774 TREES OF NORTH AMERICA 



entire or remotely and obscurely toothed margins. Flowers dioecious, appearing 

 with the leaves about the 1st of May, in rather compact pubescent panicles, with 

 scarious caducous bracts and bractlets, from the axils of leaves of the previous year; 

 staminate flower with a minute cup-shaped very obscurely dentate calyx and nearly 

 sessile oblong acute anthers; calyx of the pistillate flower much larger and deeply 

 lobed; ovary oblong, gradually narrowed into the slender style divided at the apex 

 into 2 short stigmatic lobes. Fruit in elongated glabrous or puberulous clusters, 

 l^'-lf long, the wing only slightly narrowed at the ends, emarginate at the apex, 

 about \' wide and two and one half to three times longer than the short elliptical 

 marginless many-nerved body. 



A tree, 40-50 high, with a trunk seldom more than a foot in diameter, stout 

 ascending or spreading branches forming an open symmetrical head, and stout light 

 or dark gray branchlets soft-pubescent usually during two seasons, much roughened 

 during their first winter and often for two or three years by the large elevated 

 mostly obcordate or sometimes orbicular leaf-scars displaying a marginal line of 

 fibro- vascular bundle-scars. Winter-buds terminal, ovate, usually broader than 

 long, and covered with bright brown scales, those of the outer pair keeled on the 

 back and apiculate at the apex, the others rounded, accrescent, and slightly villose. 

 Bark of the trunk rough, dark gray, and slightly furrowed. 



Distribution. Banks of streams or rarely on low river benches; northern West 

 Virginia through the foothill region of the Appalachian Mountains to northern 

 Georgia and Alabama, and to middle Tennessee. 



14. Fraxinus velutina, Torr. 



Leaves 3'-6' long, with stout grooved petioles, and 3-9-stalked lanceolate occa- 

 sionally falcate leaflets acuminate and long-pointed at the apex, mostly wedge- 

 shaped and often decurrent on the petiolule or unequally rounded at the base, and 

 entire or remotely serrate above the middle, with acute or recurved teeth, when they 

 unfold light green or reddish brown, glabrous, pubescent or tomentose, especially 



on the under surface, and at maturity subcoriaceous, dark yellow-green above, paler 

 and often pubescent below, and occasionally furnished with tufts of long pale hairs 

 on the under side of the broad midribs, 3' -5' long, \' to nearly 1' wide, with 



