92 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 
duced on her own soil, and has not been derived from or com- 
municated to any other district by the course of nature. 
§ 65. Distribution of Plants.—Most of the Sacramento and 
San Joaquin valleys, the Colorado Desert, the eastern slopes 
of the Coast Mountains, and the Coast Range south of latitude 
35°, are treeless; the Sierra Nevada and the western slopes of 
the Coast Range north of 35°, have fine forests; and in the 
foot hills of the Sierra Nevada, and in the coast valleys, there 
are beautiful open groves of oak-trees. The timber of the 
Sierra is mainly spruce, pine, and fir; that of the coast, north 
of 37°, redwood; and spruce and pine south of that latitude. 
§ 66. Superiority of Conifers.—The botany of California is 
remarkable for containing a number of the largest and most 
beautiful coniferous trees in the world, growing to a height of 
three hundred feet and a thickness of eight and ten feet in the 
trunk, and some of them still larger. Among these gigantic 
glories of the vegetable kingdom are the mammoth tree, the 
redwood, the sugar-pine, the red fir, the yellow fir, and the 
arbor-vitee, or Thuja gigantea. Other large conifers contrib- 
ute to the magnificence of our forests. We have the laurel, 
the madrofia, the evergreen-oak, and the nut-pine (Pinus sa- 
biniana), evergreen trees with a growth resembling that of 
deciduous trees. Our deciduous trees are few, and of little 
value to the mechanic. 
The mammoth tree (Sequoia gigantea) was described in the 
preceding chapter. 
§ 67. Redwood.—The redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) is 
the second in size and the first in commercial value of all the 
trees in California, though not much superior to the sugar-pine 
in either respect. It grows only within thirty miles of the 
ocean from Monterey to Crescent City, and is never found out 
of the state. It bears a remarkable resemblance in color and 
texture of wood and bark, and color, form and distribution of 
foliage to the mammoth tree, to which it is not much inferior in 
size. A redwood-tree called “Fremont’s tree,” in Santa Cruz 
county, is two hundred and seventy-five feet high, and nincteen 
