PART VIII
THE CONE-BEARING EVERGREENS
The Pines--The Spruces--The Firs--The Douglas Spruce--The Hemlocks--The Sequoias--The Arbor-vitaes--The Incense Cedar--The Cypresses--The Junipers--The Larches, or Tamaracks
The cone-bearers, or conifers, are a distinct race that we commonly call evergreens. They include pines, hemlocks, spruces, firs, sequoias, cypresses, cedars, and junipers. Besides these, the tamaracks and the bald cypress must be included, although their leaves are shed in the autumn. The term "evergreen" applies equally well to magnolias, laurels, and many oaks. Birches and alders and magnolias bear cone-like fruits. Notwithstanding such exceptions, the cone-bearing trees are mostly evergreen, and their family traits are so strongly marked that even the beginner in tree study eliminates the exceptional instances early in his studies.
The pines and their relatives in the coniferous group are an ancient race, composed of proud old "first families." Along the shores of the Silurian seas they stood up, straight and tall, their only companions that stood erect, the giant horse-tails and tree ferns. This was long before modern tree families had any existence. There were no broad-leaved trees. In the coal measures are found the mummied remains of these prehistoric conifers. The cycads in the Everglades of Florida are some of their surviving representatives. These are facing extinction, and the conifers, too, are declining. They had reached their prime as a race when the broad-leaved trees appeared upon the earth. The vigor of the new race enabled it to seize the richest, well-watered regions. They drove the conifers to seek the swamps, the exposed seacoasts, the barren and rocky mountain slopes. Man has ruthlessly destroyed for timber the coniferous forests of this country and much of the territory denuded by the axe is either devoted to agriculture or has been seized by broad-leaved species of trees, more tenacious of life and with seeds more quick and sure to germinate than those of the conifers. The time is not far distant, geologically speaking, when this ancient and declining family of trees will exist only as man fosters it by cultivation.
The conifers have resinous wood, with stiff, needle-like or scale-like leaves, and inconspicuous flowers of two sorts, borne in clusters like catkins. The pistillate catkin matures into a woody cone made of overlapping scales attached to a central stem. On each scale are borne one or more winged seeds.
The one character which is constant in the whole coniferous group and sets it apart from the rest of the plant kingdom, is expressed in the name _Gymnosperm_, applied to this botanical grand division. It means "naked seed." There is no ovary in the flower. The naked ovules are borne on the scales of the fertile spike or catkin, which is held apart and erect in blossoming time. They are pollinated by the wind, which sifts them with golden pollen dust, abundant in the staminate catkins clustered on the same tree. Contact of pollen grains and naked ovules is followed by their coalescence--the "setting of seeds."
The distinguishing trait of the higher plants that form the grand division known as _Angiosperms_, is that the ovules are borne in a closed ovary, and the pollen lodges on the end of a stigma. "Pollen tubes" grow down through the long style, finally reach the hidden ovule, and seed is set. This complicated process is found in the majority of flowers one studies in botany classes. Gymnosperms, and the still lower groups of flowerless ferns and mosses, are merely glanced at by amateur botanists. The more primitive plant forms are too difficult for beginners.
The habit of the conifers is a character upon which we may depend. With rare exceptions, there is a central shaft, "the leader," and short horizontal branches in whorls forming platforms. The side branches, also whorled, are generally flattened into a horizontal spray. The leaves are narrow, needle-like, or scale-like, and waxy or resinous. The tough fibre of the wood enables the conifers to resist damage by wind and by ice. Snowflakes sift to the ground instead of accumulating upon the branches and breaking them by their cumulative weight. The wind, which pollinated the fertile flowers of coniferous forests long before nectar-gathering insects came upon the earth, is the harvester of their seeds. It scatters them far and wide; each seed has a wing that adapts it to long journeys in front of a gale.
The resinous sap that courses through the veins of coniferous wood seals up the bark, leaves, and cones against the invasion of enemies, and acts as an antiseptic dressing for wounds. Without these special adaptations to a life of hardship, the conifers would never have held their own as they have done. They inhabit regions where conditions discourage all but a few of the broad-leaved trees.
THE PINES
In a forest of needle-leaved evergreens it is perfectly easy to distinguish the pines by their leaves. Look along the twigs and you will find the needles arranged in bundles, with a papery, enclosing sheath at the base. Follow farther back and these sheaths are missing, but on long stretches between the growing tip and the leafless part of the branch the characteristic sheathed needle-bundles declare this evergreen to be a pine. No other conifer has this trait, no pine grows but shows it every day in the year.
One half of the eighty known species of pines grow in North America. Pure forests of great extent are found in the Southern states, in the Great Lakes region, and on the mountain slopes in the western and northern parts of the continent. Smaller areas occur in the Eastern states. Very soon these forests must be spoken of in the past tense, for a century of destructive lumbering has almost cleared the Northeast of pine timber, and though the exploitation of the pine forests of the South and about the Great Lakes came later, as population increased in the Middle West, the work has progressed much more rapidly. The idea of forest conservation, crystallized into federal law by popular demand, has come too late to save from wasteful exploitation the superb pine forests west of the Rockies. Yet thousands of acres of forests are now under government control and here a great object lesson in rational methods of forest maintenance is being given. The pineries of the future depend upon the success of methods there employed.
The uses of pines are not all counted in terms of the lumberman. There are pines for every situation, soil, and climate. On low seaboard plains they come down to the highwater mark. They wade into inundated swamps and climb to the timber line on arid, rocky mountain-sides. The bravest species go out into the desert. Almost as brave are those which survive the smoke and dust of cities like Pittsburg and St. Louis, though theirs is a losing fight with sulphurous fumes and cramped root space in the smoky town. As shelter belts, as wind-breaks, as shade and ornamental trees, there are pines in cultivation in all parts of the country, their winter usefulness and beauty making them universally the choice of home-makers, rich and poor.
By-products of pine wood are chiefly turpentine, pitch, resin, and oil, derived from the resinous sap. "Naval stores" these products are called, for their consumption is greatest in shipyards. Turpentine is extensively used in the arts and industries. If the Southern pine forests are allowed to dwindle, the deficit in lumber will not affect world commerce as disastrously as the cutting off of the naval stores production.
The lumberman's division of the pines is a convenient one. "Soft pines" have soft, light wood, not heavily impregnated with resin. It is the delight of wood-workers. "Hard pines" have heavy, dark-colored wood, full of resin, which is a nuisance to the carpenter, because it "gums up" his tools. The one little sign enables us to distinguish hard and soft pines without examination of the wood. Soft pines shed the papery sheath of their leaf bundles before the leaves themselves begin to fall. Hard pines retain the leaf sheath until the leaves are shed. A glance at any leafy pine branch will enable us to determine to which of the two classes a given tree belongs.
THE SOFT PINES
The outward and visible sign of a soft pine is the loose, deciduous sheath of its leaf bundles. The scales of its cones are usually unarmed with horns or prickles. The wood is soft, light colored, close-grained. The number of leaves in a bundle is the principal key to the species.
=The White Pine=
_Pinus Strobus_, Linn.
The white pine (_see illustrations, pages 214-215_) is the only pine east of the Rocky Mountains that bears its leaves in bundles of five. This semi-decimal plan is found in three western soft pines and two western hard pines; but in the East, a native tree with needles in fives, leaves no doubt as to its name. From a distance this plan of five can be seen in the five branches that form a platform each year around the central shaft.
Study a sapling pine and you see in its vigorous young growth the fulfillment of nature's plan, before storms have broken any of the branches and changed the mathematics of the pattern. Stroke the flexible, soft leaves that sway graceful and lithe in the wind. If it is spring, note that the terminal bud has pushed out, and around it five-clustered buds are forming a circle of shoots. In autumn, after the season's growth is finished, each twig ends in a single bud, with a whorl of five buds around it. From the ground upward, count the platforms of branches. Each whorl of five marks a year in the tree's growth. The terminal bud carries the height a foot or two upward, and its surrounding five buds grow in the horizontal plane, forming the last and smallest platform of leafy shoots. Each branch is a year younger than the shoot that bears it. Note throughout this little tree the plan of five, from leaf cluster to largest branch.
Now go to the largest white pine in your neighborhood, study the plan of five in this tree, and find out the reason for any failures. Notice the conflict between the branches in the close platforms. Find branches where this conflict is in progress. Pick out the winner. Read the age of the tree by the platforms of branches on the trunk.
No evergreen is more beautiful than a white pine grown in rich soil in a situation sufficiently sheltered to defend its supple branches from breakage by severe winds. Its soft, plume-like twigs are dark blue-green, with pale lines lining each individual leaf. The young shoots are yellowish green, and they lighten in a wonderful manner the sombre coloring of the older foliage. At the bases of the new shoots cluster the staminate catkins, in early June. Yellow and becoming loose and pendulous as the wind shakes them, they are soon empty of their abundant pollen, which drifts like gold dust and fills the air. Among the youngest leaves, toward the end of the shoot, the purplish rosy lips of the erect pistillate cone-flowers catch the dust from neighbor trees, and their naked ovules absorb it and set seed. Close shut are the lips again, against any other invasion, while these ovules mature. We shall find them standing erect until autumn, but next season they hang down with their added weight, and at the end of the second summer the scales change from green to brown, open and give their ripe winged seeds to the wind for distribution. Because the tree is biennial-fruited, it always carries two sizes of cones. The large ones are one year older than the small ones. Ripe cones are five to ten inches long, with thin, broad, unarmed scales, squarish at the tips.
The most hopeful phase of the white pine problem to-day is the fact that new forests are coming up naturally where the early lumbering deforested great tracts in the Eastern states. Careful forestry improves upon nature's method, and so the pines are being restored on land unfit for agricultural crops. White pine is one of the most profitable timber crops to plant at the present time.
=The Mountain Pine=
_P. monticola_, D. Don.
The mountain pine is scattered through mountain forests from the Columbia River Basin in British Columbia to Vancouver Island, along the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains to northern Montana and Idaho, and south along the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges in Washington and Oregon, well into California. From the bottom lands of streams, where it is most abundant and reaches a height of one hundred to one hundred and fifty feet, and a trunk diameter of five to eight feet, it climbs to elevations of eight to ten thousand feet on the California Sierras. The bark of young trees and on the branches of old ones is smooth and pale-gray. The leaves, five in the bundles, range from one to four inches in length, stiff, blue-green, whitened by two to six stripes on the inner side. The cones are twelve to eighteen inches long, with thickened, pointed scales ending in an abrupt beak. The larger cone, denser, stiffer foliage, and the white bark make this white pine of the western mountains a great contrast to the Eastern white pine.
Unlike many trees whose size diminishes with increase in altitude, this white pine grows to majestic size at altitudes of nearly two miles, its noble figure more striking and impressive because of the dwindling size of its companions on the mountain-sides. The lumberman looks with despair upon these giant white pines, quite out of his reach.
In the Arnold Arboretum in Boston a fine seedling specimen of this western silver pine fruited when but twelve feet high, and proves vigorous and altogether happy in this absolutely changed climatic environment. In Europe the same success attends the cultivation of these trees, which have become very popular in parks and private grounds. Their introduction into our Eastern states can now be assured of success.
=The Sugar Pine=
_P. Lambertiana_, Dougl.
The sugar pine (_see illustration, page 231_) belongs in the class with those tree giants, the sequoias, with which it grows in the mountain forests of Oregon and California. John Muir calls it "the largest, noblest, and most beautiful of all the pine trees in the world." Trees two hundred feet high, with trunk diameter of six to eight feet, are not uncommon. The maximum given by Sargent is twelve feet across the stump. The head of a sugar pine is rounded and broad, with pendulous branches, tufted with stout, dark green leaves, three to four inches long. The cones are the largest known, reaching eighteen inches in length, rarely longer. The black or dark brown seeds are one to five inches long, including the flat, blunt wings. Indians, bears, and squirrels gather the abundant harvest of these cones, which are rich in nutriment and pleasant to the taste. Crystals of sugar form white masses like rock candy, but with a taste of maple sugar, wherever a break in the bark of a sugar pine permits the escape of the sweet sap. This gives the tree its name. No other pine has sap with such a noticeable sugar content.
Fortunately, these gigantic soft pines belong to the high Sierras and do not go down to the sea, where lumbermen could sacrifice them without effort. Nature has fenced them in by many barriers, and the government, by reservation in national parks, insures the preservation of some of the finest sugar pine groves, for the use and inspiration of all the people.
A visit to Yosemite is the experience of a lifetime to any American. Here grow the most gigantic trees in the world, and the sugar pines are nobler even than the giant "big trees," for the latter are often decrepit, while the sugar pines are hale and youthful by comparison. Leaving behind the scrawny gray digger pines on the foothills, the traveler enters the belt of the yellow pines, on the higher elevations, and passing these he comes to the grand sugar pines along the highest level of the stage road that leads into the National Park. The road is no wider than the broad stumps of sugar pines, scattered here and there. The standing trees amaze one with their height and girth.
It is impossible to shake off the impression that some magic has put magnifiers in our eyes; for trees, beetling cliffs, and rushing cataracts are bigger than their counterparts in other regions of the world far-famed for their scenery. The sugar pine trunks seem like great builded columns, too large for any real tree to grow, and the "big trees" in the Mariposa Grove intensify this impression of unreality. In a day or two the traveler becomes accustomed to his surroundings. He goes out of the Park and down into the world of men and affairs, his soul enlarged, his life enriched by an experience he can never quite forget. He is a bigger, better man for his brief association with Nature in her noblest manifestations.
The wood of the sugar pine is soft, golden, satiny, fragrant, inviting the woodworker through every one of his senses. A single tree often yields five thousand dollars' worth of marketable lumber, the finest, straight-grained soft pine in the world.
The shame of the century is the wanton destruction of sugar pine trees by vagrant shingle-makers and thieving mill-owners, who despoiled the grandest trunks of their choicest wood, wastefully leaving the bulk to cumber the ground and invite forest fires. Late and slowly, but surely also is the popular mind awakening to the fact that forests belong to the nation and should be conserved and maintained for the whole people--not wasted for the temporary enrichment of private owners, as forest wealth has been squandered in past years.
=Rocky Mountain White Pine=
_P. flexilis_, James
The Rocky Mountain white pine inhabits mountain slopes from Alberta to Mexico, including the Sierra Nevada range. In northern New Mexico and Arizona it occasionally reaches eighty feet in height, but ordinarily does not exceed fifty. Its rounded dome, as broad as an oak, bravely dares the wind on exposed cliffs, and crouches as a stunted shrub at altitudes of twelve thousand feet. The "limber pine" it is called, from the toughness of its fibre, which alone enables its long limbs to sustain the whipping they get. The leaves form thick, beautiful dark-green tufts, which are not shed until the fifth or sixth year. The cones are three to ten inches long, purplish; scales rounded, abruptly beaked at the apex; narrow wings entirely surround the seeds, which fall in September.
This is the lumber pine of the semi-arid ranges of "The Great American Desert"; the main dependence of builders, too, on the eastern slopes of the Rockies in Montana.
=The White-bark Pine=
_P. albicaulis_, Engelm.
The white-bark pine is a rippled, gnarled, squatting tree, whose matted branches, cumbered with needles and snow, make a platform on which the hardy mountain-climber may walk with safety in midwinter. It offers him a springy mattress for his bed, as well. The trunk is covered with snowy bark that glistens like the icemantle that lies on the treeless mountain-side just above the timber line.
From a twelve-thousand-foot elevation on the Rocky Mountains, in British Columbia and south to the Yellowstone, the tree clambers down to the five-thousand-foot line, where it sometimes attains forty feet in height; its dark green, rigid leaves persist from five to eight years, always five in a bundle, and never more than two and a half inches long. The cones, horny-tipped, dark purple, one to three inches long, are ripe in August; the large sweet seeds are gathered and eaten by Indians. In California the tree's range extends into the San Bernardino Mountains.
THE TWO "FOXTAIL" PINES
Two Western pines are distinguished by the common name "foxtail pine," because the leaves are crowded on the ends of bare branchlets. _P. Balfouriana_, M. Murr., has stiff, stout dark green leaves with pale linings. The tree is wonderfully picturesque when old, with an open irregular pyramid, on the higher foothills of the California mountains, or crouching as an aged straggling shrub at the timber-line. Its cones are elongated, the scales thickened and minutely spiny at tip.
The second five-leaved foxtail pine is _P. aristata_, Engelm., also called the "prickle-cone pine," from the curving spines that arm the scales of the purplish brown fruits. This is a bushy tree, with sprawling lower branches and upper ones that stand erect and are usually much longer, giving the tree a strange irregularity of form. The leaves are short and crowded in terminal brushes. From a stocky tree forty feet high, to a shrub at the timber line, this tree is found near the limit of tree growth, from the outer ranges of the mountains of Colorado to those of southern Utah, Nevada, northern Arizona and southeastern California. In Eastern parks it is occasionally seen as a shrubby pine with unusually interesting, artistic cones.
THE NUT PINES
The nut pines, four in number, supply Indians and Mexicans of the Southwest with a store of food in the autumn, for the seeds are large and rich in oils and they have keeping qualities that permit their hoarding for winter. The four-leaved _P. quadrifolia_, Sudw., scattered over the mountains of southern and Lower California, has four leaves in a cluster, as a rule. A desert tree, its foliage is pale gray-green, harmonizing with the arid mesas and low mountain slopes, where it is found. The cones are small with few scales, but the nut is five-eighths of an inch long and very rich.
_P. cembroides_, Zucc., with two to three leaves, is the "piñon," that covers the upper slopes of Arizona mountains with open forests fifteen to twenty feet high. The leaves are one to two inches long, dark green with pale lines, the branchlets orange-colored and matted with hairs. The large nuts are very oily, and so abundant in the mountains of northern Mexico that they are sold in large quantities in every town.
The piñon (_P. edulis_, Engelm.) ranges from the eastern foothills of the Colorado Rockies to western Texas and westward to the eastern borders of Utah, southwestern Wyoming, central Arizona and on into Mexico, often forming extensive open forests, and reaching an elevation of seven thousand feet. Short, stiff leaves in clusters of two or three, dark green, ridged, stout, often persist for eight or nine years. The tree is a broad compact pyramid; in age, dense, round-topped, with stout branchlets and abundant globose cones. Each scale covers two seeds, wingless, about the size of honey locust seeds, oily, sweet, nutritious and of delicious flavor. This is the pine nut _par excellence_, whose newest market is among confectioners and fancy grocers throughout the states.
The one-leaved nut pine (_P. monophylla_, Torr.), spreads like an old apple tree, and forms a low, round-topped, picturesque head, its lower limbs drooping to the ground. The reduction of the leaves in the clusters to lowest terms, gives the tree a starved look, and the eighteen or twenty rows of pale stomates on each leaf give the tree-top a ghostly pallor. The vigor of the tree is expressed in its abundant fruit, short, oblong, one to two inches in length, with rich plump brown seeds upon which the Indians of Nevada and California have long depended. The wood supplies fuel and charcoal for smelters; and this stunted tree, rarely over twenty feet in height, forms nut orchards for the aborigines and the scattered population of whatever race, between altitudes of five and seven thousand feet. From the western slopes of the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, it ranges to the eastern slopes of the southern Sierra Nevada, to their western slopes at the head waters of King's River, and southward to northern Arizona and to the mountains of southern California.
John Muir says:
"It is the commonest tree of the short mountain ranges of the Great Basin. Tens of thousands of acres are covered with it, forming bountiful orchards for the red man. Being so low and accessible, the cones are easily beaten off with poles, and the nuts are procured by roasting until the scales open. To the tribes of the desert and sage plains these seeds are the staff of life. They are eaten either raw or parched, or in the form of mush, or cakes, after being pounded into meal. The time of nut harvest is the merriest time of the year. An industrious, squirrelish family can gather fifty or sixty bushels in a single month before the snow comes, and then their bread for the winter is sure."
THE PITCH PINES
Pitch pines have usually heavy coarse-grained, dark-colored wood, rich in resin--a nuisance to the carpenter. The leaf-bundles have persistent sheaths. The cone scales are thick and usually armed. "Hard pine" is a carpenter's synonym. The group includes some of the most valuable timber trees in American forests.
=The Longleaf Pine=
_P. palustris_, Mill.
The longleaf pine is preëminent in importance in the lumber trade and in the production of naval stores. It stretches in a belt about one hundred and twenty-five miles wide, somewhat back from the coast, all the way from Virginia to Tampa Bay and west to the Mississippi River. Isolated forests are scattered in northern Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas.
The trees are tall, often exceeding one hundred feet in height; with trunks slender in proportion, rarely reaching three feet in diameter. The narrow, irregular head is formed of short stout twisted limbs on the upper third of the trunk. The leaves are from twelve to eighteen inches long, forming dense tufts at the ends of the branches. Being flexible they droop and sway on the ends of erect branches like shining fountains, their emerald lightened by the silvery sheaths that invest each group of three.
Sapling longleaf pines have recently entered the market for Christmas greens in Northern cities. This threatens the renewal of longleaf forests that have fallen to the axe of the lumberman. Unless Federal restriction comes to the rescue, there is little hope of saving this young growth, for nothing can exceed in beauty a three-foot sapling of longleaf pine as a Christmas decoration.
The lumber of this species is the "Southern pine" of the builder. Heavy, strong, yellowish brown, durable, it has a tremendous vogue for flooring and the interior finish of buildings. It is used in the construction of railway cars. Its durability in contact with water accounts for its use in bridge-building, and for masts and spars of vessels. A great deal of this lumber is exported for use in European shipyards. It has replaced the dwindling supply of white pine for building purposes throughout the North, and the strong demand for it has been followed by lumbering of the most destructive and wasteful type, because the forests are owned privately.
In the early days the American colonists in Virginia tapped the longleaf pine, collected the resin from the bleeding wounds, and boiled it down for pitch and tar. These crude beginnings established an industry now known as the "orcharding" of the longleaf pine. After a century of wastefulness and wanton destruction of the trees, it has become patent to all that scientific methods must be resorted to in the production of turpentine and other products derived from the living trees. Otherwise the dwindling industry will soon come to an end.
Resin is the sap of the tree. The first problem is to draw it in a manner least wasteful of the product, and least dangerous to the life of the tree. The second process is the melting of the collected resin in a still and the drawing off of the volatile turpentine. What is left solidifies and is known as _rosin_.
"Boxing" the trees was the cutting of a grooved incision low on the trunk, with a hollow at the base of the vertical trough to hold the discharge of the bleeding sap-wood. Resin-gatherers visited the tapped trees and emptied the pockets into buckets by means of a ladle. They also scraped away the hardened sap and widened the wounds to induce the flow from new tissues. This method cost the life of the tree in two or three years, and it became a prey to disease and a menace to the whole forest, as fuel for fires accidentally started. Nowadays, all reasonable owners of longleaf pine have discarded the old-fashioned boxing and installed methods approved by the Department of Forestry.
Tar was formerly derived from the slow burning of wood in a clay-lined pit. The branches, roots and other lumber refuse, cut in small sizes were heaped in a compact mound and covered with sods and earth. Smoldering fires soon induced a flow of smoky tar, thick as molasses, in the bottom of the pit. In due time the flow ceased, the fires went out, and charcoal was the result of this slow burning. Removing the charcoal, the tar became available for various purposes; boiled until it lost its liquid character, it became tough sticky _pitch_. This primitive pit method of extracting tar and making charcoal has been abandoned wherever intelligence governs the industry, and distillation processes have been installed.
=The Shortleaf Pine=
_P. echinata_, Mill.
The shortleaf pine ranks second to the longleaf in importance to the lumber industries of the East and South. It ranges from Staten Island, New York, to north Florida, and west through West Virginia, eastern Tennessee, southern Missouri, Louisiana and eastern Texas. It reaches its largest size and greatest abundance west of the Mississippi River, where great forests, practically untouched thirty years ago, have become the centre of the "yellow pine" industry, out of which vast fortunes have been made. The wood is preferred by builders, because it is less rich in resin, softer and therefore more easily worked. Young trees yield turpentine and pitch, and with the longleaf and the Cuban pine much forest growth has suffered destruction in the production of these commodities.
The slender tree equals the longleaf in height and bears its dark green leaves in clusters of twos and threes, scattered on short branches that form a narrow loose head. The pale green, stout branchlets are lightened by the silvery sheaths of the young leaves (_see illustrations, pages 214-215_) which are short only in comparison with the companion species, the longleaf. The cones are abundant; the seeds numerous, winged for flight, retaining their vitality longer than most pine seeds. The tree is less sensitive to injuries and has the propensity, unusual in the pine family, of throwing up suckers from the roots. In open competition, this pine will hold its own against the invasion of other trees, if only allowed to do so. Much of the deforested territory, let alone, will cover itself with a ripe crop of shortleaf pine lumber in a hundred years.
=The Cuban Pine=
_P. Caribaea_, Morelet
The Cuban pine stands third in the triumvirate of lumber pines of the South. This is the "swamp pine" or "slash pine," found in the coast regions from South Carolina throughout Florida, and along the Gulf Coast to the Pearl River in Louisiana. It is a beautiful pine--tall, with dense crown of dark green leaves, in twos and threes, eight to twelve inches long, falling at the end of their second season, before they lose their brightness. A large part of the turpentine of commerce has been derived from these coast forests, as well as lumber, which takes its place in the Northern market with the longleaf and the shortleaf.
Natural reforestation has taken place in the Southeast, and a large part of the turpentine exported by Georgia and South Carolina to-day, is from second-growth Cuban pine, on land from which the lumber companies have stripped the virgin growth.
=The Loblolly Pine=
_P. Taeda_, Linn.
The loblolly or old field pine chooses land generally sterile and otherwise worthless. It grows in swamps along the Atlantic coast, from New Jersey through the Carolinas, and follows the Gulf from Tampa Bay into Texas. Inland, it is found from the Carolinas to Arkansas and Louisiana. It has remarkable vitality of seed and seedlings, which do equally well on sterile uplands, on water-soaked ground, or where soil is light and sandy. It is very apt to take possession of land once cleared for agriculture. The young trees crowd together and grow with tremendous vigor the first years of their lives, successfully holding large tracts in pure forests. The limbs are short, thick, matted, forming a compact rounded head; the leaves slender, stiff, twisted, pale-green, six to nine inches long, in groups of threes. The wood is rich in resin, but differs greatly in quality with age and the fertility of the soil. "Rosemary pine" was heavy, hard, close-grained, with a thin rim of soft sap-wood. This famous lumber, preferred by shipbuilders of many countries for masts, grew in the virgin forest of the Carolinas. Giants were cut in the rich marsh lands back from the Sounds. But the small loblolly pine, grown on sandy soil, is but third-grade lumber, the sap-wood three times as thick as the heart-wood and exceedingly coarse-grained. One merit has recently been discovered in this lumber, that formerly blackened before it was seasoned, by the invasion of a fungous growth. It quickly absorbs creosote, which renders it immune from decay. It is used in the building of docks, cars, boats, and locally in house-building. Its wood makes a sharp, quick heat when dried. It is used in bakeries and brick kilns, and in charcoal-burning.
=The Pitch Pine=
_P. rigida_, Mill.
The pitch pine goes down to the very water's edge on the sand-dunes along the New-England Coast, and spreads on worthless land from New Brunswick to Georgia and west to Ontario and Kentucky. Occasionally in cultivation the tree is symmetrical, and grows to considerable size. In the most favorable situations, however, it rarely exceeds fifty feet in height, with gnarled rough branches, oftenest irregular in form and becoming painfully grotesque with age. The persistence of its clustered black cones adds to the tree's ugliness; and the tufted, scant foliage has a sickly yellowish-green color when new, and becomes darker and twisted the second year. The cones are armed with stout thorns and often remain on the trees ten or twelve years. The knots, particularly, are rich in resin--the delight of camping parties. "Pine-knots" and "candlewood" are household necessities in regions where these trees are the prevailing species of pine.
Starved as is its existence, the pitch pine springs up with amazing vigor after a fire. Suckers are sent up about the roots of the fire-killed trees, and the wind scatters the seeds broadcast for a new crop. The chief merit of the tree is that it grows on worthless land, and holds with its gnarled roots the shifting sand-dunes of the New-England Coast better than any other tree.
=The Gray Pine=
_P. divaricata_, Sudw.
The gray pine goes farther north than any other pine, following the McKenzie River to the Arctic Circle. From Nova Scotia to the Athabasca River, it covers barren ground, reaching its greatest height, seventy feet, in pure forests north of Lake Superior. In Michigan it forms the "jack-pine plains" of the Lower Peninsula. As a rule it is a crouching, sprawling tree, its twigs covered with scant short dingy leaves in twos, averaging an inch in length. The wood is a great boon to the regions this tree inhabits. It is light, soft, weak, and close-grained; used for posts, railroad ties, building material and fuel. Its seeds germinate better from cones that have been scorched by fire.
=The Digger Pine=
_P. Sabiniana_, Dougl.
The digger pine is a western California tree of the semi-arid foothill country. Gray-green, sparse foliage on the gnarled branches gives the tree a forlorn starved look, as it stands or crouches, singly or in scattered groups, along the gravelly sun-baked slopes. The great cones, six to ten inches long, fairly loading the branches, express most emphatically the vigor of the tree. The thickened scales protrude at a wide angle from the central core, and each bears a strong beak, triangular, flattened like a shark's tooth, but curved. The rich oily nuts, as big as lima beans, furnish a nourishing food to the Indians. The Digger tribe harvested these nuts, and the pioneer gave the tree the tribal name.
=The Western Pitch Pine=
_P. Coulteri_, D. Don.
The Western pitch pine, most abundant in the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains, at elevations of about a mile above the sea, has cones not unlike those of the digger pine, in the armament of their scales. These are notable by being the heaviest fruits borne by any pine tree. Occasionally they exceed fifteen inches in length and weigh eight pounds. The seeds are one-half an inch in length, not counting the thin wing, which is often an inch long.
The leaves of this "big-cone" pine match the cones. They are stout, stiff, dark blue-green, six to sixteen inches long, three in a bundle, which has a sheath an inch or more in length. Crowded on the ends of the branches, these leaves would entitle this tree to qualify as a "foxtail" pine, except for the fact that the foliage persists into the third and fourth year, which clothes the branches far back toward the trunk and gives the tree a luxuriant crown. The dry slopes and ridges of the Coast Ranges of California are beautified by small groves and scattered specimens of this striking and picturesque pine, so unlike its neighbors. Its wood is used only for fuel. In European countries this is a popular ornamental pine, planted chiefly for its great golden-brown cones.
=The Knob-cone Pine=
_P. attenuata_, Lemm.
The knob-cone pine inhabits the Coast Ranges from the San Bernardino Mountains northward on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains, into southwestern Oregon, where it forms pure forests over large areas, its altitude limit being four thousand feet. It is a tall slim tree of the hot dry fire-swept foothills, and it comes again with absolute certainty after forest fires. The clustered cones, three to six inches long, are amazingly hard and do not open at maturity, but wait for the death of the tree. Leaves three to seven inches long, in clusters of three, firm, rigid, pale yellow or bluish green, cover the tree with a sparse thin foliage-mass; but the branches, new and old, are covered with cones, many of which are being swallowed up by the growth of wood on trunk and limb. Thirty or forty years these cones may hang, their seeds never released and never losing their vitality, until fire destroys the tree. Then the scales open and the winged seeds are scattered broadcast. They germinate and cover the deforested slopes with a crop of knob-cone pine saplings that soon claim all standing room and cover the scars of fire completely.
=The Monterey Pine=
_P. radiata_, D. Don.
The Monterey pine, like its companion, the Torrey pine, is restricted to a very narrow area. They grow together on Santa Rosa Island. At Point Pinos, south of Monterey Bay, this tree stands a hundred feet in height, with trunks occasionally five to six feet in diameter, its branches spreading into a round luxuriant, though narrow, head. From Pescadero to San Simeon Bay, in a narrow belt a few miles wide, and on the neighboring islands, this tree finds its limited natural range; but the horticulturist has noted the silvery sheen of its young growth and the rich bright green that never dulls in its foliage. Its quick growth and handsome form in cultivation make it the most desirable pine for park and shade planting in California. Indeed it is a favorite park tree north to Vancouver along the Coast. It has been introduced into Europe and is occasionally met in parks in the Southeastern states.
=The Western Yellow Pine=
_P. ponderosa_, Laws.
The Western yellow pine forms on the Colorado Plateau the most extensive pine forests of the American continent. Mountain slopes, high mesas, dry canyon sides, even swamps, if they occur at elevations above twenty-five hundred feet, furnish suitable habitats for this amazing species, in some of its varying forms. From British Columbia and the Black Hills it follows the mountains through the Coast Ranges, Sierras, and the Great Continental Divide, to the highlands of Texas and into Mexico, forming the most extensive pine forests in the world. All sorts of construction work draw upon this wonderful natural supply of timber, from the droughty western counties of the Dakotas, Nebraska and Texas, to the Pacific Coast.
The typical tree has thick plates of cinnamon-red bark, a massive trunk, five to eight feet in diameter, one hundred to two hundred feet high, with many short, thick, forked branches in a spire-like head. In arid regions the trunk is shorter and the head becomes broad and round-topped. Near the timber line and in swamps, the trees are stunted and the bark is nearly black.
The leaves of this pine tree are two or three in a bundle, stout, dark yellow-green, five to eleven inches long, deciduous during their third season. Their color has given the name to the species, for the wood is not yellow, but light red, with nearly white sap-wood.
On the way to the Yosemite, the traveler meets the yellow pine--splendid tracts of it--with the giant sugar pine, in open park-like areas, where each individual tree has room to manifest the noble strength of its tall shaft.
The flowers appear in May, brightening the even color of the shiny leaves with their pink or brown staminate clusters two or three inches wide. The crimson pistillate cones hide at the ends of the branches, lengthening into fruits three to ten inches in length, and half as wide. Strong, recurving tips, armed with slender prickles, are seen in the scales of the reddish-brown cones that fall soon after they spread and liberate the winged seeds. These are produced in abundance, are scattered widely by the wind, and accomplish the renewal of these mountain forests.
The bark is usually very thick at the bases of the trunks, reaching eighteen inches on the oldest trees. With this cloak wrapped about its living cambium, the yellow pine is able, better than most trees, to survive a sweeping forest fire.
Botanists have found _P. ponderosa_ extremely variable, and they quarrel among themselves about species and variety, for the tree endures many climates, adapts itself to varying conditions and develops a type for each habitat and region. In old lake basins on the Sierra slopes, "variety _Jeffreyi_, Vasey," is the name given to the gigantic yellow pine, which there finds food and moisture in abundance and reaches its finest proportions and its greatest lumber value.
In the Rocky Mountains, "variety _scopulorum_, Engelm.," is the type. "But all its forms can be traced to a common origin and so the parent species stands; and despite man's devastating axe the yellow pine flourishes in the drenching rains and fog of the northern coast at the level of the sea, in the snow-laden blasts of the mountains, in the white glaring sunshine of the interior plateaus and plains, and on the borders of mirage-haunted deserts, volcanoes, and lava beds,--waving its bright plumes in the hot winds undaunted, blooming every year for centuries, and tossing big ripe cones among the cinders and ashes of nature's hearths." (_John Muir._)
=The Scrub Pine=
_P. contorta_, Loud.
The scrub pine is the humble parent of one of the splendid Western lumber pines, whose description comes under its varietal name. Down the coast of Alaska, usually in sphagnum bogs, on sand-dunes, in tide-pools and deep swamps to Cape Mendocino, the indomitable, altogether-admirable scrub pine holds its own against cold, salt air and biting arctic blasts. No matter how stunted, gnarly and round-shouldered these trees are, one thing they do, often when only a few inches high: _they bear cones_, and keep them for years; and each season add more. Up from the sea the scrub pine climbs, ascending the Coast Ranges and western slopes of the Cascade Mountains, changing its habit to a tree twenty to thirty feet tall with thick branches and dark red-brown bark, checked into oblong plates. Gummy exudations of this pitch pine make it peculiarly liable to running fires. Thousands of acres are destroyed every summer, but they seize the land again and soon cover it with the young growth. This happens because the burned trees drop their cones, which open and set free the seeds which have never lost their vitality.
In all the vast region over which this vagrant tree swarms, it furnishes firewood and shelter. The pioneer blesses it, and a great multitude of wild things, both plant and animal, maintain their lives in comfort and security because of its protection.
The lodge-pole pine or tamarack pine is but a variety (_Murrayana_) of _P. contorta_, that grows in forests on both slopes of the Rocky Mountains of Montana and Wyoming, at elevations of from seven to eight thousand feet, and stretches away into British Columbia and Alaska, and southward to the San Jacinto Range. Between eight thousand and nine thousand five hundred feet in altitude, along the Sierra Nevada in California, it reaches its greatest size and beauty, and forms extensive dense forests. The young trees have very slender trunks, and often stand crowded together like wheat on the prairie. An average forest specimen is five inches in diameter, when thirty or forty feet in height. No wonder the Indian in Wyoming and Colorado called it "the lodge-pole pine," for their supple trunks fitted these trees, while yet saplings, to support the lodge he built.
Richer, moister ground nourishes this fortunate offspring of the scrub pine. The two-leaved foliage, usually about two inches long, wears a cheerful yellow-green, while the parent tree is dark and sombre, with leaves an inch in length. The hard, strong, brown wood of _contorta_ contrasts strikingly with that of its variety, which is light yellow or nearly white--soft, weak, straight-grained and easily worked. Its abundance in regions where other timber is scarce, brings it into general use for construction work. It also furnishes railroad ties, mine timbers and fuel, with the minimum of labor, since trunks of proper sizes can easily be selected.
The Indians, whose food supply was always precarious, gathered branches and made a soft pulp of the inner bark, scraped out in the growing season. This they baked, after shaping it into huge cakes, in pit ovens built of stones, and heated for hours by burning in them loads of firewood. When the embers were burned out, the oven was cleaned and the cakes put in. Later they were smoked with a damp fire of moss, which preserved them indefinitely. "Hard bread" of this type provisioned the Indian's canoe on long trips. Inedible until boiled, it was a staple winter food at home and on long expeditions, among various tribes of the Northwest.
=The Red Pine=
_P. resinosa_, Ait.
The red pine, also called the "Norway pine" for no particular reason, is something of an anomaly. Its wood is soft like that of the white pine with which it grows, and though _resinosa_ means "full of resin," it is not so rich as several other pitch pines. Its paired leaves and red bark reveal its kinship with the Scotch pine, a European species, very common in cultivation in America.
Seemingly intermediate between soft and hard pines, _P. resinosa_ appeals to lumbermen and landscape gardeners because it embodies the good points of both classes. No handsomer species grows in the forests, from New Brunswick to Minnesota and south into Pennsylvania. The sturdy red trunk makes a bright color contrast with the broad symmetrical pyramid of boughs clothed in abundant foliage. The paired, needle-like leaves, dark green and shining, are six inches in length. The flowers are abundant and bright red, more showy than is ordinary in the pine family. Brown cones one to three inches long with thin unarmed scales, discharge their winged seeds in early autumn, but cling to the branches until the following summer.
The wood of red pine is pale red, light in weight, close-grained with yellowish or nearly white sap-wood. Logs a hundred feet and more in length used to be shipped out of Canadian woods to England. Singularly free from large knots and other blemishes, they made huge spars and masts of vessels, as well as piles for dockyards, bridges, etc. Other woods have proved more durable, and the largest red pine timber has been harvested. So its importance in the lumber trade has declined.
But in cultivation the red pine holds its own for its quick growth, its hardiness, its lusty vigor and its beauty of color contrasts. It grows on sterile ground exposed to the sea, forming groves of great beauty where other pines would languish and die. For shelter belts, inland, it is equally dependable, and as specimen trees in parks and gardens it has few equals. At no season of the year does it lose its fresh look of health. Young trees come readily from seed, and throughout their lives they are unusually free from injuries by insects and fungi.
THE SPRUCES
The distinguishing mark of spruce trees is the woody or horny projection on which the leaf is set. Look at the twigs of a tree which you think may be a fir or a spruce. Wherever the leaves have fallen, the spruce twig is roughened by these spirally arranged leaf-brackets. Leaf-scars on a fir twig are level with the bark, leaving the twig smooth. Spruce twigs are always roughened, as described above.
Most spruce trees have distinctly four-angled leaves, sharp-pointed and distributed spirally around the shoot, not two-ranked like fir leaves. They are all pyramidal trees with flowers and fruits of the coniferous type. The cones are always pendent and there is an annual crop. The wood is soft, not conspicuously resinous, straight-grained and valuable as lumber.
The genus picea comprises eighteen species, seven of which belong to American forests. These include some of the most beautiful of coniferous trees.
=The Norway Spruce=
_Picea excelsa_, Link.
The Norway spruce (_see illustration, page 246_) is the commonest species in cultivation. It is extensively planted for wind-breaks, hedges and shelter belts, where its long lower arms rest on the ground and the upper limbs shingle over the lower ones, forming a thick leafy shelter against drifting snow and winds.
=The Black Spruce=
_P. Mariana_, B. S. & P.
The black spruce is a ragged, unkempt dingy tree, with short drooping branches, downy twigs, and stiff dark blue-green foliage, scarcely half an inch long. Its cones, least in size of all the spruce tribe, are about one inch long and they remain on the branches for years (_See illustration, page 247_).
Rarely higher than fifty feet, these scraggly undersized spruces are ignored by horticulturists and lumbermen, but the wood-pulp man has taken them eagerly. The soft weak yellow wood, converted into paper, needs very little bleaching. From the far North the species covers large areas throughout Canada, choosing cold bogs and swamp borders, or well-drained bottom lands. In the United States it extends south along the mountains to Virginia and to central Wisconsin and Michigan.
=The Red Spruce=
_P. rubens_, Sarg.
The red spruce forms considerable forests from Newfoundland to North Carolina, following the mountains and growing best in well-drained upland soil. This Eastern spruce is more deserving of cultivation than the one just described, for its leaves, dark yellow-green and shining, make the tree cheerful-looking. The slender downy twigs are bright red, and there is a warm reddish tone in the brown bark. The winter buds are ruddy; the flowers purple; and the glossy cones, one to two inches long, change from purple to pale reddish brown before they mature and drop to pieces. Even in crowded forests this spruce keeps its lower limbs and looks hale and fresh by the prompt casting of its early ripening cones.
The pale red wood is peculiarly adapted for sounding-boards of musical instruments. It has been used locally in buildings, but of late the wood-pulp mills get most of this timber.
=The Engelmann Spruce=
_P. Engelmanni_, Engelm.
The Engelmann spruce is the white spruce of the Rocky Mountains and the Cascade Range of Washington and Oregon, which forms great forests on high mountain slopes from Montana and Idaho to New Mexico and Arizona. Always in damp places, this thin-barked beautiful tree is safest, from fire. The leaves are blue-green, soft and flexible but with sharp callous tips. The cones are about two inches long, their thin scales narrowing to the blunt tips. Each year a crop of seeds is cast and the cones fall. Running fires destroy the seed crop with the standing trees, making renewal of the species impossible in the burnt-over tracts. For this reason, this beautiful spruce tree is oftenest found on the higher altitudes, or where wet ground and banks of snow defend it from its arch enemy. The tree is satisfactory in cultivation, but never equal to the wild-forest specimens. The wood is used locally for building purposes, for fuel and charcoal.
=The Blue Spruce=
_P. Parryana_, Sarg.
The blue spruce well known in Eastern lawns as the "Colorado blue spruce," is a crisp-looking, handsome tree, broadly pyramidal, with rigid branches and stout horny-pointed leaves, blue-green to silvery white, exceeding an inch in length. At home on the mountains of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, it reaches a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet in height and a trunk diameter of three feet, and becomes thin and ragged at maturity. The same fate overtakes the trim little lawn trees, so perfect in color and symmetry for a few years.
=Tideland Spruce=
_P. Sitchensis_, Carr.
The tideland spruce is the most important lumber tree in Alaska. It inhabits the coast region from Cape Mendocino, in California, northward; and is abundant on wet, sandy and swampy soil. The conspicuous traits of this tree are its strongly buttressed trunk, one hundred to two hundred feet tall, often greatly swollen at the base; the graceful sweep of its wide low-spreading lower limbs; and the constant play of light and shadows in the tree-top, due to the lustrous sheen on the bright foliage. It is a magnificent tree, one of the largest and most beautiful of the Western conifers, indomitable in that it climbs from the sea-level to altitudes three thousand feet above, and follows the coast farther north than any other conifer.
THE FIRS
In a forest of evergreens the spire form, needle leaves, and some other traits belong to several families. To distinguish the firs from the spruces, which they closely resemble in form and foliage, notice the position of the cones. All fir trees hold their ripe cones erect. No other family with large cones has this striking characteristic. All the rest of the conifers have pendent cones, except the small-fruited cypresses and arbor-vitaes.
All fir trees belong to the genus _abies_, whose twenty-five species are distributed from the Far North to the highlands of tropical regions in both the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. All are tall pyramidal trees, with wide-spreading horizontal limbs bearing thick foliage masses, and with bark that contains vesicles full of resinous balsam. The branches grow in whorls and spread like fern fronds, covered for eight or nine years with the persistent leaves. Circular scars are left on the smooth branches when they fall.
The leaves are the distinguishing character of the genus when cones are lacking. They are usually flat, two-ranked on the twig, without stems, and blunt, or even notched at the tip. For these typical leaves one must look on the lower sterile branches of the tree, and back of the growing shoots, where leaves are apt to be crowded and immature. The cones are borne near the tops of the trees, and on these branches the leaves are often crowded and not two-ranked as they are below. The flowers of fir trees are abundant and showy, the staminate clusters appearing on the under sides of the platforms of foliage; the pistillate held erect on platforms higher up on the tree's spire. Always the flowers are borne on the shoots of the previous season. The cone fruits are cylindrical or ovoid, ripening in a single season and discharging their seeds at maturity. The stout tapering axis of the cone persists after seeds and scales have fallen.
The bark of fir trees is thin, smooth, and pale, with abundant resin vesicles, until the trees are well grown. As age advances the bark thickens and becomes deeply furrowed. The wood is generally pale, coarse-grained, and brittle.
=The Balsam Fir=
_Abies balsamea_, Mill.
The balsam fir is probably best known as the typical Christmas tree of the Northeastern states and the source of Canada balsam, used in laboratories and in medicine. Fresh leaves stuff the balsam pillows of summer visitors to the North Woods. In the lumber trade and in horticulture this fir tree cuts a sorry figure, for its wood is weak, coarse, and not durable, and in cultivation it is short-lived, and early loses its lower limbs.
Throughout New England, northward to Labrador, and southward along the mountains to southwestern Virginia, this tree may be known at a glance by its two-ranked, pale-lined leaves, lustrous and dark green above, one half to one and one half inches long, sometimes notched on twigs near the top of the tree. Rich dark purple cones, two to four inches long, with thin plain-margined, broad scales, stand erect, glistening with drops of balsam, on branches near the top of the tree. The same balsam exudes from bruises in the smooth bark. By piercing the white blisters and systematically wounding branch and trunk, the limpid balsam is made to flow freely, and is collected as a commercial enterprise in some parts of Canada. "Oil of fir" also is obtained from the bark.
=The Balsam Fir=
_A. Fraseri_, Poir.
This balsam fir, much more luxuriant in foliage, and worthier of cultivation as an ornamental tree, is native to the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina. The purple cones are ornamented by pale yellow cut-toothed bracts that turn back over the edge of the plain scale. Limited in range, but forming forests between the limits of four and six thousand feet in altitude, this tree is confined to local uses as lumber and fuel.
All the other firs of America are Western, and among these are some of the tree giants of the world.
=The Red Fir=
_A. magnifica_, A. Murr.
The magnificent red fir is called by John Muir "the noblest of its race." In its splendid shaft that reaches two hundred and fifty feet in height, and a trunk diameter of seven feet, there is a symmetry and perfection of finish throughout that is achieved by no other tree. One above another in graduated lengths the branches spread in level collars, the oldest drooping on the ground, the rest horizontal, their framework always five main branches that carry luxuriant flat plumes of silvery needles. Each leaf is almost equally four-sided, ribbed above and below, with pale lines on all sides, so wide as to make the new growth silvery throughout the season. Later these leaves become blue-green, and persist for about ten years. Only on the lower side of the branch are the leaves two-ranked.
The bark of this fir tree is covered with dark brown scales, deeply divided into broad rounded ridges, broken by cross fissures when old. Out toward the tips of the branches the bark is silvery white. In mid-June the flowers appear, the staminate in profuse clusters against the silvery leaf-linings, bright red, on the under sides of the platforms. It is a blind or stupid person who can travel in fir woods and fail to notice this wonderful flower pageant, that may be viewed by merely looking upward. The pistillate flowers, greenish yellow, tipped with pink, are out of sight as a rule, among the needles in the tree-tops. They ripen into tall cylindrical cones, six to eight inches long and half as wide, that fall to pieces at maturity, discharging their broad thin scales with the purple iridescent winged seeds.
Pure forests of this splendid fir tree are found in southern Oregon among the Cascade Mountains, between five and seven thousand feet above the sea. It is the commonest species in the forest belt of the Sierra Nevada, between elevations of six thousand and nine thousand feet. From northern California, it follows the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, climbing to ten thousand feet in its southernmost range. A variety, _Shastensis_, Lemm., is the red fir with bright yellow fringed bracts on its stout cones. This ornament upon its fruits seems to be the chief distinguishing character of the form which occurs with the parent species on the mountains in Oregon and northern California, and recurs in the southern Sierra Nevada.
The best defense of this superb red fir is the comparative worthlessness of its soft, weak wood. Coarse lumber for cheap buildings, packing cases and fuel makes the only demands upon it. In European parks it is successfully grown as an ornamental tree, and has proved hardy in eastern Massachusetts.
=The Noble Fir=
_A. nobilis_, Lindl.
The noble fir or red fir is another giant of the Northwest. On the western slopes of the Cascade Mountains of Washington and Oregon it reaches occasionally two hundred and fifty feet in height, differing from _magnifica_ in being round-topped instead of pyramidal before maturity. Its red-brown wood, furrowed bark and the red staminate flowers justify its name. The twigs are red and velvety for four or five years. The leaves are deeply grooved above, rounded and obscurely ribbed on the lower surface, blue-green, often silvery through their first season, crowded and curved so that the tips point away from the end of the branch.
The oblong cylindrical cones, four to five inches long, are velvety, their scales covered by bracts, shaped and notched like a scallop shell, with a forward-pointing spine, exceeding the bract in length. Forests of this tree at elevations of twenty-five hundred to five thousand feet are found in Washington and northern Oregon, from which limited quantities of the brownish-red wood enter the lumber trade under the name of "larch."
=The White Fir=
_A. grandis_, Lindl.
The white fir is a striking figure, from its silvery lined, dark green foliage, its slender pyramidal form that reaches three hundred feet in height, and the vivid green of its mature cones that are destitute of ornament and slenderly cylindrical. From Vancouver Island southward to Mendocino County in California, this tree is common from the sea level to an elevation of four thousand feet. Eastward it extends into Idaho, climbing to seven thousand feet, but choosing always moist soil in the neighborhood of streams. Various uses, woodenwares, packing cases, and fuel consume its soft, coarse wood to a limited extent. The delicate grace of its sweeping down-curving branches makes it one of the most beautiful of our Western firs. It grows rapidly, and is a favorite in European parks.
=The White Fir=
_A. concolor_, Lindl. and Gord.
This white fir is a giant of the Sierras, but a tree of medium height in the Rocky Mountains. Its leaves are often two to three inches long, very unusual for a fir tree, curving to an erect position, pale blue or silvery at first, becoming dull green at the end of two or three years.
On the California Sierras, this silver fir tree lifts its narrow spire two hundred and fifty feet toward the sky and waves great frondlike masses of foliage on pale gray branches. As a much smaller tree, it is found in the arid regions of the Great Basin and of southern New Mexico and Arizona, territory which no other fir tree invades. In gardens of Europe and of our Eastern states this is a favorite fir tree, often known as the "blue fir" and the "silver fir" from its pale bark and foliage, whose blue cast is not always permanent. Eastern nurseries obtain their best trees from seeds gathered in the Rocky Mountains.
THE DOUGLAS SPRUCE
The Douglas spruce (_Pseudotsuga mucronata_, Sudw.), ranks with the giant arbor-vitaes, firs, and sequoias in the forests of the Pacific Coast. Thousands of square miles of pure forest of this species occur in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Here the trees stand even, like wheat in a grain field, the tallest reach four hundred feet, the redwood its only rival. Nowhere but in the redwood forests is there such a heavy stand of timber on this continent. No forest tree except sequoias equals the Douglas spruce in massiveness of trunk and yield of straight-grained lumber.
The genus _pseudotsuga_ stands botanically in a position intermediate between firs and hemlocks. Our tree giant is as often called the Douglas fir as Douglas spruce. The lumberman sells the output of his mills under the trade name, "Oregon pine." This is perhaps the best known lumber in all the Western country. It has a great reputation abroad, where timbers of the largest size are used for masts, spars, piles for wharves and bridges, and for whatever uses heavy timbers are needed. The wood is stronger in proportion to its weight than that of any other large conifer in the country. It is tough, durable, and elastic. Its only faults are its extreme hardness and liability to warp when cut into boards. These faults are noted only by carpenters who use the wood for interior finish of houses. "Red pine" it is called in regions of the Great Basin, where the trees grow smaller than on the Coast, and are put to general lumber purposes. It is variable in quality, but always pale yellow, striped with red, and handsomely wavy when quarter-sawed; distractingly so in the "slash grain," oftenest seen in the interior finish of the typical California bungalow.
The living tree is a superb, broad-based pyramid, bearing a load of crowded drooping branches, where it has a chance to assume its normal habit. A delicate lace-like drooping spray of yellowish or bluish green leaves, flat, spreading at right angles from the twig, gives the Douglas spruce its hale, abundant vigor. The dark red staminate flowers glow in late winter against the yellow foliage mass of the new leaves; but even the flowers are not so showy as the drooping cones, two to four inches long, their plain scales adorned with bracts, notched and bearing a whip that extends half an inch beyond the scales. Blue-green, shading to purple, with red-lipped scales and bright green bracts, these cones are truly the handsomest ornaments worn by any tree.
Finally, this paragon of conifers surprises Eastern nurserymen by outstripping other seedlings in vigor and quickness of growth. Rocky Mountain seed does best. The Oregon trees furnish seed to European nurseries and seedlings from Europe grow quickly into superb ornamental trees.
THE HEMLOCKS
Unlike any other conifer, the hemlock mounts its evergreen leaves on short petioles, jointed to projecting, horny brackets on the twig. At any season this character determines the family name of a group of exceptionally graceful pyramidal conifers. The Eastern hemlocks have their leaves arranged in a flat spray, silvery white underneath, by pale lines on the underside of the flat blunt-pointed blade (_See illustration, page 246_). An abundance of pendent cones is borne annually. The wood of hemlocks is comparatively worthless but the bark is rich in tannin, and so the tree is important in the leather trade.
=The Hemlock=
_Tsuga Canadensis_, Carr.
The hemlock lifts its dark green, feathery spray above the sturdy trunk into a splendid broad pyramid. In all rocky uplands from Nova Scotia to Alabama and west to Minnesota, the drooping lower branches sweep the ground, and the tree is often half buried in snow. But in spring every twig is dancing and waving yellow plumes of new foliage, the picture of cheerfulness as the sunlight sifts through the tree-tops. In May the new blossoms sprinkle all the leafy twigs--the staminate, yellow; the pistillate, pale violet. Looking up from below, one sees a charming iridescent effect when the blossoms add their color to the shimmering silver which lines the various platforms of foliage. The little red-brown cones cling to the twigs all winter, slowly parting their scales to release the winged seeds. Squirrels climb the trees in the fall and cut off these cones to store away for winter use.
"Peelers" go into the woods in May, when the new growth is well started and the bark will peel readily. They fell and strip hemlock trunks and remove the bark in sheets, which are piled to dry and be measured like cord-wood, and later shipped to the tanneries. The cross-grained coarse wood is left to rot and feed forest fires. Locally, it is useful for the timbers of houses and barns, because it is rigid and never lets go its hold upon a nail or spike.
=The Western Hemlock=
_T. heterophylla_, Sarg.
The Western hemlock is a giant that dominates other trees in the Western mountain forests, famous for their giants of many different names. It is a noble pyramidal tree that reaches two hundred feet in height and a maximum trunk diameter of ten feet. Its heavy horizontal branches droop and hold out feathery tips as light and graceful in the adult monarch as in the sapling of a few years' growth. The characteristic hemlock foliage, lustrous green above and pale below, is two-ranked by the twisting of the slender petioles.
From southeastern Alaska, eastward into Montana and Idaho, and southward to Cape Mendocino in California, this tree climbs from the lowlands to an altitude that exceeds a mile. Wherever there are rich river valleys and the air is humid, this hemlock is superb, the delight of artists and lumbermen. At its highest range it becomes stunted, but always produces its oval, pointed cones in abundance.
Its wood, the strongest and most durable in the hemlock family, is chiefly used in buildings, and the bark for tanning.
=The Mountain Hemlock=
_T. Martensiana_, Sarg.
The mountain hemlock of the West is called by John Muir "the loveliest evergreen in America." Sargent endorses this judgment with emphasis. It grows at high altitudes, fringing upland meadows, watered by glaciers, with groves of the most exquisite beauty. The sweeping, downward-drooping branches, clothed with abundant pea-green foliage, silver-lined, resist wind storms and snow burdens by the wonderful pliancy of their fibres. In early autumn the trees are bent over so as to form arches. Young forests are thus buried out of sight for six months of the year. With the melting of the snow they right themselves gradually, and among the new leaves appear the flowers, dark purple cones and staminate star-flowers, blue as forget-me-nots. Three-angled leaves, whorled on the twig, and cones two to three inches long, set this hemlock apart from its related species, but the leaf-stalk settles once for all the question of its family name.
THE SEQUOIAS
Nowhere else in the world are conifers found in such extensive forests and in such superlative vigor and stupendous size as in the states that border the Pacific Ocean. California is particularly the paradise of the conifers. All of the species that make the forests of the Northwest the wonder of travelers and the pride of the states are found in equally prodigal size and extent in California. To these forests are added groves of sequoias--the Big Tree and the redwood, the former found nowhere outside of California, the latter reaching into Oregon. Once the sequoias had a wide distribution in the Old and the New World. With magnolias and many other luxuriant trees found in warm climates, five species of sequoia extended over the North Temperate zone in both hemispheres, reaching even to the Arctic Circle. The glacial period transformed the climate of the world and destroyed these luxuriant northern forests under a grinding continuous glacier. The rocks of the tertiary and cretaceous periods preserved in fossils the story of these pre-glacial forests. Two of the species of sequoia escaped destruction in tracts the ice sheet did not overwhelm. For ten thousand years, perhaps, the sequoia has held its own in the California groves. Indeed, both species are able to extend their present range if nature is unhindered. The three enemies that threaten sequoia groves are the axe of the lumberman, the forest fire kindled by the waste about sawmills, and the grazing flocks that destroy seedling trees.
=The Big Tree=
_Sequoia Wellingtonia_, Seem.
The Big Tree is the most gigantic tree on the face of the earth, the mightiest living creature in existence. Among the giant sugar pines and red firs it lifts a wonderfully regular, rounded dome so far above the aspiring arrow-tips of its neighbors as to make the best of them look like mere saplings. The massive trunk, clothed with red-brown or purplish bark, is fluted by furrows often more than a foot in depth. The trunk is usually bare of limbs for a hundred or two hundred feet, clearing the forest cover completely before throwing out its angular stout arms. These branch at last into rounded masses of leafy twigs, whose density and brilliant color express the beauty and vigor of eternal youth in a tree which counts its age by thousands of years already.
To see this Big Tree in blossom one must visit the high Sierras while the snow is eight to ten feet deep upon the buttressed base of the huge trunk. It is worth a journey, and that with some hardship in it, to see these trees with all their leafy spray, gold-lined with the multitude of little staminate flowers that sift pollen gold-dust over everything, and fill the air with it. The pistillate flowers, minute, pale green, crowd along the ends of the leafy sprays, their cone scales spread to receive the vitalizing dust brought by the wind.
When spring arrives and starts the flower procession among the lower tree-tops, the spray of the Big Tree is covered with green cones that mature at the end of the second season. They are woody, two to three inches long, and spread their scales wide at a given signal, showering the surrounding woods with the abundant harvest of their minute winged seeds. Each scale bears six to eight of them, each with a circular wing that fits it for a long journey. The cones hang empty on the trees for years.
The leaves of the Big Tree are of the close, twig-hugging, scaly type, never exceeding a half inch in length on the most exuberant-growing shoots. For the most part they are from one fourth to one eighth of an inch in length, sharp pointed, ridged, curved to clasp the stem, and shingled over the leaves above.
John Muir believes there is no absolute limit to the existence of any tree. Accident alone, he thinks, not the wearing out of vital organs, accounts for their death. The fungi that kill the silver fir inevitably before it is three hundred years old touch no limb of the Big Tree with decay. A sequoia must be blown down, undermined, burned down, or shattered by lightning. Old age and disease pass these trees by. Their heads, rising far above the spires of fir and spruce, seem not to court the lightning flash as the lower, pointed trunks do; and yet no aged sequoia can be found whose head has not suffered losses by Jove's thunderbolts. Cheerfully the tree lets go a fraction of its mighty top, and sets about the repair of the damage, with greatly accelerated energy, as if here was an opportunity to expend the tree's pent-up vitality. It is strange to see horizontal branches of great age and size strike upward to form a part of a new, symmetrical dome to replace the head struck off or mangled by lightning. With all the signs of damage lightning has done to these tree giants of the Sierras, but one instance of outright killing of a tree is on record.
The wood of the Big Tree is red and soft, coarse, light, and weak--unfit for must lumber uses. It ought, by all ordinary standards, to be counted scarcely worth the cutting; but the vast quantity yielded by a single tree pays the lumberman huge profits, though he wastes thousands of feet by blasting the mighty shaft into chunks manageable in the sawmill. Shingles, shakes, and fencing consume more of the lumber than general construction--ignoble uses for this noblest of all trees.
The best groves of Big Trees now under government protection are in the grand Sequoia National Park. Near the Yosemite is the famous Mariposa Grove that contains the "grizzly giant" and other specimen trees of great age and size. More than half of the Big Trees are in the hands of speculators and lumber companies. Exploitation of nature's best treasure is as old as the human race. The idea of conservation is still in its infancy.
The ruin by the lumbering interests of a sequoia grove means the drying up of streams and the defeat of irrigation projects in the valleys below. Big Trees inhabit only areas on the western slopes of the Sierras. Wherever they grow their roots have made of the deep soil a sponge that holds the drainage of melting snowbanks and doles it out through streams that flow thence to famishing, hot, wind-swept plains and valleys. When the trees are gone, turbulent, short-lived spring floods exhaust the water supply and do untold damage in the lowlands.
Big Trees have not succeeded in cultivation in our Eastern states, but for many years have been favorites in European gardens and parks. In the native groves the seedlings do not show the virility of the redwoods, though to the south the range of the species is being gradually extended. No tree is more prodigal in seed production and more indifferent, when mature, to the ills that beset ordinary forest trees; yet government protection must be strengthened, private claims must be bought, and scientific forestry maintained in order to prevent the extinction of the species, with the destruction of trees that are, as they stand to-day, the greatest living monuments in the world of plants.
=The Redwood=
_S. sempervirens_, Endl.
The redwood comes down to the sea on the western slopes of the Coast Range, from southern Oregon to Monterey County in California, tempting the lumberman by the wonderful wealth and accessibility of these groves of giant trees. The wood is soft, satiny, red, like the thick, fibrous, furrowed bark that clothes the tall, fluted trunks.
Redwoods are taller than Big Trees, have slenderer trunks and branches and a more light and graceful leaf-spray. The head is pyramidal in young trees, later becoming irregular and narrow, and exceedingly small in forests by the crowding of the trees and the death of lower branches. The leaves on the terminal shoots spread into a flat spray, two-ranked, like those of a balsam fir. Each blade is flat, tapering to both ends, and from one fourth to one half an inch in length. Awl-shaped and much shorter leaves are scattered on year-old twigs, back of the new shoots, resembling the foliage of the Big Tree.
The cones are small and almost globular, maturing in a single season, scarcely an inch long, with three to five winged seeds under each scale. Seedling redwoods come quickly from this yearly sowing, and thrive under the forest cover, unless fire or the trampling feet of grazing flocks destroy them. After the lumberman, the virile redwood sends up shoots around the bleeding stumps, thus reinforcing the seedling tree and promising the renewal of the forest groves in the centuries to come.
Redwood lumber is the most important building material on the Pacific Coast. The hardest and choicest wood comes in limited quantities from the stumps which furnish curly and bird's-eye wood, used by the makers of bric-Ã -brac and high-priced cabinet work. Shingles, siding, and interior finish of houses consume quantities of the yearly output of the mills. Demand for fence posts, railway ties and cooperage increases. Quantities of lumber are shipped east to take the place of white pine no longer obtainable.
In cultivation the redwood is a graceful, quick-growing, beautiful evergreen, successful in the Southeastern states, and often met in European parks and gardens. Weeping forms are very popular abroad.
Government and state protection has made sure the safeguarding for coming generations of some groves of redwoods, containing trees whose size and age rival those of the most ancient Big Trees. But the fact that the redwood, restricted on the map to such a limited territory, is the most important timber tree on the Coast, is a blot upon our vaunted Democracy, which has allowed the cunning of a few small minds to defeat the best interests of the whole people and rob them of forest treasure which might yield its benefits continuously, if properly managed. Government purchase of all sequoia-bearing land, followed by rational methods of harvesting the mature lumber and conserving the young growth, is the ideal solution of the problem. Such a plan would assure the saving of the monumental giants.
THE ARBOR-VITAES
Minute, scale-like leaves, four-ranked, closely overlapping, so as to conceal the wiry twig, mark the genus _thuya_, which is represented in America by two species of slender, pyramidal evergreen trees, whose intricately branched limbs terminate in a flat, open spray (_see illustration, page 262_). "Tree of Life" is the English translation, but the Latin name everywhere is heard.
=Eastern Arbor-vitae=
_Thuya occidentalis_, Linn.
The Eastern arbor-vitae, called also the white cedar, is found in impenetrable pure forest growth, from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick northwestward to the mouth of the Saskatchewan River, always in swampy regions, or along the rocky banks of streams. In the East it follows the mountains to Tennessee, and from Lake Winnipeg it extends south to middle Minnesota and northern Illinois. In cultivation it is oftenest seen as an individual lawn and park tree, or in hedges on boundary lines. It submits comfortably to severe pruning, is easily transplanted, and comes readily from seed. Plantations grow rapidly into fence posts and telegraph poles. The wood is durable in wet ground, but very soft, coarse, and brittle.
=The Red Cedar=
_T. plicata_, D. Don.
The red cedar or canoe cedar is the giant arbor-vitae of the coast region from British Columbia to northern California and east over the mountain ranges into Idaho and northern Montana. Its buttressed trunk is a fluted column one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet high in western Washington and Oregon, along the banks of mountain streams and in the rich bottom land farther seaward. The leaves in a flat spray at once distinguish this tree from any other conifer, for they are pointed, scale-like, closely overlapping each other in alternate pairs.
The clustered cones, with their six or eight seed-bearing scales, seem absurdly small fruits on so huge a tree. None exceeds one half an inch in height, but their number makes up for size deficiency and the seed crop is tremendous.
The Alaskan Indian chooses the tall bole of a red cedar for his totem pole, and from the massive butt hollows out the war canoe and "dug-out" which solve his problems of transportation in summer. Durability is the chief merit of this soft, brittle wood, which is easily worked with the Indian's crude tools. The bark of the tree furnishes the walls of the Indian huts and its inner fibre is the raw material of his cordage--the harness for his dog team, his nets and lines for fishing; and it is the basis of the squaw's basket-weaving industry.
This is the best arbor-vitae for ornamental planting. Its success in Europe is very striking, and from European nurseries it has been successfully re-introduced into the United States, where it is hardy and vigorous. But it fails when taken directly into the North Atlantic states. It must come in via Europe, as nearly all West Coast trees have to do in order to succeed.
THE INCENSE CEDAR
One tree, so magnificent in proportions that it ranks among the giants in our Western forests, stands as the sole American representative of its genus. Its nearest relatives are the arbor-vitaes, sequoias, and the bald cypress of the South.
The incense cedar (_Librocedrus Decurrens_, Torr.) has its name from its resinous, aromatic sap. The tree, when it grows apart from others, forms a perfect tapering pyramid, with flat, plume-like sprays that sweep downward and outward with wonderful lightness and grace. The leaves are scale-like, closely appressed to the wiry twigs, in four ranks, bright green, tinged with gold in late winter, by the abundance of the yellow staminate flowers. The cones are small, narrowly pointed, made of few paired scales, each bearing two seeds. The bark is cinnamon-red in color. The trees occur scattered among other species in open forests from three thousand to six thousand feet above the sea, reaching a height of two hundred feet and a trunk diameter of twelve feet on the Sierra Nevada glacial moraines.
The lumber resembles that of arbor-vitae, and is used for the same purposes. In cultivation the tree is hardy and thrives in parks in the neighborhood of New York. In Europe it has long been a favorite.
THE CYPRESSES
Three genera of pyramidal conifers, with light, graceful leaf-spray, and small woody cones, held erect, compose the group known as cypresses. All have found places in horticulture, for not one of them but has value for ornamental planting. Some species have considerable lumber value.
=The Monterey Cypress=
_Cupressus macrocarpa_, Cord.
The Monterey cypress is now restricted to certain ocean-facing bluffs about Monterey Bay in California. These trees are derelicts of their species. Wind-beaten into grotesqueness of form, unmatched in any other tree near the sea-level, their matted and gnarled branches make a flat and very irregular top above a short, thick, often bent and leaning trunk. Clusters of globular cones stud the twigs behind the leafy spray composed of thread-like wiry twigs, entirely covered with scaly, four-ranked leaves.
In cultivation this cypress grows into a luxuriant, pyramidal tree, often broadening and losing its symmetry, but redeeming it by the grace of its plume-like, outstretched branches. One by one the native cypresses on the crumbling bluffs will go down into Monterey Bay, for the undermining process is eating out their foundations. Wind and wave are slowly but surely sealing their doom. But the species is saved to a much wider territory.
=The European Cypress=
_C. sempervirens_, Linn.
A tall, narrow pyramid of sombre green, the European cypress is found in cemeteries in south Europe and everywhere, planted for ornament. This is the classic cypress, a conventional feature of Italian gardens, the evergreen most frequently mentioned in classical literature. Slow-growing and noted for its longevity, it was the symbol of immortality. It is hardy in the South-Atlantic and Pacific-Coast states, and is a favorite evergreen for hedges in the Southwest.
Three other members of the genus occur on mountain foothills--one in Arizona, two in California--all easily recognized by their scale-like leaves and button-like woody cones, which require two years to mature.
=The White Cedar=
_Chamaecyparis Thyoides_, Britt.
The genus _chamaecyparis_ includes three American species, of tall, narrow pyramidal habit and flat leaf-spray like that of the arbor-vitae. Annual erect globular cones of few, woody scales, produce one to five seeds under each.
This white cedar is the swamp-loving variety of the Atlantic seaboard--its range stretches from Maine to Mississippi. The durability of its white wood gives it considerable importance as a lumber tree. It is particularly dependable when placed in contact with water and exposed to weather. Cedar shingles, fence posts, railroad ties, buckets, and other cooperage consume quantities each year. The trees are important ornamental evergreens, planted for their graceful spray and their dull blue-green leaves. Their maximum height is eighty feet.
=The Lawson Cypress=
_C. Lawsoniana_, A. Murr.
The Lawson cypress lifts its splendid spire to a height of two hundred feet, on the coast mountains of Oregon and California, forming a nearly continuous forest belt twenty miles long, between Point Gregory and the mouth of the Coquille River. Spire-like, with short, horizontal branches, this species bears a leaf-spray of feathery lightness, bright green, from the multitude of minute paired leaf-scales, and adorned with the clustered pea-sized cones, which are blue-green and very pale until they ripen.
The wood of this giant cypress is used in house-finishing and in boat-building; for flooring, fencing, and for railroad ties.
=The Bald Cypress=
_Taxodium distichum_, Rich.
The bald cypress is the one member of the cypress group that sheds its foliage each autumn, following the example of the tamarack. In the Far South, river swamps are often covered with a growth of these cypresses whose trunks are strangely swollen at the base, and often hollow. The flaring buttresses are prolonged into the main roots, which form humps that rise out of the water at some distance from the tree. These "cypress knees" are not yet explained, though authorities suspect that they have something to do with the aëration of the root system.
Inundated nine or ten months of the year, these cypress swamps are often dry the remaining time, and it is a surprise to Southerners to find these trees comfortable and beautiful in Northern parks. Cleveland and New York parks have splendid examples.
The leaves of the bald cypress are of two types. They are scale-like only on stems that bear the globular cones. On other shoots they form a flat spray, each leaf one half to three-fourths of an inch long, pea-green in the Southern swamps, bright yellow-green on both sides in dry ground, turning orange-brown before they fall. The twigs that bear these two-ranked leaves are also deciduous, a unique distinction of this genus.
Cypress wood is soft, light brown, durable, and easily worked. Quantities of it are shipped north and used in the manufacture of doors and interior finishing of houses, for fencing, railroad ties, cooperage, and shingles.
THE JUNIPERS
The sign by which the junipers are most easily distinguished from other evergreens, is the juicy berries instead of cones. In some species these are red, but they are mostly blue or blue-black. Before they mature it is easy to see the stages by which the cone-scales thicken and coalesce, instead of hardening and remaining separate, as in the typical fruit of conifers.
Juniper leaves are of two types: scale-like in opposite pairs, pressed close to the twig, as in the cypresses; and stiff, spiny, usually channelled leaves, which stand out free from the twig in whorls of threes.
The wood is red, fragrant, durable, and light.
=The Dwarf Juniper=
_Juniperus communis_, Linn.
The dwarf juniper departs from the pyramidal pattern and forms a loose, open head above a short, stout trunk. The slender branchlets are clothed with boat-shaped leaves which spread nearly at right angles from the twigs in whorls of three. Each one is pointed and hollowed, dark green outside, snowy white inside, which is really the upper side of the leaf. It requires three years to mature the bright blue berries, and they hang on the tree two or three years longer. Each fruit contains two or three seeds, and these require three years to germinate.
It is plain to see that time is no object to this slow-growing dwarf juniper, found in both the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, covering vast stretches of waste land. From Greenland to Alaska it is found and south along the highlands into Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and California. Its hardiness gives it importance as a cover for waste land on seashores and for hedges and wind-breaks in any exposed situation. It is a tree reaching thirty feet in height on the limestone hills of southern Illinois. In other situations it is usually a sprawling shrubby thing, the cringing parent of a race of dwarf junipers, known in many and various horticultural forms.
=The Western Juniper=
_J. occidentalis_, Hook.
The giant of its race is the Western juniper, one of the patriarchial trees of America, ranking in age with the sequoias. Never a tall tree, it yet attains a trunk diameter of ten feet, and an age that surely exceeds two thousand years. At elevations of seven to ten thousand feet this valiant red cedar is found clinging to the granite domes and bare glacial pavements where soil and moisture seem absolutely non-existent. Sunshine and thin air are abundant, however, and elbow room. Upon these commodities the tree subsists, crouching, stubbornly clinging, while a single root offers foothold, its gnarled branches picturesque and beautiful in their tufts of gray-green leaves. Avalanches have beheaded the oldest of these giants, but their denuded trunks throw out wisps of new foliage with each returning spring. When they succumb, their trunks last almost as long as the granite boulders among which they are cast by the wind or the ice-burden that tore them loose.
The stringy bark is woven into cloth and matting by the Indians, and the fine-grained, hard, red wood finds no better use than for the mountaineer's fencing and fuel.
=The Eastern Red Cedar=
_J. Virginiana_, Linn.
The Eastern red cedar is a handsome, narrow pyramid in its youth, often becoming broad and irregular, or round-topped above a buttressed, twisted trunk, as it grows old. The scale-like leaves are four-ranked, blue-green when young, spreading, and sometimes three fourths of an inch long, on vigorous new shoots. The dark blue berries are covered with a pale bloom and have a resinous, sweet flesh. This juniper is familiar in abandoned farms and ragged fence-rows, becoming rusty brown in foliage to match the stringy red bark in winter time. The durable red wood is used for posts and railroad ties, for cedar chests and pencils. The tree is profitably planted by railroad companies, as cedar ties are unsurpassed. In cultivation the tree forms an interesting, symmetrical specimen, adapted to formal gardens. (_See illustration, page 230_.)
=The Red Juniper=
_J. Barbadensis_, Linn.
The red juniper, much more luxuriant than its close relative of the North, is the handsomest juniper in cultivation. Its pyramid is robbed of a rigid formal expression by the drooping of its fern-like leaf-spray. The berries are silvery white and abundant. The wood is used principally for pencils. This species grows in the Gulf states.
THE LARCHES, OR TAMARACKS
The notable characteristic of the small genus, _larix_, is that the narrow leaves are shed in the autumn. Here is a tall pyramidal conifer which is not evergreen. It bears an annual crop of small woody cones, held erect on the branches, and the leaves are borne in crowded clusters on short lateral spurs, except upon the terminal shoots, where the leaves are scattered remotely but follow the spiral plan. Larch wood is hard, heavy, resinous, and almost indestructible. The tall shafts are ideal for telegraph poles and posts.
=The Tamarack=
_Larix Americana_, Michx.
The tamarack or American larch (_see illustration, page 263_) goes farther north than any other tree, except dwarf willows and birches. Above these stunted, broad-leaved trees pure forests of tamarack rise, covering Northern swamps from Newfoundland and Labrador to Hudson Bay and west across the Rocky Mountains, the trees dwindling in size as they approach the arctic tundras, the limit of tree growth. The wood of these bravest of all conifers is a God-send over vast territories where other supply of timber is wanting. The tough roots of the larch tree supply threads with which the Indian sews his birch canoe.
In cultivation the American species is too sparse of limb and foliage to compete with the more luxuriant European larch, yet it is often planted. Its fresh spring foliage is lightened by the pale yellow of the globular staminate flowers and warmed by the rosy tips of the cone flowers. In early autumn the plain, thin-scaled cones, erect and bright chestnut-brown, shed their small seeds while the yellow leaves are dropping, and the bare limbs carry the empty cones until the following year.
=The Western Larch=
_L. occidentalis_, Nutt.
The Western larch is the finest tree in its genus, reaching six feet in trunk diameter and two hundred feet in height, in the Cascade forests from British Columbia to southern Oregon and across the ranges to western Montana. This tree has the unusual distinction of exceeding all conifers in the value of its wood, which is heavy, hard, strong, dense, durable, of a fine red that takes a brilliant polish. It is used for furniture and for the interior finish of houses. Quantities of it supply the demand for posts and railroad ties, in which use it lasts indefinitely, compared with other timber.