104
SALICACE®-
sometimes lighter brown and slightly tinged with orange-color, and is deeply divided into broad flatconnected ridges, their surface separating into thick plate-like scales. The branchlets are slender, verybrittle at the base, rather bright reddish brown or in the desert region of New Mexico and Arizona pal eorange-color, and glabrous or often coated at first with pale pubescence or snowy tomentum which soondisappears. The winter-buds are acute and about a sixteenth of an inch long, and in color resemble thebranches. The leaves are involute in the bud, lanceolate, gradually narrowed above the middle intolong tapering and usually curved tips, and below into a wedge-shaped or somewhat rounded base, andserrate with minute reflexed remote teeth; when they unfold they are coated, especially on the lowersurface, with pale pubescence, and at maturity are thin, bright light green, rather lustrous, obscurelyreticulate-venulose, and glabrous, or often pubescent on the under side of the midribs and arcuate veinsand on the short slender petioles; they are from three to six inches long and from one eighth tothree quarters of an inch wide, varying greatly in size and outline on different individuals, and are fr®"quently conspicuously scythe-shaped , 1 especially on trees growing in the northeastern states; the first p& irare ovate, acute, coated with pale silky hairs, and disappear when less than an inch in length. Thestipules are semicordate, acuminate, foliaceous, and persistent, or ovoid, minute, and deciduous. Latein the autumn the leaves turn light yellow before falling, but often, especially in the south, fall withoutchange of color. The aments, which appear from the first of February in southern Arizona to themiddle of June in northern New England , are borne on short leafy branches often prolonged by one ofthe upper axillary buds, and are narrowly cylindrical and from one to three inches in length; the#scales are remotely subverticillate, short, rounded at the apex, yellow, and coated on the inner surfacewith pale hairs. The stamens vary from three to five in number, with free filaments hairy toward thebase. The ovary is ovate, glabrous, and gradually narrowed above the middle to the apex, which I scrowned with nearly sessile thick slightly emarginate stigmatic lobes. Before the fruit ripens the scalesfall from the pistillate aments, which, when fully grown, vary from an inch and a half to three inches i°length. The capsule is ovate, conical, short-stalked, glabrous, about an eighth of an inch long, andlight reddish brown.
Salix nigra inhabits the banks of streams and lakes, over which it often extends its trunks andbranches, and is distributed from southern New Brunswick and the northern shores of Lakes Hur ® 11
and Superior 2 southward to southern Florida , westward to eastern Dakota , 3 Nebraska , 4 Kansas , 5 and theIndian Territory, and through western Texas , 6 southern New Mexico and Arizona , and southward ufl®Mexico , and along the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada northward to the valley of the Sacrament®River and to the shores of Clear Lake at the eastern base of the Coast Range in Colusa County, Cabfornia. It is the largest and most conspicuous native Willow of eastern North America , and is m° s *abundant in the basin of the Mississippi River , growing probably to its greatest size in souther 11Indiana and Illin ois and in the valley of the lower Colorado River in Texas . It is the common arborescent Willow on the banks of streams in western Texas , 7 and southern New Mexico and Arizona , wber®it frequently attains a height of forty feet and forms a trunk four feet in diameter, and a bro»round-topped symmetrical head. The Black Willow apparently does not grow in any part of & enorthern interior region of the continent, and is comparatively rare in California .
The wood of Salix nigra is light, soft, weak, and close-grained, checking badly in drying' >
1 Salix nigra, var. falcata, Torrey, FI. N. Y. ii. 209 (1843).—Carey, Gray's Man. 429. — Darlington, FI. Cestr. ed. 3, 280. —Bebb, Gray’s Man. ed. 6, 481. — Dippel, Handb. Laubholzk. ii. 226,f. 112.
Salix falcata, Pursh, FI. Am. Sept. ii. 614 (1814). — Poiret,Lamarck Diet. Suppl. v. 70. — Sprengel, Syst. i. 107. — Forbes,Salict. Woburn. 279. — Trautvetter, Mem. Sav. Air. Acad. Sci.St. Pe'tersbourg, iii. 613. — Hooker, FI. Bor.-Am. ii. 149. —Dietrich,Syn. v. 420.
Salix Purshiana, A. F. Sprengel, Syst. v. 608 (1828). — Traut-
vetter, l. c. 626. — Darlington, FI. Cestr. ed. 2, 660. — Ba rraSal. Amer. No. 21.
2 Provaneher, Flore Canadienne, ii. 629. — Macoun, Cat-PI. 461.
* Williams, Bull. No. 43, South Dakota Agric. Coll. 107.
4 Bessey, Rep. Nebraska State Board Agric. 1894, 103.
6 Mason, Eighth Bienn. Rep. State Board Agric. Kansas , 272.
6 Bebb, Garden and Forest, viii. 363.