CONIFER &, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. : 95 
CUPRESSUS PYGMZHA. 
Cypress. 
Scauzs of the fruit 6 to 10; seeds compressed, black. Branchlets stout. Leaves 
dark green, eglandular. 
Cupressus pygmea, Sargent, Bot. Gazette, xxxi. 239 Cupressus Goveniana, Sargent, Silua N. Am. x. 107 (in 
(391). part) (not Gordon) (1896). 
Cupressus Goveniana, var. pygmza, Lemmon, Handb. 
West American Cone-Bearers, 77 (1895). 
A tree, sometimes thirty or forty feet in height, with a trunk rarely more than a foot in diameter, 
and ascending branches. The bark of the trunk is bright reddish brown, about a quarter of an inch in 
thickness, and divided by shallow fissures into flat ridges which separate on the surface into long 
thread-like scales. The branchlets, which are comparatively stout, are bright orange color when they 
first appear, bright reddish brown during one or two seasons, and then turning purple become dark 
reddish brown at the end of several years. The leaves are ovate, acute, or acuminate on vigorous 
shoots, dark green, and eglandular. The staminate flowers are obscurely four-angled, with broadly 
ovate peltate connectives, and the fertile scales of the pistillate flowers, which vary from six to ten in 
number, are acute and spreading. The fruit is short-oblong, usually sessile, and from three quarters to 
seven eighths of an inch in length, with from six to ten scales terminating in small bosses. The seeds 
are compressed, only about one eighth of an inch long, and black. 
Cupressus pygmea inhabits the high barren region near the coast of Mendocino County, California, 
which extends from Ten Mile Run on the north to the Navarro on the south. Here it grows on 
deposits of sand and a thin coat of peat, overlaying a heavy yellow clay in a narrow belt which, 
beginning about three quarters of a mile from the ocean, extends inland for three or four miles.’ 
The wood of Cupressus pygmea is soft, very coarse-grained, and pale reddish brown? 
1 On this poor soil the plants begin to bear cones when only a 
foot or two high, but on the borders of the barrens and of the deep 
gullies which penetrate them, where the plants occasionally escape 
for several years the fires which almost annually sweep over this 
region, they often grow in better soil to a height of thirty or forty 
feet, although from overcrowding they rarely develop the spread- 
ing branches which are peculiar to Cupressus growing in abundant 
space. 
The name pygmea used by Lemmon to distinguish the dwarf 
plant stunted by ding and ient isk t 
unfortunate as a specific name, for there is no difference between 
* fe 
is 
the smallest and the largest plants except in size; and it is proba- 
ble that individuals on the borders of the barrens, if they could be 
protected from fire, would in time grow to a large size, for the 
oldest plants now standing show no signs of maturity and none of 
them are thought to be more than fifty years old. (Teste Purdy, in 
litt.) 
2 The log specimen in the Jesup Collection of North American 
Woods in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, 
is eleven and one half inches in diameter inside the bark, and is 
thirty-six years old. The sapwood is two inches thick, with thir- 
teen layers of annual growth. 
