FLOWERS--The female flowers of shagbark are found on short 1 to 5 flowered spikes produced on the current season's growth. Most of the flowers are around 1/3" long, sessile and covered with a tawny tomentum. Each flower tends to have two yellowish green stigmatic lobes but three-lobed stigmas may be found and one case of a 4-lobed stigma was observed. Various amounts of an amber, or yellow scurfy, substance was also observed on the new flowers. The male flowers occur on 3 parted, slender, glandular-hairy aments from the basal portion of the current season's growth. The aments are usually 3-4 inches long with individual flowers consisting of 4 stamens with their surrounding bract and calyx lobes. The anthers are yellowish or greenish yellow. Occasionally a two branched ament may be found but this seems to occur when one branch of the ament has failed to develop due to an injury of some sort. One case of an unbranched ament was observed. Both female and male flowers are found to be mature after the leaves have grown to nearly their fully expanded mature size. There are more male aments to be found on the lower branches than female spikes of flowers, which would tend to aid in cross pollination of the flowers by wind action. In general the stigmatic lobes are not quite mature at the time that the bulk of the pollen is being shed, yet individual trees, at a considerable distance from another pollen bearing shagbark tree, will bear considerable quantities of nuts indicating self fertility. FRUIT--The husk of the shagbark is extremely variable in size, shape, thickness and opening habits. In general the husk consists of 4 segments which split along 4 sutures and fall apart at maturity dropping the nut to the ground. In many cases the husk falls to the ground with the nut and does not break apart until it reaches the ground. A few of the trees examined had husks which were not quite deciduous to the base and were retained on the tree until after the nut had been released. One tree among the 158 examined consistently had a 5 parted husk. The husks varied considerably in thickness, the dried measurements ranging from 1/8 to 1/2 inch with the bulk of the measurements averaging around 1/4" thick. Two trees had husks so thin as to be more typical of red hickory while only 6 trees had husks 1/2 inch thick or more. The overall shape of the husk around the nut ranged from globose (Fig. 5a) to ovoid (Fig. 5b) to obovate (Fig. 5c). It would seem that the shape of the nut enclosed within the husk might be predetermined by examination of the husk itself. The obovate husk shape could most frequently be depended on to produce either elliptical or obovate nuts but this was not an absolute certainty. The thickness of the husk effectively concealed the true shape of the nut beneath; the thinnest husks most nearly conforming to the true nut shape.