The Red PineP. 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 thoughresinosameans "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. resinosaappeals 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.Seepage 248LEAVES AND CONES OF HEMLOCK (left) AND OF NORWAY SPRUCE (right)Seepage 248THE SPINY FOLIAGE AND FAST-CLINGING CONES OF THE BLACK SPRUCEThe 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 SPRUCESThe 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 roughenedby 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 SprucePicea 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 SpruceP. 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 andthey 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 SpruceP. 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 SpruceP. 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 SpruceP. 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, andbecomes 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 SpruceP. 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 FIRSIn 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 genusabies, 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 FirAbies 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 FirA. Fraseri, Poir.This balsam fir, much more luxuriant in foliage, and worthier of cultivation as an ornamental tree, is native tothe 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 FirA. 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 thebranches 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 FirA. 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 frommagnificain 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 FirA. 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 andslenderly 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 FirA. 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 SPRUCEThe 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 genuspseudotsugastands 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 withred, 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 HEMLOCKSUnlike 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 HemlockTsuga 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 cordwood, 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, becauseit is rigid and never lets go its hold upon a nail or spike.The Western HemlockT. 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 HemlockT. 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 highaltitudes, 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.Seepage 268THE FLAT, FROND LIKE SPRAY OF THE ORNAMENTAL ARBOR VITAESeepage 278FRUIT AND LEAVES OF THE AMERICAN LARCHTHE SEQUOIASNowhere 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 TreeSequoia 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 highSierras 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 andspruce, 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 areason 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 RedwoodS. 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-à-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-VITAESMinute, scale-like leaves, four-ranked, closely overlapping, so as to conceal the wiry twig, mark the genusthuya, 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-vitaeThuya occidentalis, Linn.The Eastern arbor-vitae, called also the white cedar, is found in impenetrable pure forest growth, from NovaScotia 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 CedarT. 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 hollowsout 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 CEDAROne 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 pairedscales, 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 CYPRESSESThree 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 CypressCupressus 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 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 thoughresinosameans "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. resinosaappeals 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.
Seepage 248LEAVES AND CONES OF HEMLOCK (left) AND OF NORWAY SPRUCE (right)
Seepage 248
LEAVES AND CONES OF HEMLOCK (left) AND OF NORWAY SPRUCE (right)
Seepage 248THE SPINY FOLIAGE AND FAST-CLINGING CONES OF THE BLACK SPRUCE
Seepage 248
THE SPINY FOLIAGE AND FAST-CLINGING CONES OF THE BLACK SPRUCE
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 roughenedby 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 andthey 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, andbecomes 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 genusabies, 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 tothe 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 thebranches 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 frommagnificain 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 andslenderly 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 genuspseudotsugastands 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 withred, 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 cordwood, 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, becauseit 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 highaltitudes, 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.
Seepage 268THE FLAT, FROND LIKE SPRAY OF THE ORNAMENTAL ARBOR VITAE
Seepage 268
THE FLAT, FROND LIKE SPRAY OF THE ORNAMENTAL ARBOR VITAE
Seepage 278FRUIT AND LEAVES OF THE AMERICAN LARCH
Seepage 278
FRUIT AND LEAVES OF THE AMERICAN LARCH
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 highSierras 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 andspruce, 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 areason 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-à-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 genusthuya, 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 NovaScotia 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 hollowsout 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 pairedscales, 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.