Description
It is a deciduous shrub or small tree, depending on the environment, usually with multiple stems that reach 2 to 7 m in height in dry, cold, high elevations, and other difficult environments, and 10 to 20 m in favorable sites. The stems are straight and support few branches generally resulting in narrow crowns. The root system is fibrous, deep, and widespread. The thick sapwood is nearly white, and heartwood is light brown tinged with red. Stem bark is thin, gray or dark brown, with broad, flat ridges. Twigs are stout and whitish-green. The leaves are oblanceolate to elliptic, 5–12.5 cm long, mostly short-pointed at the apex and tapered toward the base, with entire to sparsely wavy-toothed margins. They are dark-green and nearly hairless above, and white- or grayish-hairy below.
It is dioecious, having male and female flowers on different trees. The flowers are tiny, grouped in pussy willow-like catkins. The anthers, two per flower, are yellow, sometimes tipped with red; pistils are red. The fruit is light reddish-brown, long-pointed capsules about 0.75 cm long. At maturity, they open to release a white fluff with tiny, imbedded seeds. The species has 2n = 76 or 114 chromosomes.
Read more about this topic: Salix Scouleriana
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to- morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)