2. COTINUS L.
Small trees or shrubs, with scaly bark, small acute winter-buds, with numerous imbricated scales, fleshy roots, and strong-smelling juice. Leaves simple, petiolate, oval, obovate-oblong or nearly orbicular, glabrous or more or less pilose-pubescent, deciduous. Flowers regular, diœcious by abortion or rarely polygamo-diœcious, greenish yellow, on slender pedicels accrescent after the flowering period, mostly abortive and then becoming conspicuously tomentose-villose at maturity, in ample loose terminal or lateral pyramidal or thyrsoidal panicles, the branches from the axils of linear acute or spatulate deciduous bracts; calyx-lobes ovate-lanceolate, obtuse, persistent; disk coherent with the base of the calyx and surrounding the base of the ovary; petals oblong, acute, twice as long as the calyx, inserted under the free margin of the disk opposite its lobes, deciduous; stamens shorter than the petals, usually rudimentary or wanting in the pistillate flower; ovary sessile, obovoid, compressed, rudimentary in the staminate flower; styles 3, short and spreading from the lateral apex of the ovary; stigmas large, obtuse. Fruit oblong-oblique, compressed, glabrous, conspicuously reticulate-veined, light red-brown, bearing on the side near the middle the remnants of the persistent styles, the outer coat thin and dry; stone thick and bony.
Cotinus is widely distributed through southern Europe and the Himalayas to central China with a single species, and is represented in the southern United States by one species.
The Old World Cotinus coggygria Scop., the Smoke-tree of gardens, is often cultivated in the United States.
The generic name is from Κότινος, the classical name of a tree with red wood.
1. [Cotinus americanus] Nutt. Chittam Wood.
Leaves oval or obovate, rounded or sometimes slightly emarginate at apex, gradually contracted at base, and entire, with slightly wavy revolute margins, when they unfold light purple and covered below with fine silky white hairs, and at maturity dark green on the upper surface, pale on the lower surface, and puberulous along the under side of the broad midrib and primary veins, 4′—6′ long and 2′—3′ wide; turning in the autumn brilliant shades of orange and scarlet; petioles stout, ½′—¾′ in length. Flowers appearing late in April or early in May on pedicels ½′—¾′ long, and usually collected 3 or 4 together in loose umbels near the end of the principal branches of puberulous terminal slender long-branched few-flowered panicles 5′—6′ long and 2½′—3′ broad, the staminate and pistillate flowers on different individuals. Fruit produced very sparingly, about ⅛′ long, on stems 2′—3′ in length; the sterile pedicels becoming 1½′—2′ long at maturity and covered with short not very abundant rather inconspicuous pale purple or brown hairs; seed kidney-shaped, pale brown, about 1/16′ long.
A tree, 25°—35° high, with a straight trunk occasionally 12′—14′ in diameter, usually dividing 12°—14° from the ground into several erect stems separating into wide-spreading often slightly pendulous branches, and slender branchlets purple when they first appear, soon becoming green, bright red-brown and covered with small white lenticels and marked by large prominent leaf-scars during their first winter, and dark orange-colored in their second year. Winter-buds ⅛′ long, and covered with thin dark red-brown scales. Bark of the trunk ⅛′ thick, light gray, furrowed, and broken on the surface into thin oblong scales. Wood light, soft, rather coarse-grained, bright clear rich orange color, with thin nearly white sapwood; largely used locally for fence-posts and very durable in contact with the soil; yielding a clear orange-colored dye.
Distribution. Banks of the Ohio River, Owensboro, Daviess County, Kentucky (E. J. Palmer); on the Cheat Mountains, eastern Tennessee; near Huntsville, Madison County, Alabama; valley of White River in Stone and Taney Counties, southern Missouri; near Cotter, Baxter County, and Van Buren, Crawford County, Arkansas, and eastern Oklahoma; valleys of the upper Guadalupe and Medina Rivers, western Texas; usually only in small isolated groves or thickets scattered along the sides of rocky ravines or dry slopes; very abundant as a small shrub and spreading over many thousand acres of the mountain cañons, and high hillsides in the neighborhood of Spanish Pass, Kendall County, Texas.
Occasionally cultivated in the eastern United States and rarely in Europe; hardy as far north as eastern Massachusetts.