112 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. CONIFER. 
the apex, and decreasing in size from below upward, dark brown below the middle, nearly black toward 
the apex, and furnished with two pollen-sacs. The pistillate flowers are subglobose, from one sixteenth 
to one eighth of an inch long, with usually six ovate acute spreading pale liver-colored scales bearing 
generally two black ovules. The fruit, which ripens at the end of the first season, is globose and 
about a quarter of an inch in diameter, sessile on a short leafy branch, surrounded at the base by the 
persistent lower scales of the flower, with six scales furnished with thin ovate acute often reflexed 
bosses: it is light green and covered with a glaucous bloom when fully grown, then bluish purple and 
very glaucous, and finally dark red-brown. The seeds, of which there are usually one or two under 
each fertile scale, are ovate, acute, full and rounded at the base, slightly compressed, and about an 
eighth of an inch in length, with a thin testa produced into wings as broad as the body of the seed 
and darker in color, and a minute pale hilum. 
Cupressus thyoides inhabits the cold swamps of the Atlantic and Gulf coast plains usually 
immersed during several months of the year, frequently covering them at the north with dense pure 
forests, or at the south mingling with the Bald Cypress. Rarely extending far inland,’ it ranges from 
southern Maine? southward to northern Florida and westward to the valley of the Pearl River in 
Mississippi. Very abundant in New England south of Massachusetts Bay and in the middle and south 
Atlantic states, it is comparatively rare east of Boston and west of Mobile Bay. 
The wood of Cupressus thyoides is light, soft, not strong, close-grained, easily worked, slightly 
fragrant, and very durable in contact with the soil. It seasons rapidly and perfectly without warping 
or checking; it is light brown tinged with red, with thin lighter colored sapwood, but grows darker 
with exposure, and contains dark-colored conspicuous narrow bands of small summer-cells and numerous 
The specific gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.3322, a cubic foot 
It is largely used in boatbuilding and cooperage, for wooden-ware, shingles,* 
obscure medullary rays.’ 
weighing 20.70 pounds. 
the interior finish of houses, telegraph and fence posts and railway-ties, and for other purposes where 
a light soft durable wood easy to work and of even grain is desired.° 
The earliest account of Cupressus thyoides appears in Morton’s New English Canaan, published 
in London in 1635 ;° it was first described by Plukenet’ in 1700 from a plant in Bishop Compton’s ® 
garden at Clapham, and, according to Aiton,’ it was cultivated by Peter Collinson in 1736. The White 
Cedar is still found in European gardens, where a number of forms varying in habit and in the color 
and marking of the leaves have appeared and are prized by lovers of curious plants.” 
One of the most beautiful of the coniferous trees of eastern America, the White Cedar is also one 
of the valuable timber-trees of the country, and its importance is increased by the fact that, attaining its 
greatest perfection in situations where no other useful timber-tree can flourish, it gives value to lands 
which without it would be worthless. 
1 The highest elevation at which the White Cedar has been 
reported above the sea-level is at High Point in New Jersey, a 
few miles from Port Jervis, New York, and close to the boun- 
daries of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, where at an 
elevation of fifteen hundred feet it grows in a cold deep swamp. 
(See Gifford, Garden and Forest, ix. 63.) 
2 Goodale, Proc. Portland Soc. Nat. Hist. i. pt. ii. 129. 
8 Roth, The Forester, i. 15. 
4 Kalm, Travels, English ed. ii. 174.— Porcher, Resources of 
Southern Fields and Forests, 509. 
5 The wood of trunks of the White Cedar, which have probably 
lain for centuries buried deep in the swamps of New Jersey and 
Pennsylvania, retains its character and furnishes excellent lumber, 
and the mining of these trunks has proved a profitable industry. 
6 “Cypress, of this there is great plenty, and vulgarly this tree 
hath bin taken for an other sort of Cedar: but now men put a dif- 
ference between this Cypress and the Cedars, especially in the 
color.” (Force, Historical Collections, ii. No. 5, 44.) 
“The white Cedar is a stately Tree, and is taken by some to be 
Tamarisk, this tree the English saw into boards to floor their rooms, 
for which purpose it is excellent, long lasting, and wears very 
smooth and white.” 
England, 67.) 
7 Cupressus nana Mariana fructu ceruleo parvo, Alm. Bot. Mant. 
61, t. 345, f. 1. 
Cupressus semper virens seu cupressus Thyoides, Romans, Nat. 
Hist. Florida, 25. 
5 See i. 6. 
® Aiton, Hort. Kew. iii. 372.— Loudon, Arb. Brit. iv. 2475, f. 
2327. 
10 Beissner (Handb. Nadelh. 67) describes twelve of these gar- 
den forms, the most distinct, perhaps, being one which retains the 
juvenile leaves (Cupressus thyoides ericoides. Chamecyparis ericoides, 
Carriere, Traité Conif. 140 (1855), and one in which the young 
branchlets and leaves are blotched with yellow (Cupressus thyoides 
aurea). 
(Josselyn, Account of Two Voyages to New 
