380 



PINUS SYLVESTRIS. 



Geographical Varieties. 



aryentea, a taller tree than the common form, found on the Caucasian 

 mountains and bearing cones with a silver-white tint : enyadensis, a 

 much-branched small tree, common in Lapland: erythranthem, a variety 

 with red staminate flowers occurring in Prussia and Saxony : nevadensix, 

 a southern form with broader, shorter and stilfer leaves, inhabiting the 

 Sierra Nevada in Spain : reflexa, a smaller tree with an irregular 

 head, growing in marshy valleys among the Swiss Alps and the 

 lowlands of southern Germany : viryata, an irregularly-branched tree 

 with twiggy branchlets found on the Oberforst Wandsburg in Prussia, 

 and a few other places. 



Garden Varieties. 



The most distinct of these have been named aurea, columnaris, 

 compacta fastiyiata, eompressa, nana, pendula, pyramidalis, varieyata, 

 names sufficiently indicative of their most obvious characteristic. The 

 most useful of these varieties for British gardens is aurea, a low 

 tree of dense habit, with the young leaves of a golden yellow 

 colour which changes to the normal green in the second year. 

 The Scots Pine has a greater geographical distribution than any 

 other Pine, or even of any other species included in the Abietineae. 

 With the exception of the southern portion of the Balkan peninsula 

 it is spread over the whole of Europe, including the British Islands, 

 and in Asia it occurs throughout nearly the whole of that part of 

 the continent comprised within the Russian dominions. Its western 

 limit is the Sierra Nevada in Spain, whence it ranges eastwards 

 across the continent to the Stanovoi mountains in eastern Siberia, 

 and to the Amur region. It reaches its highest latitude in Europe 

 at about the 70th parallel 011 the north-west coast of Norway ; 

 eastwards of this its northern limit lies near the Arctic Circle, but 

 sinking below the 64th parallel in eastern Siberia; its southern 

 limit in Europe follows very nearly the trend of the mountain 

 systems stretching eastwards from the Sierra Nevada to the Caucasian 

 mountains, and in Asia the mountains of Turkestan and the Altai 

 range to the Amur littoral. Throughout this great region the Scots 

 Pine is very irregularly distributed ; as it is a tree of the plain as 

 well as of the mountain, its spread in the lowlands has been greatly 

 influenced by climate and soil, and within historic times by the 

 pressure of population ; it forms forests of considerable extent in the 

 flat sandy plains of north-east Germany, also in Finland, Russia and 

 Poland ; in Siberia it is more scattered and often mixed with Picea 

 obovata and Abies sibirica. On the mountains the vertical range of Pinus 

 sylvestris varies with the latitude of the localities; in northern Norway 

 it. ascends only to about 700 feet above sea-level ; on the mountains 

 of central Germany its highest vertical limit is 2,000 2,500 feet 

 on the French Vosges about 4,000 feet, on the Swiss Alps 5,500 

 6,000 feet, and on the Sierra Nevada of southern Spain 6,500 feet. 



