A tree, occasionally 30° high, with a trunk sometimes a foot in diameter, and spreading branches forming a round-topped handsome head.
Distribution. Coast of Labrador to the northern shores of Lake Superior and Minnesota, southward to the mountains of northern New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York. Distinct in its extreme forms but connected with Sorbus americana by intermediate forms.
This variety of Sorbus americana, perhaps the most beautiful of the genus when the large and brilliant fruits cover the branches in autumn and early winter, occasionally finds a place in the gardens of eastern Canada and the northern states.
5. HETEROMELES Roem.
A tree, with smooth pale aromatic bark, stout terete branchlets pubescent or puberulous while young, acute winter-buds covered by loosely imbricated red scales, and fibrous roots. Leaves oblong-lanceolate, acute at the ends, sharply and remotely serrate with rigid glandular teeth, or rarely almost entire, dark green and lustrous above, paler below, feather-veined, with a broad midrib and conspicuous reticulate veinlets; petiolate with stout petioles often furnished near the apex with 1 or 2 slender glandular teeth; stipules free from the petioles, subulate, rigid, minute, early deciduous. Flowers on short stout pedicels, in ample tomentose terminal corymbose leafy panicles, their bracts and bractlets acute, minute, usually tipped with a small gland, caducous; calyx-tube turbinate, tomentose below, glabrate above, the lobes short, nearly triangular, spreading, persistent; disk cup-shaped, obscurely sulcate; petals flabellate, erose-denticulate or emarginate at apex, contracted below into a short broad claw, thick, glabrous, pure white; stamens 10, inserted in 1 row with the petals in pairs opposite the calyx-lobes; filaments subulate, incurved, anthers oblong-ovoid, emarginate; carpels 2, adnate to the calyx-tube, and slightly united into a subglobose tomentose nearly superior ovary; styles distinct, slightly spreading, enlarged at apex into a broad truncate stigma; ovules 2 in each cell, ascending; raphe dorsal; micropyle inferior. Fruit obovoid, fleshy, the thickened calyx-tube connate to the middle only with the membranaceous carpels coated above with long white hairs filling the cavity closed by the infolding of the thickened persistent calyx-lobes, their tips erect and crowning the fruit. Seed usually solitary in each cell, ovoid, obtuse, slightly ridged on the back; seed-coat membranaceous, slightly punctate, light brown; hilum orbicular, conspicuous; embryo filling the cavity of the seed; cotyledons plano-convex; radicle short, inferior.
The genus is represented by a single species of western North America.
The generic name, from ἔτερος and μῆλον, is in reference to its difference from related genera.
1. [Heteromeles arbutifolia] Roem. Tollon. Toyon.
Leaves appearing with the flowers in early summer, 3′—4′ long, 1′—1½′ wide, usually persistent during at least two winters; petioles ½′—⅔′ in length. Flowers opening from June to August in clusters 4′—6′ across and often more or less hidden by young lateral branchlets rising above them. Fruit ripening in November and December, mealy, astringent and acid, scarlet or rarely yellow, ⅓′ long, remaining on the branches until late in the winter.