CONIFERJE 



43 



north the rocky slopes of low hills, from Labrador along the northern frontier of 

 the forest nearly to the shores of the Arctic Sea, reaching Behring Strait in 66 44' 

 north latitude, and southward down the Atlantic coast to southern Maine, northern 

 New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, northern Michigan and Wisconsin, the 

 Black Hills of Dakota, and through the interior of Alaska and along the Rocky 

 Mountains to northern Montana. 



Often planted in Canada, northern New England, and northern Europe as an 

 ornamental tree; southward suffering from heat and dryness. 



** Cone-scales oblong or rhomhoidal. 

 -*-Branchlets pubescent. 



4. Picea Engelmanni, Engelm. White Spruce. Engelmann Spruce. 



Leaves soft and flexible, with acute callous tips, slender nearly straight or slightly 

 incurved on vigorous sterile branches, stouter shorter and more incurved, on fer- 



piC, 45 



tile branches, l'-l|^' long? marked on each face bj^ 3-5 rows of stomata, covered 

 at first with a glaucous bloom, soon becoming dark blue-green or pale steel-blue. 

 Flo"wers : staminate dark purple; pistillate bright scarlet, with pointed or rounded 

 and more or less divided scales, and oblong bracts rounded or acute or acuminate 

 and denticulate at the apex or obovate-oblong and abruptly acuminate. Fruit 

 oblong-cylindrical, oval, gradually narrowed to the ends, usually about 2' long, 

 sessile or very short-stalked, produced in great numbers on the upper branches, hori- 

 zontal and ultimately pendulous, light green somewhat tinged with scarlet when 

 fully grown, becoming light chestnut-brown and lustrous, with thin flexible slightly 

 concave scales, generally erose-dentate or rarely almost entire on the margins, 

 usually broadest at the middle, wedge-shaped below, and gradually contracted above 

 into a truncate or acute apex, or occasionally obovate and rounded above; mostly 

 deciduous in the autumn or early in their first winter soon after the escape of the 

 seeds ; seeds obtuse at the base, nearly black, about ^ long and much shorter than 

 their broad very oblique wings. 



A tree, with disagreeable smelling foliage, often 150 high, with a trunk 4-5 

 in diameter, spreading branches produced in regular whorls and forming a narrow 

 compact pyramidal head, gracefully hanging short lateral branches, and compara- 

 tively slender branchlets pubescent for three or four years, light or dark orange- 



