624 



TREES OF NORTH AMERICA 



gular lateral and upper lobes; petals pure white, with a large pale yellow blotch marking 

 the inner surface of the standard. Fruit ripening late in the autumn, 3 '-4' long and \' 

 wide, with bright red-brown valves, usually 4-8-seeded, mostly persistent until the end of 

 winter or early spring; seeds ^' long, dark orange-brown, with irregular darker markings. 



A tree, 70-80 high, with a trunk 3-4 in diameter, small brittle usually erect branches 

 forming a narrow oblong head, and slender terete or sometimes slightly many-angled 

 branchlets marked by small pale scattered lenticels, coated at first with short appressed 

 silvery white deciduous pubescence, pale green and puberulous during their first summer, 

 becoming light reddish brown and glabrous or nearly glabrous toward autumn. Bark of 

 the trunk l'-l|' thick, deeply furrowed, dark brown tinged with red, and covered by small 

 square persistent scales. Wood heavy, exceedingly hard and strong, close-grained, very 

 durable in contact with the ground, brown or rarely light green, with pale yellow sapwood 

 of 2 or 3 layers of annual growth; formerly extensively used in shipbuilding, for all sorts of 

 posts, in construction and turnery; preferred for treenails, and valued as fuel. 



Distribution. Slopes of the Appalachian Mountains, central and southern Pennsyl- 

 vania, to northern Georgia; in southern Illinois; now widely naturalized in the United 

 States east of the Rocky Mountains, and perhaps indigenous as a low shrub in northeastern 

 and western Arkansas and in Oklahoma; nowhere common; in the Appalachian forest 

 growing singly or in small groups up to altitudes of 3500; most abundant and of its 

 largest size on the western slopes of the Alleghanies of West Virginia; often spreading by 

 underground stems into broad thickets of small and often stunted trees. 



Formerly much planted as an ornamental and timber tree in the eastern states; very 

 frequently used in Europe, with numerous seminal varieties of peculiar foliage or habit, 

 for the decoration of parks and gardens, and to shade the streets of cities. 



2. Robinia neo-mexicana A. Gray. Locust. 



In its typical form a shrub only a few feet high. The hairs on the fruit not glandular- 

 hispid. 

 Distribution. Mountain canons and plains, Grant County, New Mexico. Passing into 



Robinia neo-mexicana var. luxurians Dieck. 



Leaves 6'-12' long, with a stout pubescent petiole, and 15-21 leaflets; stipules charta- 

 ceous, covered with long silky brown hairs, becoming at maturity stout slightly recurved 



Fig. 570 



flat brown or bright red spines sometimes 1' or more long; leaflets elliptic-oblong, rounded 

 or sometimes slightly emarginate at the mucronate apex, cuneate or sometimes rounded 



