ALDER. 



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Family: AMENTACEAE. [Translator's note: now BETULACEAE] 

 Reproductive system: MONCECY, TETRANDRY. 



The common alder. Alms glutinosa, Gaertn., is a tree that grows forty or fifty feet 

 high. The bark on its trunk is thick, brown, and fissured. The leaves are petiolate, oval, 

 blunt, more or less truncate at the tips, crenate on the margins and sticky when they're 

 young. The flowers are monoecious. The male flowers, in pendent cylindrical catkins 

 composed of scales, are three at a time underneath each scale, with a calyx of four lobes 

 and four stamens. The female flowers are in rounded catkins composed of blunt wedge- 

 shaped scales that are persistent and spaced apart when mature. The flowers are two by- 

 two underneath each scale. The fruit is a pericarp with two lobes and two seeds and no 

 membranous wing on the edge. 



FLOWERS: in February and March. 



RANGE: France, along streams and in damp areas. 



NOMENCLATURE. German, die erle, orle. English, the alder-tree. Italian, ontano. 

 Spanish, aliso. Dutch, etzeboom. Russian, olcha. Polish, olsza. Hungarian, eger-fa. 



USES. The wood of the alder tree has a reddish hue shortly after it's been cut 

 down, but that color soon fades. It remains light pink, bordering on yellow when it's dry. 

 It weighs about eighteen kilograms a cubic foot. It's uniformly and finely grained. Lathe 

 workers and cabinet-makers put it to a variety of uses. A feature of the wood is that it can 

 be kept in water for centuries without alteration, which makes it most suitable for 

 building underground water conduits out of its trunk and for use as pilings. Very 

 handsome chairs are made in Scotland out of wood from the tree's roots, which is 

 attractively veined. 



