CONIFER-aE. 



SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 51 



PICEA BREWERIANA. 



Weeping Spruce. 



F 



Cones oblong, acute, their scales rounded, entire. Branchlets slender, elongated, 

 pendent, pubescent. Leaves flattened, stomatiferous only on the upper surface. 



Picea Breweriana, Watson, Proc. Am. Acad. xx. 378 nia) ; West-American Cone-Bearers, 52 ; Bull. Sierra 



(1885). — Sargent, Gard. Chron. n. ser. xxv. 498, f. 93; Club, ii. 158 {Conifers of the Pacific Slope). — Beissner, 



Garden and forest, ii. 496; iii. 63, f. 15, 16. — Mayr, Eandh. Nadelh. 350. — Masters, Jour. B, Hort. Soc. xiv. 



Wald* Nordam. 355. — Lemmon, Bep. California State 221. — St. Paul, Mitt. Deutsck. Dendr, Gesell, 1896, 42, t. 

 Board Forestry, iii, 116, t. 4-6 {Cone-Bearers of Califor- 



A tree, usually from eighty to one hundred and occasionally one hundred and twenty feet in 

 height, with a trunk from two to three feet in diameter above the swelling of its enlarged and gradually 

 tapering base, and furnished to the ground with crowded branches ; at the top of the tree these are 

 short and slightly ascending, with comparatively short pendulous lateral branchlets, and form a thin 

 spire-like head, and below they are horizontal or pendulous, and are clothed with slender flexible whip- 

 like branchlets which are often seven or eight feet in length and not more than a quarter of an inch 

 in thickness, and are furnished with numerous laterals of the same character and habit. The bark of the 

 trunk is from one half to three quarters of an inch in thickness and is broken into long thin closely 

 appressed scales which are dull red-brown on the surface. The winter-buds are conical, often a quarter 

 of an inch long and an eighth of an inch thick, with thin light chestnut-brown scales. When they first 

 appear the branchlets are coated with fine pubescence, which generally does not disappear until their 

 third season, and during their first autumn and winter they are rather bright red-brown, and then 

 gradually grow dark gray-brown. The leaves are abruptly narrowed and obtuse at the apex, straight 

 or slightly incurved, rounded or obscurely ridged and dark green and lustrous on the lower surface, 

 flattened and conspicuously marked on the upper surface with four or five rows of small stomata on each 

 side of the prominent midrib, from three quarters of an inch to an inch and one eighth in length and 



'r 



from one sixteenth to one tenth of an inch in width. The staminate flowers are oblong, about five 

 eighths of an inch long and a quarter of an inch thick, and dark reddish purple, with conspicuously 

 toothed anther crests. The pistillate flowers are oblong-cylindrical, obtuse, and an inch in length, with 

 obovate scales rounded above and reflexed on the entire margins, and oblong bracts laciniately divided 

 at their rounded or acute apex. The cones are oblong, gradually narrowed from the middle to both 

 ends, acute at the apex, rather oblique at the base, from two and a half to five inches in length and 

 from three quarters of an inch to an inch in thickness, with thin broadly obovate flat scales longer 

 than they are broad and slightly thickened on the entire margins ; suspended on straight slender stalks 

 about a quarter of an inch long, when fully grown the cones are deep rich purple or green more or 

 less tinged with purple, and at maturity they are light orange-brown without lustre, and, opening late 

 in the autumn, usually remain on the branches until the second winter, the scales becoming often 

 strongly reflexed and so flexible that they can be easily compressed between the fingers. The seeds are 

 acute at the base, full and rounded on the sides, about an eighth of an inch long, very dark brown and 

 about one quarter the length of their wings, which are broadest toward the full and rounded apex. 



Picea Breweriana is scattered in small groves through an area of a few hundred acres of dry 

 mountain ridges and peaks near the timber-line on the northern slope of the Siskiyou Mountains, at an 

 elevation of about seven thousand feet above the sea, at the head of one of the small south forks of the 



