CALIFORNIA EVERGREEN CHESTNUT OAK. 85 



where round about these bright golden guardian angel oaks, 

 holding the four winds to calm repose lest they blow on the 

 earth and on the trees; midway the light, delicate, silvery 

 gray Sabin Pine, casting her gauzy maiden veil over some 

 beauty, far or near. Such is but a faint glimpse of a very 

 little of one of ten thousand glories that dwell in the land. 



Summarily recapitulating — this summer-green oak may 

 be considered as only a middle sized tree of notoriously black 

 bark, characteristically extending even to the main branches. 

 The branchlets soon become smooth, leaves large, three to 

 six inches long, broadly oval in general outline, moderately 

 pinnatifid-lobed or broadly bayed, and these lobes outwardly 

 tapering, like the Red Oak of the Atlantic sometimes; again 

 lobe-toothed and always more or less awl-pointed, in age 

 smooth, leaf-stems slender, about an inch or so long. Cat- 

 kins (male flowers-stamened), starry-downy, or smoothish ; 

 calyx, with five broad eye-lashed lobes, bearing four or five 

 stamens. Biennial, i. e., acorns set in one year and ripened 

 the next season on the wood of the previous year's growth, 

 one to three together, set close down, etc. 



CALIFORNIA EVERGREEN CHESTNUT OAK. 



(Q.uereus densiflora.) 



"0 spare that aged oak, 

 Now towering to the skies." — Morris. 



A LARGE tree, of great beauty and unusual regularity 

 of outline, being broadly conic, often oblong-conic- 

 topped, and always, if in freedom, the most symmetri- 

 cal of any oak ever seen. The very wide range in the size of 

 this dense-flowered Evergreen Chestnut Oak is scarcely less 

 wonderful than is seen in its boon companion, our Evergreen 

 Chestnut itself, being from a few inches, or feet, to one hun- 

 dred and fifty feet high, and to six feet or more in diameter. 

 Throughout the Coast Range associated with redwood 

 forests, or chiefly bordering their vanishing limit, among 

 such colossal trees it must needs aspire with more or less 

 erect-spreading branches, and here is often seen the some- 

 what spire-shaped top; but with space to spread, the lower 

 and middle branches reach abroad horizontally in the flat 

 fan-sprayed type of the very large Pacific Red Alder (Ahius 

 rubra), but so perfect in form that no possible art-training 

 could equal it for true symmetry; the ever verdant leaves 



