CONIFERS 



45 



meter and occasionally divided into 3 or 4 stout secondary stems, rigid horizontal 

 branches disposed on young trees in remote whorls and decreasing regularly in 

 length from below upward, the short stout stiff branchlets pointing forward and 

 making flat-topped masses of foliage, on old trees short and remote, with stout 

 pendant lateral branches forming a thin ragged pyramidal crown and stout rigid 

 glabrous branchlets, pale glaucous green, becoming bright orange-brown during the 

 first winter and ultimately light grayish brown. Winter-buds stout, obtuse or rarely 

 acute, \'-^' long, with thin pale chestnut-brown scales usually reflexed on the mar- 

 gins. Bark of young trees gray or gray tinged with cinnamon-red and broken into 

 small oblong plate-like scales, becoming on the lower part of old trunks f'-l^' 

 thick and deeply divided into broad rounded ridges covered with small closely ap- 

 pressed pale gray or occasionally bright cinnamon-red scales. Wood light, soft, 

 close-grained, weak, pale brown or often nearly white, with hardly distinguishable 

 sapwood. 



Distribution. Banks of streams or on the first benches above them singly or in 

 small groves at elevations between 6500 and 10,000 above the sea; Colorado and 

 eastern Utah northward to the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming. 



Often planted as an ornamental tree in the eastern and northern states and in 

 western and northern Europe, especially individuals with blue foliage; very beauti- 

 ful in early life but in cultivation soon becoming unsightly from the loss of the 

 lower branches. 



2. Leaves flattened. 



* Cone-scales rounded at the apex. 



6. Picea Breweriana, Wats. Weeping Spruce. 

 Leaves abruptly narrowed and obtuse at the apex, straight or slightly incurved, 

 rounded and obscurely ridged and dark green and lustrous on the lower surface, flat- 



tened and conspicuously marked on the upper surface by 4 or 5 rows of stomata on 

 each side of the prominent midrib, f '-1|^' long, Jg'- ^-^' wide. Flowers : staminate 

 dark purple; pistillate oblong-cylindrical, with obovate scales rounded above and re- 

 flexed on the entire margins and oblong bracts laciniately divided at their rounded 

 or acute apex. Fruit oblong, gradually narrowed from the middle to the ends, acute 



