PLATANACEvE 



373 



dimunition of diameter, massive spreading limbs forming a broad open irregular head 

 sometimes 100 in diameter, their extremities usually erect or more or less pendulous, and 

 slender branchlets coated at first like the leaves, petioles, and stipules with thick pale de- 

 ciduous tomentum, during their first summer dark green and glabrous, marked by minute 

 oblong pale lenticels, becoming dark orange-brown and rather lustrous during their first 

 winter and light gray in their second year. Winter-buds |'-f long. Bark of young 

 trunks and large branches rarely more than \' thick, dark reddish brown, broken into small 

 oblong thick appressed plate-like scales, smooth, light gray, and separating higher on the 

 tree into large thin scales, in falling exposing large irregular surfaces of the pale yellow, 

 whitish, or greenish inner bark, becoming at the base of large trunks 2'-3' thick, dark 

 brown, and divided by deep furrows into broad rounded rjdges covered by small thin ap- 

 pressed scales. Wood the favorite material for tobacco boxes, ox-yokes, and butcher's 

 blocks, and now largely used for furniture and the interior finish of houses. 



Distribution. Borders of streams and lakes on rich bottom-lands; southeastern Maine 

 to northern Vermont and through southern Ontario and Michigan to central and southern 

 Iowa, southeastern Nebraska, eastern Kansas, and eastern Oklahoma to the valley of 

 the Arkansas River (Clay County), and southward to western Florida (Gladsden County) 

 central Alabama and Mississippi, and the valley of the Rio Grande (Zavalla County) 

 western Texas; common but most abundant and of its largest size on the bottom lands 

 of streams in the basin of the lower Ohio and Mississippi rivers; less abundant and of 

 smaller size in the coast region of the Carolinas and in western Texas; ascending the 

 Appalachian Mountains up to altitudes of 2500. The most massive if not tbe tallest 

 deciduous-leaved tree of eastern North America. 



Sometimes planted as a street tree, especially in the cities of eastern Texas; passing into 



1. Platanus occidentalis var. glabrata Sarg. 

 Platanus glabrata Fern. 



Leaves usually broader than long, truncate, broad-cuneate or rarely cordate at base, 

 3-lobed by sinuses acute or rounded in the bottom, the lobes long-acuminate, entire, the 

 lateral lobes often furnished near the base with one or rarely with two small acuminate in- 



Fig. 332 



