] Trees and How to Know Them 



ones may be painted or used in natural color for Christmas trim- 

 mings; larger cones, such as those of the western sugar pine, which 

 weigh a pound or more, are spectacular items for nature collec- 

 tions. 



Pine cones, which develop from small pistillate flowers, require 

 two years to mature. In May and June you can see the bright 

 pink flowers of white pine growing near the tips of new twigs. 

 On the new shoots of lower branches, yellow staminate conelike 

 blossoms appear and produce quantities of pollen. Soon after 

 this pollen has been carried off by the wind, these blossoms wither 

 and fall; but meanwhile the pistillate flowers, which have been 

 pollinated, are turning into cones. 



By the end of a season's growth the cones are about an inch 

 long, green and upright. By the second season they are longer and 

 turn downward. By August they have turned brown and are from 

 five to eleven inches in length. If you look at them carefully at 

 this time, you will find two little winged seeds beneath each scale. 

 In September the cone scales open out and the wind carries the 

 seeds away perhaps as far as a quarter of a mile. 



MASSIVE SEQUOIAS THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLD 



The likeliest place to find these huge trees is in the national 

 parks of California, though giant sequoias have been successfully 

 planted in other parts of California and occasionally in parts of 

 the eastern United States and Europe. 



The sequoia is the most massive, as well as the oldest, of all 

 living things. Some of the very trees that stand majestically today 

 on the high slopes of the Sierras were growing in the time of 

 Christ roughly two thousand years ago. Some sequoias are more 

 than three hundred feet high! These magnificent trees were named 

 in honor of Sequoyah, a gifted Indian chief who invented an 

 alphabet over a hundred years ago for his people of the Cherokee 

 tribe. 



The Sequoia's Foliage and Bark: The rich evergreen foliage is in 

 the form of scalelike sharp-pointed needles that overlap closely 

 on the branches. You can see the tiny flowers in February or 



