Distribution. Cool ravines and hillsides; Newfoundland, through the maritime provinces of Canada, Quebec and Ontario to northern Wisconsin, and southward through New England, New York and Pennsylvania, and along the Appalachian Mountains to northern Georgia; on the North Carolina Mountains ascending to altitudes of 5500°; common and generally distributed at the north and in New England, New York and through the Appalachian forests; the forma nitida only in Newfoundland.
Occasionally cultivated and very beautiful in spring with its abundant pure white flowers and conspicuous red-brown leaves.
3. [Amelanchier florida] Lindl. Service Berry.
Amelanchier alnifolia Sarg., probably not Nutt.
Amelanchier Cusickii Fern.
Leaves oblong-ovate to oval or ovate, or at the end of vigorous shoots broad-ovate or occasionally broad-obovate, rounded or rarely acute at apex, rounded or slightly cordate at base, and coarsely serrate only above the middle with straight teeth; when they unfold often tinged with red and sometimes floccose-pubescent below, usually soon glabrous, at maturity thin, dark green on the upper surface, pale and rarely pubescent on the lower surface, 1½′—2½′ long, and 1′—1½′ wide, with a thin midrib and about ten pairs of primary veins; petioles slender, at first glabrous or puberulous becoming glabrous, ½′—1′ in length. Flowers ½′—¾′ long, appearing when the leaves are about half grown on pedicels ⅙′—¼′ in length, in short crowded erect glabrous or pubescent racemes, their bracts and bractlets scarious, slightly villose; calyx-tube campanulate, glabrous or tomentose, the lobes ovate, long-acuminate, glabrous or tomentose on the outer surface, tomentose or rarely nearly glabrous on the inner surface, soon reflexed; petals oblong-obovate gradually narrowed or broad at the rounded apex, ⅙′—¼′ wide; summit of the ovary densely tomentose. Fruit usually ripening in July, on pedicels ½′—¾′ long, in short nearly erect or spreading racemes, short-oblong or ovoid, dark blue, more or less covered with a glaucous bloom, ¼′ to nearly ½′ in diameter, sweet and succulent.
A tree, occasionally 30°—40° high, with a tall trunk 12′—14′ in diameter, small erect and spreading branches forming an oblong open head, and slender branchlets glabrous, pubescent or puberulous when they first appear, bright red-brown and usually glabrous during their first season, rather darker in their second year, and ultimately dark gray-brown; more often a large or small shrub. Winter-buds ovoid to ellipsoidal, acute or acuminate, dark chestnut-brown, glabrous or puberulous, ⅙′—¼′ long, scales of the inner ranks ovate, acute, brightly colored, coated with pale silky hairs, ½′—¾′ long. Bark about ⅛′ thick, smooth or slightly fissured, and light brown slightly tinged with red. Wood heavy, hard, close-grained, light brown. The nutritious fruit was an important article of food with the Indians of northwestern America, who formerly gathered and dried it in large quantities.
Distribution. Valley of the Yukon River (near Dawson) and Wrangell, Alaska, and southward to the coast region of British Columbia, and southward in Washington and Oregon possibly to northern California, ranging east in the United States to western Idaho, and probably to the northern Rocky Mountain region; its range, like that of the other species of western North America, still very imperfectly known.
7. CRATÆGUS. Hawthorn.
Trees or shrubs, with usually dark scaly bark, rigid terete more or less zigzag branchlets marked by oblong mostly pale lenticels, and by small horizontal slightly elevated leaf-scars, light green when they first appear, becoming red or orange-brown and lustrous or gray, rarely unarmed or armed with stout or slender short or elongated axillary simple or branched spines generally similar in color to that of the branches or trunk on which they grow, often bearing while young linear elongated caducous bracts, and usually producing at their base one or rarely two buds often developing the following year into a branch, a leaf, or a cluster of flowers, or sometimes lengthening into a leafy branch. Winter-buds small, globose or subglobose, covered by numerous imbricated scales, the outer rounded and obtuse at apex, bright chestnut-brown and lustrous, the inner accrescent, green or rose color, often glandular, soon deciduous. Leaves conduplicate in the bud, simple, generally serrate, sometimes 3-nerved, often more or less lobed, especially on vigorous leading branchlets, membranaceous to coriaceous, petiolate, deciduous; stipules often glandular-serrate, linear, acuminate, frequently bright-colored, deciduous, or on vigorous branchlets often foliaceous, coarsely serrate, usually lunate and stalked and mostly persistent until autumn. Flowers pedicellate, in few or many-flowered simple or compound cymose corymbs terminal on short lateral leafy branchlets, with linear usually bright-colored often glandular caducous bracts and bractlets leaving prominent gland-like scars, the lower branches of compound corymbs usually from the axils of upper leaves; branches of the inflorescence mostly 3-flowered, the central flower opening before the others; calyx-tube usually obconic, 5-lobed, the lobes acute or acuminate and usually gland-tipped, rarely foliaceous, glandular-serrate or entire, green or reddish toward the apex, reflexed after the flowers open, persistent and often enlarged on the fruit, or deciduous; disk thin or fleshy, entire, lobed or slightly sulcate, concave or somewhat convex; petals imbricated in the bud, orbicular, entire or somewhat erose or rarely toothed at apex, white or rarely rose color, spreading, soon deciduous; stamens often variable in number in the same species by imperfect development, but normally 5 in 1 row and alternate with the petals, or 10 in 5 pairs in 1 row alternate with the petals, or 15 in 2 rows, those of the outer row in 5 pairs opposite the sepals and alternate with and rather longer than those of the inner row, or 20 in 3 rows, those of the inner row shorter and alternate with those of the 2d row, or 25 in 4 rows, those of the 4th row alternate with those of the 3d row; filaments broad at base, subulate, incurved, often persistent on the fruit; anthers pale yellow to nearly white, or pink to light or dark rose color or purple; ovary composed of 1—5 carpels inserted in the bottom of the calyx-tube and united with it; styles free, with dilated truncate stigmas, persistent on the mature carpels; ovules ascending; raphe dorsal; micropyle inferior. Fruit subglobose, ovoid or short-oblong, scarlet, orange-colored, red, yellow, blue, or black, generally open and concave at apex; flesh usually dry and mealy; nutlets 1—5; united below, more or less free and slightly spreading above the middle, thick-walled, rounded, acute, or acuminate at apex, full and rounded or narrowed at base, rounded or conspicuously ridged and grooved on the back, flattened, or nearly round when only 1, their ventral faces plane or plano-convex, in some species penetrated by longitudinal cavities or hollows, and marked by a more or less conspicuous hypostyle sometimes extending to below the middle or nearly to the base of the nutlet. Seed solitary by abortion, erect, compressed, acute, with a membranaceous light chestnut-brown coat; embryo filling the cavity of the seed; cotyledons plano-convex, radicle short, inferior.