THE FORESTS OF WASHINGTON 



open margins, where the soil is not too wet, 

 and extends up the coast on Vancouver Island 

 beyond Nanaimo. But in no part of the State 

 does it reach anything like the size and beauty 

 of proportions that it attains in California, 

 few trees here being more than ten or twelve 

 inches in diameter and thirty feet high. It 

 is, however, a very remarkable-looking object, 

 standing there like some lost or runaway na- 

 tive of the tropics, naked and painted, beside 

 that dark mossy ocean of northland conifers. 

 Not even a palm tree would seem more out of 

 place here. 



The oaks, so far as my observation has 

 reached, seem to be most abundant and to grow 

 largest on the islands of the San Juan and 

 Whidbey Archipelago. One of the three species 

 of maples that I have seen is only a bush that 

 makes tangles on the banks of the rivers. Of 

 the other two one is a small tree, crooked and 

 moss-grown, holding out its leaves to catch 

 the light that filters down through the close- 

 set spires of the great spruces. It grows almost 

 everywhere throughout the entire extent of 

 the forest until the higher slopes of the moun- 

 tains are reached, and produces a very pic- 

 turesque and delightful effect; relieving the 

 bareness of the great shafts of the evergreens, 

 without being close enough in its growth to 

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