CONIFERS. 



SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 



119 



is light brown, with thiu lighter colored sapwood^ and contains hroad dark-colored resinous conspicuous 

 bands of small summer cells and numerous obscure medullary rays. The specific gravity of the 

 absolutely dry wood is 0.3545, a cubic foot weighing 22.09 pounds. Occasionally manufactured into 

 lumber in western Washington and Oregon, it is used for the interior finish of buildings, for packing- 

 cases, and in cooperage. 



AUes grandis was probably one of the Pine-trees which Lewis and Clark saw in September, 1805, 

 as they crossed the Bitter Root Mountains on their journey to the west.^ Introduced into English 

 gardens in 1831 by David Douglas, who found it near the mouth of the Columbia River, it has since 

 been occasionally cultivated in the parks and gardens of Europe, where it grows rapidly,^ and gives 

 some promise of attaining the magnificent proportions and luxuriant growth which make this tree one 

 of the stateliest and most splendid inhabitants of the forests of the northern hemisphere.^ 



1 The History of the Expedition under Command of Lewis and Clarh, 

 ed. Coues, ii. 598. See, also, Sargent, Garden and Forest, x. 29. 



Among the trees of large growth described by Lewis and Clark 

 (I. c. iii. 831) the third species was said to resemble in all parts the 

 Canada Balsam Fir, its trunk being described as from two and a 

 half to four feet in diameter, and its height at from eighty to one 

 hundred feet. This description might be supposed to refer to 

 Abies grandis, which is the only Fir-tree that grows in the neigh- 

 borhood of the camp at the mouth of the Columbia Hiver, where 

 Lewis and Clark passed the winter, and where they had their best 

 opportunities for the examination of trees ; but the leaves were said 

 to be only one eighth of an inch long and one sixteenth of an inch 

 wide. Dr. Coues, acknowledging the uncertainty of the determinar- 

 tion, suggested that this tree might be Thuya gigasntea. The au- 

 thors of the journal state that " this tree affords, in considerable 

 quantities, a fine deeply aromatic balsam, resembling the balsam of 

 Canada in taste and appearance. The small pistils, filled, rise like 

 a blister on the trunk and the branches. The bark that envelops 

 these pistils is soft and easily punctured ; the general appearance 

 of the bark is dark and smooth, but not so remarkable for that 

 quality as the white pine of our country. The wood is white and 

 soft." This description evidently refers to some species of Fir, 

 The statement that the leaves were only an eighth of an inch long 

 may have been the result of a clerical error. But the travelers 

 may have confounded Abies lasiocarpa, which they must have seen 

 in crossing the Bitter Root Mountains, and probably also on the 

 continental divide, with the coast species, and certainly it is not safe 

 to accept Rafinesque's name of Ahies aromatica, based entirely on 

 the description of Lewis and Clark's third species, for the White 

 Fir of the coast, although it is a year earlier than Liudley's Abies 

 grandis. 



2 Abies grandis is described as growing in Belgium sometimes 

 at the rate of forty inches in height a year (see Wesmael, Garden 

 and Forest, iii. 494) ; and in Mr. Schober's Piuetum in Putten, Hol- 

 land, Abies grandis has surpassed all other conifers in rapidity of 

 growth, a tree which in 1878 had a trunk circumference of twenty- 

 two inches and a height of twenty-one feet four inches, having in 

 1886 a trunk circumference of forty-four inches and a height of 

 thirty-five feet three inches, and in 1892 a trunk circumference of 

 sixty-nine inches and a height of fifty feet. (See Schober, Tijd. 

 Nederl. Maatsch. Bevord. Nijver. September, 1892 \Pinetum Scho- 

 berianum]. The tallest tree of this species reported in Great Britain 

 in 1892 was at Riccarton, Midlothian, and was eighty-three feet 

 three inches in heigh-" with a trunk three feet eight and one half 

 inches in diameter. This tree is said to have grown fifty-three feet 

 in twelve years, or an average of four feet five inches annually. 

 Several other specimens in Great Britain were from sixty to sev- 







enty feet tall in 1892. [See Dunn, Jour. R. Hort. Soc. xiv. 82. 

 See, also, Webster, Gard. Chron. n. ser. xxiii. 670.]) 



In the Arnold Arboretum plants of Abies grandis, obtained in 

 1880 by Mr. Sereno Watson in northern Idaho, have been kept 

 alive in sheltered positions, but it is not probable that trees of this 

 species, to which constant root moisture seems essential, can have 

 a long life on the Atlantic seaboard. 



^ The log specimen of Abies grandly cut near Portland, Oregon, 

 in the Jesup Collection of North American Woods in the American 

 Museum of Natural History, New York, is twenty-four and one 

 half inches in diameter inside the bark and one hundred and twenty- 

 eight years old, with an inch and one eighth of sapwood showing 

 twenty-one layers of annual growth. 



