572 



TREES OF NORTH AMERICA 



North Carolina and Tennessee; common in all the forest regions of the extreme northern 

 states, growing in moist rather rich soil; often occupying to the exclusion of other trees 

 large areas cleared by fire of their original forest-covering; common and attaining its largest 

 size on the western slopes of the Big Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. Passing into var. 

 saximontana Rehd. differing from the type in its shorter and broader, more coarsely serrate 

 leaves, usually fewer flowered sessile umbels, larger fruit, and smaller size. The Rocky 

 Mountain form; common from Manitoba, the Flathead Lake region, Montana, and north- 

 ern Wyoming, southward through Colorado. 



13. Prunus emarginata Walp. Wild Cherry. 



Leaves oblong-obovate to oblanceolate, rounded and usually obtuse or sometimes acute 

 at apex, cuneate and furnished at base with 1 or 2 and sometimes 3 or 4 large dark 

 glands, and serrate with minute subulate glandular teeth, when they unfold puberulous or 

 pubescent on the lower surface and slightly viscid, and at maturity glabrous or pubescent 

 below (var. mollis S. Wats.), l'-3' long, f'-lf wide, dark green above and paler below; 

 petioles usually pubescent, |'-j' in length; stipules lanceolate, acuminate, glandular-ser- 

 rate, deciduous. Flowers appearing when the leaves are about half grown, at the end of 

 April at the level of the ocean or as late as the end of June at high altitudes, %'%' in diame- 

 ter, on slender pedicels from the axils of foliaceous glabrous glandular-serrate bracts, in 



6-12-flowered glabrous or pubescent corymbs l'-l' long; calyx-tube obconic, glabrous 

 or puberulous, bright orange-colored in the throat, the lobes short, rounded, emarginate or 

 slightly cleft at apex, sometimes slightly glandular on the margins, reflexed after the 

 flowers open; petals obovate, rounded or emarginate at apex, contracted below into a short 

 claw, white faintly tinged w r ith green. Fruit ripening from June to August, on slender 

 pedicels, in long-stalked corymbs often 2' long, globose, \'-\' in diameter, more or less 

 translucent, with a thick skin bright red at first when fully grown, becoming darker and al- 

 most black, and thin bitter astringent flesh; stone ovoid, turgid about ' long, pointed and 

 compressed at the ends, with thick brittle slightly pitted walls, ridged and prominently 

 grooved on the ventral suture and rounded and slightly grooved on the dorsal suture. 

 A tree, occasionally 30-40 high, with exceedingly bitter bark and leaves, a trunk 

 12'-14' in diameter, slender rather upright branches forming a symmetric oblong head, and 

 slender flexible branchlets coated at first with pale pubescence, dark red-brown during 

 their first winter, bright red, conspicuously marked by large pale lenticels in their second 

 season, and furnished with short lateral branchlets; frequently a shrub especially at high 

 altitudes, with spreading stems 3-10 tall forming dense thickets. Winter-buds acute, \' 

 long, with chestnut-brown scales often slightly scarious on the margins, those of the inner 



