78 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. conifers 



diameter, or exceptionally two hundred and thirty feet tall, with a trunk eight feet in diameter, 1 short 

 thick many-forked often pendulous branches 2 generally ascending at the ends and forming a narrow 

 regular spire-like head which constitutes from one third to one half the height of the tree ; or, when 

 less favorably situated, producing a shorter trunk and stouter branches forming a broader and often 

 round-topped head. During the first eighty or one hundred years of its life the bark of the trunk is 

 broken into rounded ridges covered with small closely appressed scales, and is dark brown, nearly black, 

 or lio-ht cinnamon-red ; and on older trees it is from two to four inches thick and deeply and irregularly 

 divided into plates sometimes four or five feet long and twelve or eighteen inches wide, and covered 

 with thick bright cinnamon-red scales. The branchlets are stout and more or less fragrant when cut, 

 with the pungent aromatic odor of orange-peel ; when they first appear they are orange-color, but soon 

 grow darker, frequently becoming nearly black at the end of two or three seasons, and are much 

 roughened for several years by the thickened persistent bases of the ovate acute light chestnut-brown 

 conspicuously fringed scales of the branch-buds, which are often half an inch long and soon become 

 reflexed, those of the outer ranks being linear-lanceolate and dark or fight red-brown. The branch-buds 

 are ovate, gradually narrowed and acute at the apex, the terminal bud being from one half to three 

 quarters of an inch long and frequently twice as large as the lateral buds. The leaves form great tufts 

 at the ends of the naked branches, and are borne in clusters of three in sheaths which are at first 

 loose, pale chestnut-brown, and from three quarters of an inch to an inch in length, but, soon losing the 

 inner bud-scales, become about a quarter of an inch long and thick, dark brown or nearly black, and 

 fall with the leaves, mostly during their third season ; they are acute with sharp-pointed callous tips, 

 finely serrate, dark yellow green, stomatiferous on the three faces, and from five to eleven inches in 

 length ; they contain two fibro-vascular bundles and usually two or sometimes as many as five paren- 

 chymatous resin ducts surrounded by strengthening cells, which also occur in from one to three layers 

 under the epidermis. 3 The pistillate flowers are borne in short crowded spikes, and are cylindrical, 

 flexuous, from an inch and a half to two inches long and about half an inch thick, with yellow anthers 

 terminating in conspicuous semiorbicular obscurely denticulate crests, and are surrounded b}^ involucres 

 of ten or twelve broadly ovate light chestnut-brown bracts scarious on the margins and rounded at the 

 apex. The pistillate flowers are subterminal, clustered or in pairs, oval, dark red, and about one third 

 of an inch long and one quarter of an inch broad, with ovate scales gradually narrowed into elongated 

 slender tips and conspicuous orbicular bracts fimbriate on the margins. The young cones are erect in 

 their first summer, and during the winter are from an inch to an inch and a quarter long and about 

 three quarters of an inch thick, with light red-brown ovate scales produced into long or short slender 

 incurved or straight awn-like spines ; when fully grown, at midsummer, the cones are oval, horizontal, or 

 slightly declining, subsessile or short-stalked, from three to six inches long and from an inch and a 

 half to two inches broad, often in clusters of from three to five, and bright green or purple, 4 with 



1 The largest specimen measured by Muir on the California nine years old, the sapwood being eight and a half inches thick and 



Sierras was two hundred and twenty feet high, with a trunk eight two hundred and eleven years old. 



feet in diameter ; other specimens measured by him in California 2 A seedling raised in the Knaphill Nursery, England, and planted 



were one hundred and eighty feet high, with a trunk three feet ten by Mr. Henry Winthrop Sargent in his garden at Fishkill-on-the- 



inches in diameter, and three hundred and eighty years old ; one Hudson, New York, in 1851, when a few inches high, grew into a 



hundred and seventy-five feet high, with a trunk five feet one inch tree with long drooping branches, forming a narrow column which 



in diameter, and two hundred and sixty years old ; a trunk three in forty years had attained a height of sixty feet, and become an 



feet six inches in diameter, and two hundred and thirty-five years object of beauty and interest before its ruin by fungal disease 



old ; a trunk two feet in diameter, and two hundred and thirty-one (H. W. Sargent, Gard. Chron. u. ser. x. 236, f. 42. — Sargent, 



years old ; a trunk three feet four inches in diameter, and one hun- Garden and Forest, i. 392, f. 62). 



dretl and eight years old ; and a trunk three feet three inches in 3 Coulter & Rose, Bot. Gazette, xi. 306. 



diameter, and one hundred years old. The log specimen in the 4 The cones of what may be considered the typical form of Pinus 

 Jesup Collection of North American Woods in the American Mu- ponderosa are usually green ; but in the Bitter Root valley, in Mon- 

 seum of Natural History, New York, cut on the western slope of tana, trees bearing all green cones and all purple cones are mixed 

 the northern Sierra Nevada, is forty-seven and three quarters together in about equal numbers, while on the plains north of Flat- 

 inches in diameter inside the bark, and three hundred and seventy- head Lake in Montana most of the trees bear purple cones. 



