846 TREES OF NORTH AMERICA 



branches forming a compact irregularly shaped head, and slender terete branchlets more or 

 less coated when they first appear with pale tomentum sometimes persistent until their 

 second or third year or often disappearing during the first summer, ultimately becoming 

 ashy gray or light brown tinged with red, frequently covered with a glaucous bloom and 

 marked by pale lenticels, and in their first winter by the semicircular leaf-scars displaying a 

 short row of large fibro-vascular bundle-scars. Winter-buds: terminal, about ' long, 

 with 3 pairs of scales coated with rufous tomentum, those of the outer pair acute, rounded 

 on the back, truncate at apex, and rather shorter than those of the other pairs l'-l|' long 



Fig. 749 



at maturity and sometimes pinnately cut toward the apex. Bark of the trunk '-f ' thick, 

 brown tinged with red, and slightly furrowed, the surface of the ridges separating into thin 

 appressed scales. Wood heavy, hard, rather strong, brittle, coarse-grained, light brown, 

 with thick lighter brown sapw T ood streaked with yellow; sometimes confounded commer- 

 cially with the more valuable wood of the White Ash. Variable in the length of the petio- 

 lules and in the shape of the fruit and the width of its wing; a form with short-stalked or 

 nearly sessile leaflets, found chiefly in Nebraska has been described as F. campestris Britt. 

 and a form with the wing of the spatulate fruit sometimes \' wide as F. Michauxii Britt. 

 Distribution. Low rich moist soil near the banks of streams and lakes; Nova Scotia to 

 Manitoba, and southward to central Georgia, northern Alabama (St. Bernard, Cullman 

 County, and Attalla, Etowah County), northeastern Mississippi (Tishomingo County), 

 southern Indiana and Illinois, northern Missouri, eastern Kansas and southwestern Okla- 

 homa (Cache, Comanche County) ; usually confined in the Carolinas to the Piedmont re- 

 gion and foothills of the high mountains. Passing into 



Fraxinus pennsylvanica var. lanceolata Sarg. Green Ash. 



Leaves with rather narrower and shorter and usually more sharply serrate leaflets lus- 

 trous and bright green on both surfaces, and glabrous or pubescent along the midrib below. 



A round-topped tree, rarely more than 60 high, or with a trunk more than 2 in diame- 

 ter, slender spreading branches, ashy gray terete glabrous branchlets marked by pale lenti- 

 cels, and rusty-pubescent bud-scales. 



Distribution. Banks of streams; valley of the Penobscot River (Orono, Penobscot 

 County), Maine, to northern Vermont and the valley of the St. Lawrence River, near 

 Montreal, Province of Quebec, and to the valley of the Saskatchewan (Saskatoon, Sas- 

 katchewan), and in the United States westward to North Dakota, eastern Wyoming to the 

 base of the Bighorn Mountains, and on the mountains of northern Montana, and south- 



