32 TREES OF NORTH AMERICA 



curves, often becoming contorted and pendulous and forming a broad open frequently 

 picturesque head, and slender leading branchlets often covered at first with a glaucous 

 bloom, becoming light orange-brown during their first winter and conspicuous from the 

 small globose dark red lustrous buds. Bark ,^'-f ' thick, separating into thin closely 

 appressed rather bright reddish brown scales. Wood heavy, hard, very strong, rather 

 coarse-grained, very durable, light brown; largely used for the upper knees of small ves- 

 sels, fence-posts, telegraph-poles, and railway-ties. 



Distribution. At the north often on well-drained uplands, southward in cold deep 

 swamps which it often clothes with forests of closely crowded trees, from Labrador to the 

 Arctic Circle, ranging west of the Rocky Mountains to latitude 65 35' north, and south- 



Fig. 36 



ward through Canada and the northern states to northern and eastern Pennsylvania, 

 Garrett County, Maryland (Oakland to Thayerville), and Preston County, West Virginia 

 (Cranesville Swamp), northern Indiana and Illinois, and northeartern Minnesota; along 

 the eastern foothills of {he Rocky Mountains to about latitude 53 and between the Yukon 

 River and Cook Inlet, Alaska (Larix alaskensis Wight.); very abundant in the interior of 

 Labrador, where it is the largest tree; common along the margins of the barren lands 

 stretching beyond the sub-Arctic forest to the shores of the Arctic Sea; attaining its largest 

 size north of Lake Winnipeg on low benches which it occasionally covers with open forests; 

 on the eastern slopes of the northern Rocky Mountains usually at elevation from 600- 

 1700 above the sea; rare and local toward the southern limits of its range. 



Occasionally planted as an ornamental tree in the northeastern states, growing rapidly 

 and attaining in cultivation a large size and picturesque habit. 



2. Larix occidentalis Nutt. Tamarack. 



Leaves triangular, rounded on the back, conspicuously keeled below, rigid, sharp- 

 pointed, I'-lf long, about 3 V wide, light pale green, turning pale yellow early in the 

 autumn. Flowers: male short-oblong; female oblong, nearly sessile, with orbicular scales 

 and bracts produced into elongated tips. Fruit oblong, short-stalked, l'-lf long, with 

 numerous thin stiff scales nearly entire and sometimes a little reflexed on their margins, 

 much shorter than their bracts, more or less thickly coated on the lower surface below the 

 middle with hoary tomentum, and standing after the escape of the seeds at right angles to 

 the axis of the cone, or often becoming reflexed; seeds nearly ' long, with a pale brown 

 shell, one half to two thirds as long as the thin fragile pale wings broadest near the middle 

 and obliquely rounded at apex. 



