RHAMNACE^E 665 



often shrubby and occasionally prostrate. Winter-buds naked, hoary-tomentose. 

 Bark of the trunk rarely more than \' thick, dark brown to light brown or gray 

 tinged with red, broken on the surface into short thin scales. Wood light, soft, not 



strong, brown tinged with red, with thin lighter colored sap wood. The bark pos- 

 sesses the drastic properties peculiar to that of other species of the genus, and is a 

 popular domestic remedy in Oregon and California, and under the name of Cascara 

 Sagrrula has been admitted into the American materia medica. 



Distribution. Rich bottom-lands and the sides of canons, usually in coniferous 

 forests; shores of Puget Sound eastward along the mountain ranges of northern 

 Washington to the Bitter Root Mountains of Idaho and the shores of Flat Head 

 Lake, Montana, and southward into northern California. 



Occasionally cultivated in the gardens of western Europe and of the eastern 

 United States. 



5. CEANOTHTJS, L. 



Small trees or shrubs, with slender terete branches, without terminal buds, and 

 small scaly axillary buds. Leaves petiolate, triple-veined from the base, or rarely 

 pinnately veined, persistent. Flowers on colored pedicels, in umbellate fascicles col- 

 lected in dense or prolonged terminal or axillary thyrsoid cymes or panicles, blue or 

 white; calyx colored, with a turbinate or hemispherical tube and 5 triangular mem- 

 branaceous petaloid lobes; disk fleshy, thickened above; petals 5, inserted under the 

 margin of the disk, unguiculate, wide-spreading, deciduous, the long claw infolded 

 round the stamens; stamens 5, inserted with and opposite the petals, persistent; 

 filaments spreading; ovary partly immersed in and more or less adnate to the disk, 

 3-celled, sometimes 3-angled, the angles often surmounted by a fleshy gland per- 

 sistent on the fruit; styles short, united below; stigmas 3-lobed, with spreading lobes; 

 ovule erect from the base of the cell. Fruit 3-lobed, subglobose, with a thin outer 

 coat, soon becoming dry and separating into 3 crustaceous or cartilaginous longitudi- 

 nally 2-valved nutlets. Seeds erect, obovate-lenticular, with a broad basal excrescence 

 surrounding the hilum; seed-coat thin, crustaceous; raphe ventral; albumen fleshy; 

 embryo axile; cotyledons oval or obovate. 



Ceanothus is confined to the temperate and warmer regions of North America, 

 with about thirty species, mostly belonging to California. The leaves, bark, and 



