Distribution. Texas, dry limestone hills, Travis, Comal, Blanco, Kendall and Bandera Counties, on the Guadaloupe and Eagle Mountains, Culberson and El Paso Counties; southeastern New Mexico (Eddy County); on the mountains of Nuevo Leon in the neighborhood of Monterey.
3. [Arbutus arizonica] Sarg. Madroña.
Leaves lanceolate to rarely oblong, acute or rounded and apiculate at apex, and cuneate or occasionally rounded at base, with thickened entire or rarely denticulate margins, when they unfold, tinged with red, and slightly puberulous, especially on the petiole and margins, and at maturity thin, firm and rigid, light green on the upper surface, pale on the lower surface, 1½′—3′ long and ½′—1′ wide, with a slender yellow midrib and obscure reticulate veinlets; appearing in May and after the summer rains in September, and persistent for at least a year; petioles slender, often 1′ in length. Flowers ¼′ long, with a corolla much contracted in the middle, and a glabrous porulose ovary, opening in May on short stout hairy pedicels from the axils of conspicuous ovate rounded scarious bracts, in rather loose clusters 2′—2½′ long and broad, their lower branches from the axils of upper leaves. Fruit ripening in October and November, globose or short-oblong, dark orange-red, granulate, ⅓′ in diameter, with thin sweetish flesh, and a papery usually incompletely developed stone; seeds compressed, puberulous.
A tree, 40°—50° high, with a tall straight trunk 18′—24′ in diameter, stout spreading branches forming a rather compact round-topped head, and thick tortuous divergent branchlets reddish brown and more or less pubescent or light purple, pilose, and covered with a glaucous bloom when they first appear, becoming bright red at the end of their first season, their bark thin, separating freely into thin more or less persistent scales. Winter-buds ⅓′ long, red, the two outer scales linear, acuminate a third longer than those of the next, rank, acute and apiculate and ridged on the back. Bark of young stems and of the branches thin, smooth, dark red, exfoliating in large thin scales, becoming on old trunks ⅓′—½′ thick, irregularly broken by longitudinal furrows and divided into square appressed plate-like light gray or nearly white scales faintly tinged with red on the surface. Wood heavy, close-grained, soft and brittle, light brown tinged with red, with lighter colored sapwood of 30—40 layers of annual growth.
Distribution. Dry gravelly benches at altitude of 6000°—8000° on the Santa Catalina and Santa Rita Mountains, southern Arizona, and on the San Luis and Animas Mountains of southwestern New Mexico (Grant County); on the Sierra Nevada of Chihuahua.
7. VACCINIUM L.
Shrubs or rarely small trees, with slender branchlets, and fibrous roots. Leaves thin or coriaceous, deciduous or persistent. Flowers small, on bibracteolate pedicels, in many-branched axillary racemes, or solitary, their bracts small or foliaceous; calyx-tube adnate to the ovary, 4—5-lobed, the lobes valvate in the bud, persistent; corolla epigynous, 4 or 5-toothed, the teeth imbricated in the bud, urceolate-campanulate; stamens 8—10, inserted on the base of the corolla under the thick obscurely lobed epigynous disk; filaments filiform, free, usually hirsute; anthers awned on the back, the cells produced upward into erect spreading tubes dehiscent by a terminal pore; ovary inferior, 4 or 5-celled, the cells sometimes imperfectly divided by the development from the back of a false partition; style filiform, erect; stigma minute; ovules attached to the interior angle of the cell by a 2-lipped placenta, anatropous. Fruit a berry crowned with the calyx-limb, 4 or 5 or imperfectly 8 or 10-celled, the cells many-seeded. Seed minute, compressed, ovoid or reniform; seed-coat crustaceous; embryo clavate, minute, surrounded by fleshy albumen, axile, erect; cotyledons ovate; radicle terete, turned toward the hilum.
Vaccinium with about one hundred species is distributed through the boreal and temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, and occurs within the tropics at high altitudes north and south of the equator. Of the twenty-five or thirty species which occur in North America one is small trees. The fruits of many of the species are edible, the most valuable being the North American Vaccinium macrocarpum L., the Cranberry.
Vaccinium is the classical name of one of the Old World species.