430 PICE A BREWERIAXA. 



of P. ajanensis far outnumbered those of P. Alcoc/dana, whence lar^c 

 specimens of the latter are extremely rare in British Pineta. One of 

 the best known to the author is at Blackford Park, near Edinburgh ; 

 it is a tree of remarkably handsome shape and healthy appearance, 

 growing in a situation exposed to the full force of the westerly gales 

 that sweep along the Pentland Hills, and where few other Conifers 

 an thrive.* 



Picea Breweriana. 



A tree 80 100 feet high with a trunk 2 3 feet in diameter and 

 furnished to the ground with crowded branches ; at the top of the 

 tree these are short with comparatively short pendulous lateral branches ; 

 below they are horizontal and clothed with slender, flexible, whip-like 

 branchlets, often 7 8 feet in length, and not more than a quarter 

 of an inch in thickness, and are furnished with numerous laterals of 

 the same character and habit. Leaves abruptly narrowed and obtuse 

 at the apex, straight or slightly incurved, rounded or obscurely ridged, 

 and dark green on the lower surface ; flattened and marked with 

 rows of small stomata on each side of the midrib on the opposite 

 surface, 0*75 1-125 inch in length. Staminate flowers oblong, 

 0*625 inch long, dark reddish purple with conspicuously toothed 

 anther crests. Cones oblong, gradually narrowed from the middle to 

 both ends, acute at the apex, 2 -5 5 inches long, and 0'75 1 inch 

 in thickness ; when fully grown, dark purple or green, more or less 

 tinged with purple, at maturity light orange-brown ; scales broadly 

 obovate, slightly thickened on the entire margin. Sargent, Silra of 

 North America, XII. 51, t. 601. 



Picea Breweriana, Watson, Proc. Amer. Acad. XX. 378 (1885). Sargent in 

 Gard. Chron. XXV. (1886), p. 498, with fig. Garden and Forest, III. (1890), p. 63, 

 with figs.; and Silva N. Amer. loc. cit. Beissner, Nadelholzk. 350. 



The following account of Picea Breweriana is derived almost solely" 

 from the great work from which the description was taken : 



"It is the most local and least known of all the American Piceas ; 

 it is scattered in small groves through an area of a few hundred 

 acres of dry mountain ridges near the timber line on the northern 

 slope of the Siskiyou mountains at an elevation of about 7,000 feet, 

 just south of the northern boundary of California. There is a grove 

 a few miles south of this, and it also covers a mile square on a 

 high peak west of Marble Mountain, and it occurs again in three or 

 four localities on the mountains of southern Oregon. It was discovered 

 in 1884 in the first-named locality by Mr. Thomas Howell, a botanist 

 of Oregon, and is named in compliment to Professor W. H. Brewer, 

 who, more than any one in his generation, has brought to light by 

 explorations in the forest the character and distribution of the Pacific 

 coast Conifers." 



Curiously enough, Picea Breiceriana most resembles in leaf structure 

 and in the form of its cone-scales the flat-leaved P. Omorica of the 

 Balkan peninsula, the least known of European Conifers ; in its weeping- 

 habit it approaches the P. Smithiana of the Himalaya mountains, and 

 on that account alone it would be a most desirable tree for British 



* Communicated by the late Malcolm Dunn. 



