A tree, 80°—100° high, with a tall straight trunk often 2° in diameter, stout slightly spreading branches forming a comparatively narrow rather open head, and slender branchlets coated with lustrous golden or brown scales often persistent until the second year, light brown or ashy gray during their first winter, ultimately dark reddish brown, and marked by small scattered pale lenticels and small oval emarginate elevated leaf-scars. Winter-buds covered with thick brown scurvy pubescence; terminal ⅛′—¼′ long, ovoid, rather obtuse; axillary much smaller, acute, slightly flattened, sessile or short-stalked, often solitary. Bark ½′—¾′ thick, dark brown tinged with red, and broken irregularly into small thin appressed scales. Wood hard, very strong, tough, close-grained, light brown, with thick lighter colored sapwood of 80—90 layers of annual growth.
Distribution. Banks of rivers and swamps in rich moist soil or rarely on higher ground; eastern South Carolina, central Alabama, eastern, and northwestern (bluffs of the Yazoo River at Yazoo City) Mississippi, southern Arkansas, western Louisiana, southeastern Oklahoma to Clear Boggy Creek, western Choctaw County, and in Beaumont County, Texas; on the mountains of northeastern Mexico; rare and local; abundant only in southern Arkansas.
6. Carya ovata K. Koch. Shellbark Hickory. Shagbark Hickory.
Leaves 8′—14′ long, with stout glabrous or pubescent petioles, and 5 or rarely 7 ovate to ovate-lanceolate or obovate leaflets, acuminate or rarely rounded at apex, more or less thickly ciliate on the margins, finely serrate except toward the usually cuneate base, dark yellow-green and glabrous above, paler, glabrous and lustrous or puberulous below, the terminal leaflet decurrent on a slender stalk, 5′—7′ long, 2′—3′ wide, rather larger than the sessile or short-stalked upper leaflets, and two or three times as large as those of the lowest pair. Flowers: staminate opening after the leaves have grown nearly to their full size, in slender light green glandular-hirsute aments 4′—5′ long, glandular-hirsute, their elongated ovate-lanceolate acute bract two or three times as long as the ovate concave rounded or acute calyx-lobes; stamens 4, with yellow or red anthers hirsute above the middle; pistillate in 2—5-flowered spikes, ⅓′ long, clothed with rusty tomentum. Fruit solitary or in pairs, subglobose, rather longer than broad or slightly obovoid, depressed at apex, dark reddish brown or nearly black at maturity, roughened by small pale lenticels, glabrous or pilose, 1′—2½′ long, the husk, ⅛′—½′ thick, splitting freely to the base; nut oblong, nearly twice as long as broad, or obovoid and broader than long, compressed, prominently or obscurely 4-ridged and angled, acute and gradually or abruptly narrowed or rounded or nearly truncate at apex, gradually narrowed and rounded at base, pale or nearly white, with a usually thin shell; seed light brown, lustrous, sweet, with an aromatic flavor.