32 WEST-AMERICAN 



Group I. Common Lumber Pines. 



Communes. 

 Widely distributed and variable trees. Two species: 



No. 14-Western Yellow Pine 



P ponderosa, Dougl. 



Trees of the largest size, 200 to 300 feet in height, 

 and 5 to 15 feet thick; bark an the typical form, 

 yellowish or whitish, mostly very thick and deeply 

 fissured into large plates; cones conical-ovate, 2 to 5 

 inches long; male flowers long and flexuous, forming 

 large rosettes, 3 to 5 inches across, on the ends of 

 branchlets, with a leaf-bud or a few leaves in the 

 center. The broken branchlets exhale an odor of 

 turpentine. First detected, 1826, by David Douglas, 

 "between the Columbia and Spokane Rivers," eastern 

 Washington. Afterward found to be widely distrib- 

 uted. 



The first thought that must enter the mind of a reflec- 

 tive observer when he finds himself in a Yellow Pine 

 forest is that a half dozen or more kinds of pines are 

 about him, and such, indeed, is the lumberman's view 

 of the subject. He sees whitish or yellow-barked trees 

 with large longitudinal plates, which, when cleft by his 

 ax, crumble to hundreds of buttons, revealing but a few 

 layers of sap-wood. The next tree met with may have 

 darker, harder bark and more layers of sap-wood. A 

 third tree will intensify these characters, and so on until 

 perhaps not five rods away is a brown-barked, low- 

 limbed tree that he might cut almost to the center before 



