SMALL tree, with smooth, gray bark, showing swellings lik•• veins. Leaves simple, alternate, oblong-lanceolate. Flowers, both sorts in aments, moncecious. Fruit, paired nutlets, each with a 3-lobed wing. (C. Carolinian) HORNBEAM Hop HORNBEAM; IRONWOOD (Ostrya Virgtmana, WilId). tO to 30 feet; rarely 50 to 60 feet. Slender tree with close, roundish head of wiry branches that droop in tough, flexible twigs of thread-like slimness. Bark gray-brown, furrowed closely into scaly ridges, that break into oblong plates. Shed in strips that spring out at both ends giving the trunk the ap pearance of a shagbark hickory. Wood red-brown, tough, strong, cross-grained, hard to work, used for mallets, tool handles, and levers. Also for fence-posts. Leaves oblong
lanceolate or ovate acuminate, .doubly and sharply serrate, 3 to 5 inches long, thin, tough, yellow-green, paler beneath; petioles short, hairy. Flowers with leaves; moncecious, in catkins; staminate in 3's, on ends of twigs; opening early the season after they were formed; pistillate in slender, erect, loose clusters, green, with red, forked stigmas, and perianth of 3 united bracts. Fruit a hop-like cluster of papery capsules, each containing a hard, shiny nut. Dist.: Shady woodlands, Nova Scotia to western Dakota; south to Florida and Texas.