TREES AND SHRUBS 157 



Doubtless anyone who has patience to under- 

 take the task will be able to produce various 

 types of redwoods that will reveal interesting 

 characteristics of the remote racial strains that 

 now are so blended in the existing representa- 

 tives of the family as to be scarcely observable. 



It is not best to attempt to speak except in a 

 general way of the other members of the great 

 tribe of conifers, the merits of most of which, as 

 ornamental trees, are familiar to every garden 

 and landscape architect. 



There are some scores of genera and some 

 hundreds of species of conifers, but the varieties 

 are too numerous and too intricately blended for 

 accurate computation. 



No other single region has so many forms of 

 evergreens, and ones that show such wide range 

 of variation, as the Pacific Coast region. It has 

 been estimated that there are as many species of 

 conifers in California as in all the rest of the 

 world. 



But the conifers of one kind and another grow 

 everywhere throughout the colder regions of the 

 Northern Hemisphere, some of them making 

 their way also to parts of the South. 



Every one of them is an object lesson in the 

 possibility of plant variation; for as a class they 

 represent a modification of leaf form of the most 



