CONIFERS. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 69 



TSUGA CAROLINIANA. 



Hemlock. 



Cones oblong, pedunculate, their scales longer than broad, spreading at right 



angles at maturity. 



Tsuga Caroliniana, Engelmann, Bot. Gazette, vi. 223 Hort Soc. xlv. 255. — Hansen, Jour, B, Mort, Soc. xiv. 



(1881). — Sargent, forest Trees -^. Am,. 10th Census 445 {Pinetum Danicum). — Koehne, Deutsche Dendr. 



U. S. ix. 207 ; Gard. Chron. n. ser. xxvi. 780, f . 153 11, f . 5, O. — Britton & Brown, III. Fl. i. h% f . 125. 



(excl. f, 5). — Mayr, Wald. Nordam. 196, t. 6, f. — Beiss- Chapman, Fl. ed. 3, 458. 



ner, Randh. Nadelh, 406, f. 111. — Masters, Jour. E. Abies Caroliniana, Chapman, FL ed. 2, Suppl. 650 (1887). 



A tree, usually forty or fifty and occasionally seventy feet in height, with a trunk rarely exceeding 

 two feet in diameter/ with comparatively short stout and often pendulous branches which form a 

 handsome compact pyramidal head. The bark of the trunk is from three quarters of an inch to an 

 inch and a quarter in thickness, and is reddish brown on the surface and deeply divided into broad 

 flat connected ridges covered with thin closely appressed plate-like scales. The slender branchlets, 

 when they first appear, are Kght orange-brown, coated with short dark pubescence which nearly entirely 

 disappears during their first season or continues to cover them until they are three years old, when the 

 bark is dull brown more or less tinged with orange and then begins to separate into the small thin 

 loose scales of the older branches. The winter-buds are obtuse, nearly an eighth of an inch in length, 

 dark chestnut-brown, and covered with pubescence which is thickest near the margins of the scales. 

 The leaves are entire, retuse or often emarginate at the apex, very dark green and lustrous on the 

 upper surface, which is conspicuously grooved, and marked on the lower surface with a band of seven 

 or eight rows of stomata on each side of the midrib ; they are from one third to three quarters of an 

 inch long, the difference in length between those on the same branchlet being usually less than in the 

 other flat-leaved Hemlocks, and about one twelfth of an inch wide, with orange-red bases from which 

 they fall during their fifth year. The staminate flowers are tinged with purple and the pistillate 

 flowers, which are about an eighth of an inch in length, are purple, with broadly ovate bracts scarious 

 and erose on the margins. The cones are oblong, from an inch to an inch and a half in length, and 

 are suspended on short stout peduncles ; their scales are oblong, gradually narrowed and rounded at 

 the apex, rather abruptly contracted at the base into distinct stipes, thin, concave, striately grooved and 

 puberulous on the outer surface, twice as long as they are broad, and pale brown at maturity, when 

 they spread nearly at right angles to the axis of the cone ; their bracts are rather longer than they are 

 wide, wedge-shaped below and nearly truncate or slightly cuspidate at the broad apex. The seeds 

 are one sixth of an inch in length, with from fifteen to twenty small oil vesicles on the lower side, and 

 are one quarter as long as the pale lustrous wings, which, broad or narrow at the base, are narrowed 

 to the rounded apex. 



An inhabitant of the rocky banks of streams, usually at elevations of between two thousand five 

 hundred and three thousand feet above the level of the sea, but sometimes ascending a thousand feet 

 higher, the Carolina Hemlock is nowhere very common, although it is widely scattered along the Blue 



1 The trunk of a tree of this Hemlock growing on the hanks of feet above the ground of eight feet nine and three quarters inches. 

 Overflow Creek, near Highlands, North Carolina, measured sev- I have not heard of a larger specimen, 

 eral vears ao-o bv Mr. F. H. Bovnton, had a circumference three 



