ERICACEAE 793 



panulate, gibbous on the posterior side, puberulous in the throat, light rose color, purplish, 

 or white, 1' long, cleft to the middle into 5 oval rounded lobes, with conspicuous central 

 veins, the upper lobe marked on the inner face by a cluster of yellow-green spots, and 



Fig. 709 



furnished on the outer surface at the bottom of each sinus with a conspicuous dark red 

 gland; stamens 8-12, white, inserted on the bright green disk; filaments enlarged and flat- 

 tened at base, slightly bent inward above the middle, and bearded with stiff white hairs, 

 the 4 or 5 short ones at the back of the flower for more than half their length and the others 

 only near the base; ovary ovoid, green, coated with short glandular pale hairs, crowned 

 with a long slender glabrous white declining style club-shaped and inflexed at apex, and 

 terminating in a 5-rayed scarlet stigma. Fruit dark red-brown, ovoid, ' long, glandular- 

 hispid, ripening and shedding its seeds in the autumn, the clusters of open capsules re- 

 maining on the branches until the following summer; seeds oblong, flattened, the coat 

 prolonged at the ends into scarious fringed appendages. 



A bushy tree, 30-40 high, with a short crooked often prostrate trunk occasionally 

 10'-12' in diameter, stout contorted branches forming a round head, and branchlets green 

 tinged with red and covered with dark red or slightly ferrugineous glandular-hispid hairs 

 when they first appear, dark green and glabrous in their first winter, gradually turning- 

 bright red-brown in their second year, and ultimately gray tinged with red, the thin bark 

 separating on branches four or five years old into persistent scales; more often a broad 

 shrub, with many divergent twisted steins 10-12 high. Winter-buds: leaf-buds conic, 

 dark green, axillary, or terminal on barren shoots, with many closely imbricated scales, those 

 of the inner ranks accrescent, increasing in length from the outer to the inner, and at matu- 

 rity \\' long, \' wide, gradually'narrowed at base, and terminating at apex in a long slender 

 point, light green, glabrous, closely held against the shoot by a resinous exudation from 

 the glandular hairs, and in falling marking the branchlet with numerous conspicuous nar- 

 row remote scars persistent for three or four years. Bark of the trunk about T V thick, light 

 red-brown, broken on the surface into small thin appressed scales. Wood heavy, hard, 

 strong, rather brittle, close-grained, light clear brown, with thin lighter colored sap wood; 

 occasionally made into the handles of tools and used as a substitute for boxwood in engrav- 

 ing. A decoction of the leaves is occasionally employed in domestic practice in the treat- 

 ment of rheumatism. 



Distribution. Nova Scotia, Mt. Chocorua, New Hampshire, and southward in New 

 England and eastern New York and along the Appalachian Mountains to northern Georgia 

 and westward to the northern shores of Lake Erie and to southeastern Ohio (Hocking 

 and Fairfield Counties) ; rare at the north and an inhabitant of deep cold swamps in a few 



