Leaves usually crowded at the ends of the branches, oblong-lanceolate to broadly obovate, acute or acuminate with a long narrow or with a short broad point, abruptly or gradually narrowed and cuneate or slightly narrowed and rounded or cordate at base, equally serrate with acute and often incurved or broad and rounded teeth tipped with small glandular mucros, or rarely slightly undulate, when they unfold bright bronzy green and puberulous above, tinged with purple and coated below with pale tomentum, at maturity thick and firm, light yellow-green on the upper surface, pale often silvery white and covered with short fine pubescence on the lower surface, 4′—7′ long, 1′—5′ wide, with a stout yellow midrib and conspicuous primary veins running to the points of the teeth; turning in the autumn orange color and scarlet; petioles slender ¾′—1½′ in length. Flowers: staminate in pilose aments 3′—4′ long; calyx light yellow, hairy, deeply divided into 5 or 6 lanceolate ciliate segments; pistillate sessile or in short spikes coated like their involucral scales with thick white tomentum; stigmas bright red. Fruit sessile or raised on a short stout peduncle, solitary or often in pairs; nut broadly ovoid, narrowed and rounded at apex, ½′ to nearly 1′ long, light chestnut-brown, inclosed for about half its length in a thin cup-shaped light brown cup pubescent on the inner, hoary-tomentose on the outer surface, and covered by small obtuse scales more or less thickened and rounded on the back toward the base of the cup, the small free red-brown tips of the upper ranks forming a minute fringe-like border to its rim; seed sweet and sometimes edible.
A tree, 80°—100°, occasionally 160° high, with a tall straight trunk 3°—4° in diameter above the broad and often buttressed base, comparatively small branches forming a narrow shapely round-topped head, and slender branchlets, green more or less tinged with red or purple, pilose when they first appear, light orange color or reddish brown during their first winter, and ultimately gray or brown; east of the Alleghany Mountains and on dry hills often not more than 20°—30° tall. Winter-buds ovoid, acute, ⅛′—¼′ long, with chestnut-brown scales white and scarious on the margins. Bark rarely ½′ thick, broken on the surface into thin loose silvery white scales sometimes slightly tinged with brown. Wood heavy, very hard, strong, close-grained, durable, with thin light-colored sapwood; largely used in cooperage, for wheels, fencing, and railway-ties.
Distribution. Gardner’s Island, Lake Champlain, Vermont, western Massachusetts and Connecticut, near Newberg, Orange County, New York, westward through New York, southern Ontario and southern Michigan to northern Iowa, southeastern Nebraska, eastern Kansas, and Oklahoma to the valley of the Washita River (Garvin County) and to the Devil’s Cañon near Hinton (Caddo County), and southward in the Atlantic states to the District of Columbia, eastern Virginia; sparingly on the eastern foothills of the Blue Ridge in North and South Carolina at altitudes between 1000° and 2000°; in central Tennessee and Kentucky, central and northeastern Georgia, western Florida, and through the Gulf states to the valley of the Guadalupe River, Texas; on the Guadalupe Mountains, Texas, and on the Capitan Mountains, New Mexico (Lincoln County); rare and comparatively local in the Atlantic states, usually on limestone soil; very abundant in the Mississippi basin, growing on ridges, dry flinty hills, deep rich bottom-lands and the rocky banks of streams; probably of its largest size on the lower Wabash River and its tributaries in southern Indiana and Illinois; on the Edwards Plateau (Kemble, Kerr, Uvalde, Bandera and Real Counties), Texas, a form occurs with nuts sometimes 1¼′ long with deeper cups up to 1′ in diameter (var. Brayi Sarg.).
Section 2. Flowers unisexual (usually perfect in Ulmus); calyx regular; stamens as many as its lobes and opposite them; ovary superior, 1-celled (rarely 2-celled in Ulmus); seed 1.
XI. ULMACEÆ.
Trees, with watery juice, scaly buds, terete branchlets prolonged by an upper lateral bud, and alternate simple serrate pinnately veined deciduous stalked 2-ranked leaves unequal and often oblique at base, conduplicate in the bud, their stipules usually fugaceous. Flowers perfect or monœciously polygamous, clustered, or the pistillate sometimes solitary; calyx 4—9-parted or lobed; stamens 4—6; filaments straight; anthers introrse, 2-celled, opening longitudinally; ovary usually 1-celled; ovule solitary, suspended from the apex of the cell, anatropous or amphitropous; styles 2. Fruit a samara, nut, or drupe; albumen little or none; embryo straight or curved; cotyledons usually flat or conduplicate. Five of the thirteen genera of the Elm family occur in North America. Of these four are represented by trees.
CONSPECTUS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN ARBORESCENT GENERA.
Fruit a dry samara, or nut-like. Flowers perfect; fruit a samara.1. [Ulmus.] Flowers polygamo-monœcious; fruit nut-like, tuberculate.2. [Planera.] Fruit drupaceous. Pistillate flowers usually solitary.3. [Celtis.] Pistillate flowers in dichotomous cymes.4. [Trema.]