PINE FAMILY 



The murmuring pines and the hemlocks 

 Bearded with moss and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight 

 Stand like Druids of eld with voices sad and prophetic, 

 Stand like harpers hoar with beards that rest on their bosoms, 



— Henry W. Longfellow. 



Many voices there are in Nature's choir, and none but were good to hear 

 Had we mastered the laws of their music well, and could read their meaning 



clear ; 

 But we who can feel at Nature's touch, cannot think as yet with her thought ; 

 And I only know that the sough of the pines with a spell of its own is fraught. 

 • — Eraser's Magazine. 



The White Pine is the tallest, the most stately and beauti- 

 ful of all our eastern conifers, it is the most ornamental for 

 parks and lawns, as well as by far the most valuable econom- 

 ically. In the forest it grows straight as an arrow, towering 

 branchless until it gains the forest roof where it spreads out 

 a more or less open head ; in the open it takes on the form 

 of all free growing trees, the lower branches live and lengthen, 

 the trunk gets fat and sturdy. But no one pine is ever so 

 beautiful as a grove of pines. The great shafts towering up- 

 ward like Corinthian columns — the ceaseless murmur of the 

 wind in the tree-tops — the soft brown carpet of fallen needles 

 — the subdued light — the stillness — the absence of joyous life 

 — all unite to induce feelings of reverence and awe. 



The White Pine bears the smoothest bark of all the pines, 

 on old trunks it does indeed fissure and separate into small 

 plates but they are simply loose at the edges and do not 

 scale off. On young stems the bark is very smooth, a red- 

 dish green or reddish brown and covered in summer with a 

 very striking ashy or pearly gloss. The primary leaves are 

 simply thin and chaff-like bud-scales, from their axils proceed 

 the secondary needle-shaped evergreen leaves in clusters of 

 five. A cross section of these needle-shaped leaves is trian- 

 gular. The edges are serrate. The massed foliage is beau- 

 tiful ; the needles are bright bluish green, soft, slender, 

 delicate, and disposed in pretty tassels upon the branch. 

 Although, apparently, to an evergreen all seasons are the 

 same, yet the White Pine has a fashion of folding its needles 



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