364 TREES OF NORTH AMERICA 



caducous bracts, and usually producing at their base one or rarely two buds often 

 developing the following year into a branch, a leaf, or a cluster of flowers, or some- 

 times lengthening into a leafy branch. Winter-buds small, globose or subglobose, 

 covered by numerous imbricated scales, the outer rounded and obtuse at the apex, 

 bright chestnut-brown and lustrous, the inner accrescent, green or rose color, often 

 glandular, soon deciduous. Leaves conduplicate in the bud, simple, generally serrate, 

 sometimes 3-nerved, often more or less lobed, especially on vigorous leading branch- 

 lets, membranaceous to coriaceous, petiolate, deciduous; stipules often glandular- 

 serrate, linear, acuminate, frequently bright-colored, deciduous, or on vigorous 

 branchlets often foliaceous, coarsely serrate, usually lunate and stalked and mostly 

 persistent until autumn. Flowers pedicellate, in few or many-flowered simple or com- 

 pound cymose corymbs terminal on short lateral leafy branchlets, with linear usually 

 bright-colored often glandular caducous bracts and bractlets leaving prominent gland- 

 like scars, the lower branches of compound corymbs usually from the axils of upper 

 leaves; branches of the inflorescence mostly 3-flowered, the central flower opening 

 before the others; calyx-tube usually obconic, 5-lobed, the lobes acute or acuminate 

 and usually gland-tipped, rarely foliaceous, glandular-serrate or entire, green or red- 

 dish toward the apex, reflexed after the flowers open, persistent and often enlarged on 

 the fruit, or deciduous ; disk thin or fleshy, entire, lobed or slightly sulcate, concave or 

 somewhat convex; petals imbricated in the bud, orbicular, entire or somewhat erose 

 or rarely toothed at the apex, white or rarely rose color, spreading, soon deciduous; 

 stamens often variable in number in the same species by imperfect development, but 

 normally 5 in 1 row and alternate with the petals, or 10 in 5 pairs in 1 row alternate 

 with the petals, or 15 in 2 rows, those of the outer row in 5 pairs opposite the sepals 

 and alternate with and rather longer than those of the inner row, or 20 in 3 rows, 

 those of the inner row shorter and alternate with those of the 2d row, or 25 in 4 

 rows, those of the 4th row alternate with those of the 3d row; filaments broad at the 

 base, subulate, incurved, often persistent on the fruit; anthers pale yellow to nearly 

 white, or pink to light or dark rose color or purple; ovary composed of 1-5 carpels 

 inserted in the bottom of the calyx-tube and united with it; styles free, with dilated 

 truncate stigmas, persistent on the mature carpels; ovules ascending; raphe dorsal; 

 micropyle inferior. Fruit subglobose, ovate, short-oblong or pear-shaped, scarlet, 

 orange-colored, red, yellow, blue, or black, generally open and concave at the apex; 

 flesh usually dry and mealy; nutlets 1-5; united below, more or less free and slightly 

 spreading above the middle, thick-walled, rounded, acute, or acuminate at the apex, 

 full and rounded or narrowed at the base, rounded or conspicuously ridged and 

 grooved on the back, flattened, or nearly round when only 1, their ventral faces 

 plane or plano-convex or penetrated by longitudinal cavities or hollows. Seed solitary 

 by abortion, erect, compressed, acute, with a membranaceous light chestnut-brown 

 coat; embryo filling the cavity of the seed; cotyledons plano-convex, radicle short, 

 inferior. 



Crataegus is most abundant in eastern North America, where it is distributed from 

 Newfoundland to the mountains of northern Mexico, and is represented by a large 

 number of arborescent and shrubby species. A few species occur in the Rocky 

 Mountain and Pacific-coast regions, and in China, Japan, Siberia, central and south- 

 western Asia, and in Europe. The genus is still very imperfectly known in North 

 America, and in the absence of sufficient information concerning them several ar- 

 borescent species are necessarily excluded from the following enumeration. The 

 beautiful and abundant flowers and showy fruits make many of the species desirable 



