36 



TREES OF NORTH AMERICA 



scales. Wood heavy, hard, very strong, rather coarse-grained, very durable, light 

 brown; largely used for the upper knees of small vessels, fence-posts, telegraph-poles, 

 and railway-ties. 



Distribution. At the north often on well-drained uplands, southward in cold 

 deep swamps which it often clothes with forests of closel}' crowded trees, from 



Labrador to the Arctic Circle, ranging west of the Rocky Mountains to latitude 

 65 35' north, and southward through Canada and the northern states to northern 

 Pennsylvania and Preston County, West Virginia, northern Indiana and Illinois, and 

 central Minnesota, and along the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains to about 

 latitude 53; very abundant in the interior of Labrador, where it is the largest 

 tree ; common along the margins of the barren lands stretching beyond the sub- 

 Arctic forest to the shores of the Arctic Sea; attaining its largest size north of Lake 

 Winnipeg on low benches which it occasionally covers with open forests; rare and 

 local toward the southern limits of its range. 



Often planted as an ornamental tree in the northeastern states, growing rapidly 

 and attaining in cultivation a large size and picturesque habit. 



2. Larix occidentalis, Nutt. Tamarack. 



Leaves triangular, rounded on the back, conspicuously keeled below, rigid, sharp- 

 pointed, I'-lf long, about ^' wide, light pale green, turning pale yellow early in 

 the autumn. Flowers: staminate oblong, pale yellow; pistillate oblong, nearly ses- 

 sile, with orbicular scales and bracts produced into elongated tips. Fruit oblong, 

 short-stalked, I'-l-^' long, with numerous thin stiff scales nearly entire and some- 

 times a little reflexed on their margins, much shorter than their bracts, more or less 

 thickly coated on the lower surface below the middle with hoary tomentum, and 

 standing after the escape of the seeds at right angles to the axis of the cone, or often 

 becoming reflexed; seeds nearly y long, with a pale brown shell, one half to two 

 thirds as long as the thin fragile pale wings broadest near the middle and obliquely 

 rounded at the apex. 



A tree, sometimes 250 high, with a tall tapering naked trunk 6-8 in diame- 

 ter, or on dry soil and exposed mountain slopes usually not more than 100 tall, 

 surmounted by a short narrow pyramidal head of small branches clothed with scanty 



