368 WOODY PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 
ries are oval, a third of an inch long, pointed, compressed, oval, 
blue-black when ripe, and very disagreeable to the taste. The 
nut is of the same shape, slightly grooved. 
Section Seconp.— Zhe flowers in the margin of the cymes much 
larger than the others and sterile. 
Sp. 1. Tse Hien Cranperry. Cranzerry Tree. V. dpulus. L. 
A handsome, low tree, five to ten feet high, ornamented 
throughout the year with flowers or fruit. In May or early in 
June, it spreads open, at the end of every branch, a broad cyme 
of soft, delicate flowers, surrounded by an irregular circle of 
snow-white stars, scattered, apparently, for show. From the 
common axil of the upper pair of leaves, a stout, furrowed 
footstalk, one or two inches long, separates into five, six, or 
more, radiating branches, from each of which, after successive 
similar sub-divisions, procced a number of crowded flowers, 
diverging, on short, partial footstalks, from a single, ceuiral 
point. Each perfect flower isa white cup of a single picce, 
with a border of five round lobes, silting in a green calyx with 
a few obsolete teeth, and bearing, from its base, within, five 
upright stamens, twice as long as itself, which support whitish 
anthers, opening from the top. The germ is a short, white, 
conical body, terminating in two or three minute stigmas, and 
seeming, when the corolla is gone, immediately to surmount the 
calyx. At the base of the flower-stems and branches, are long, 
linear, brown, fugacious bracts. ‘T’he outer florets are on longer 
stalks, barren, salver-shaped, of five larger, unequal, obovate, 
rounded lobes. 
The leaves are opposite, from two to five inches long, straight, 
rounded or acute at base, three-nerved, and with three very 
divergent, acuminate lobes, and large, unequal, obtuse teeth, 
strongly veined, paler beneath. ‘The footstalks are three fourths 
of an inch to an inch in length, with one or two glandular sti- 
pules below, and a few glands near the base of the leaf and 
towards the bottom, the lower ones hair-like. 
The fruit, which is red when ripe, is of a pleasant acid taste, 
resembling cranberries, for which it is sometimes substituted. 
