288 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW 



In the East the White Pine with its fine, tasseled foHage grows 

 often 150 to 200 feet in height and reaches an age of from two to 

 three hundred years. It is a stately tree, conical, with spreading 

 horizontal branches in whorls of five. The bark is grey, furrowed, 

 thick, with broad scaly ridges. Like other pines, the white pine 

 bears its evergreen leaves in sheathed bundles set on little pro- 

 jecting shelves along the twigs. The sheaths are shed in spring in 

 all the white pines, and the number of leaves in a bundle is always 

 five. In our Eastern woods a five-leaved pine is a white pine 

 whether it is a flourishing little sapling with only three or four 

 whorls of branches coming out from its central stem, or a great 

 forest tree towering above its broad leaved neighbors, noble 

 and picturesque, tho storms have disturbed the symmetry of its 

 youth. Certain pitch pines, all Western, have leaves in fives, 

 but the sheaths will be found at the bases of the bundles thruout 

 the season. 



Stroke the leaves of a white-pine branch — they are soft and 

 flexible. As they sway in the wind they are graceful and light; 

 the tree seems decked with plimies of dark blue-green. The young 

 shoots, pale yellowish green, lighten the sombre pine woods, and 

 the clustering catkins, shaking out their abundant pollen, sift 

 gold dust thru the whole forest. The pistillate flowers show 

 themselves clustered about the terminal bud, which keeps on 

 growing, leaving them to ripen, thru two seasons into long, slender 

 green cones. The pinkish purple of these tiny cone flowers adds a 

 rich color to the upper twigs, where they stand erect until autumn. 

 Below them, hanging down with their weight, are the half -grown 

 cones, slim, finger-like and green, with tight, smooth scales, that 

 will turn brown and discharge their ripened seed at the end of 

 their second simimer. 



This white pine of ours is built on a semi-decimal plan, which it 

 is worth our while to notice. In the gracefully winged seed there 

 are ten cotyledons, or seed leaves, that mount the stem and 

 surround the precious terminal bud when the seed germinates. 

 This bud is the "leader." If anything happens to it the central 

 shaft is maimed for life, and either one side bud will have to bend 

 upward and take the leader's place, or two will divide the honor, 

 and a forked pine is the result. 



The buds on the crown of a baby white pine cluster at the top — 

 a circle of five around the central bud. In spring the leader grows 



