756 TREES OF NORTH AMERICA 



brous or pubescent during their first summer and often covered with a glaucous bloom, 

 lustrous, reddish brown or orange color during their first winter and marked by large 

 obcordate leaf-scars, growing darker the following year, their thin bark then some- 

 times separating into thread-like scales and beginning to display the pale shallow 

 longitudinal fissures of old branches and young trunks; or usually much smaller, and 

 often a shrub, with many stout wide-spreading stems. Winter-buds ^' long, obtuse, 

 with thick broadly ovate dark red scales rounded on the back and covered, especially 

 at the base and above the middle, with pale hairs, those of the inner rows becoming 

 strap-shaped, rounded at the apex, bright yellow, and sometimes ' in length. Bark 

 of the trunk ' thick, bright red-brown, with broad rounded ridges separating on the 

 surface into thin papery scales. Wood light, soft, close-grained, light brown, with 

 thick lighter colored sapwood of 50-60 layers of annual growth. 



Distribution. Rich wooded slopes and the banks of streams; mountains of West 

 Virginia to southern Illinois, and southward to middle Florida, central Alabama and 

 Mississippi, and through Arkansas to western Louisiana and eastern Texas; most 

 abundant in the elevated Appalachian region, and of its largest size on the western 

 slopes of the high mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. 



Often cultivated as an ornamental plant in the eastern United States and hardy as 

 far north as eastern Massachusetts, and in central and northern Europe. 



2. Mohrodendron dipterum, Britt. Snowdrop Tree. Silver Bell Tree. 



Leaves ovate or sometimes slightly obovate, acuminate, wedge-shaped or 

 rounded at the base, and remotely serrate, with minute callous teeth, when they 

 unfold coated with pale tomentum below and puberulous above, and at maturity 



thin, light green, glabrous on the upper surface except along the narrow midribs, 

 pubescent on the lower surface, 4' -5' long, l^'-3' wide, with conspicuous pale arcuate 

 veins and reticulate veinlets; their petioles stout, $' in length. Flowers nearly V 

 long, opening from the middle of March to the end of April, on slender pedicels 

 1^' 2' in length, in the axils of obovate acute puberulous caducous bracts often ^-' 

 long; corolla puberulous on the outer surface, divided nearly to the base into 

 slightly obovate spreading divisions; stamens 8-16, usually 8, nearly as long as the 

 corolla, their filaments covered with pale hairs and sometimes free from the corolla; 



