, dark 

 chestnut-brown, with glabrous or puberulous scales, those of the inner ranks becoming 

 oblong or obovate, rounded and tipped with a minute mucro, thin and scarious, light red, 

 especially above the middle, and \' long. Bark rarely exceeding \' in thickness, light 

 brown tinged with red, and divided by irregular shallow fissures into flat ridges covered by 

 small closely appressed scales. Wood heavy, hard, not strong, close-grained, difficult to 

 split, light brown, with thick lighter colored sapwood; sometimes employed for the hubs of 

 wheels and the handles of tools. Ropes used for fastening the covers of cotton bales are 

 sometimes made from the inner bark. 



Distribution. Usually on dry gravelly uplands, less commonly in alluvial soil on the 

 borders of swamps and the banks of streams, and occasionally in inundated swamps; 

 southeastern Virginia, southwestern Indiana, southern Illinois (Richland and Johnson 

 Counties) and southern Missouri, and southward to central Florida (Lake County), and 

 the valley of the Guadalupe River, Texas; ranging westward in Oklahoma to Garfield 

 County (near Kingfisher, G. W. Stevens). 



Often planted as a shade-tree in the streets of towns and villages of the southern states. 



4. Ulmus fulva Michx. Slippery Elm. Red Elm. 



Leaves ovate-oblong, abruptly contracted into a long slender point, rounded at base 

 on one side and short-oblique on the other, and coarsely doubly serrate with incurved 



Fig. 285 



callous-tipped teeth, when they unfold thin, coated below with pale pubescence, pilose 

 above with scattered white hairs, at maturity thick and firm, dark green and rugose with 

 crowded sharp-pointed tubercles pointing toward the apex of the leaf above, soft, smooth, 

 and coated below, especially on the thin midrib and in the axils of the slender straight 

 veins with white hairs, 5'-7' long, 2'-3' wide; turning a dull yellow color in the autumn; 

 petioles stout, pubescent, \' in. length; stipules obovate-oblong to oblong-lanceolate, thin 

 and scarious, pale-pubescent, and tipped with clusters of rusty brown hairs. Flowers on 

 short pedicels, in crowded fascicles; calyx green, covered with pale hairs, divided into 5-9 



