92 FOREST TREES OF CALIFORNIA. 



of swamps, ponds, rivulets, and springs, may not be more 

 than eight to fifteen feet high in many places. But the 

 River Ball-flower Tree, in all its greatness and glory, all 

 over aglow in white and creamy button-balls of flowers, 

 crowded into little globes of an inch or more in size ; the 

 long pistils like insect pins, innumerable for multitude, 

 sticking out all over them; in this spherical head, each tiny 

 floweret is forced into a w T edged, four-sided, inverted pyramid ; 

 but details apart, they are fragrant as the honey hive itself, 

 and fairly alive with bee, insect, and butterfly life ; besides 

 being the fond retreat of the humming-bird, and unnum- 

 ered songsters that throng their boughs; often a grand and 

 glorious ornament to riversides and watery regions, from 

 June to Autumn; the joy of the sportsman and the admira- 

 tion of the foreign traveler, from its singular mode of flower- 

 ing, and by its flowers appearing at a season when few others 

 are to be seen. These are the natural liveried attendants 



conceived ideas of propriety for a wintergreen chestnut (casianopsis) , to bear fruit a 

 foot or so high, and then see it seven or eight feet in diameter, huge trunk of clean 

 colossal column seventy to eighty feet, thence towering one hundred and fifty feet 

 high : nor an evergreen Tan-bark Chestnut Oak ( Q. densi flora), one hundred and fifty 

 feet high, and nearly of equal spread, sound, and ramping in the vigor of 3 T outh — on 

 the coast — and then find it in full fruitage a few inches to a foot high, among the 

 least of shrubs, near the foot of Mount Shasta ; nor a cypress (C macrocaipa) and 

 others, four to six feet in diameter, and only a little way off, in equal fruit, barely 

 two or three feet high; or the Tamarack contorted pine and others sporting in the 

 same way; the Buckeye, or Horse-chestnut exhibiting similar extremes. Think of 

 the California Bay-tree fruiting, a common bush, then furnishing hewn logs 

 seventy-five to one hundred feet or more, tapering from three to four feet to a foot, 

 and others eight feet through, and straight as a line (exhibited at Mechanic's Fair), 

 seen for a thousandth time on coast or mountains only as a respectable shrub, wav- 

 ing elders, etc. 



Take another example, to wit: our tiniest of Buckthorns {Rhamnus croccus), 

 mostly a lowly matted shrubling, when flowering and fruiting, the body scarcely 

 the size, nay, often half the size of the quill you write with, yet occasionally a 

 small tree, body half a foot or more in diameter, and that higher than one can 

 reach, and the ample top fifteen to twenty-five feet high: wood as bright yellow or 

 brighter than the boxwood of the engraver, texture of exquisite homogeneity, 

 susceptible of the highest polish for cabinet and fancy work, or useful withal: 

 abounding in crystals of oxalate of lime, makes the choicest strops or hones to 

 sharpen, but otherwise bad on tools, and eminently so on the ax. Again, one most 

 familiar with the herculean Pinus ponderosa, the grave Jcffrcyi form or species (?), 

 would be the last to suspect it of sporting on the shallow shore of similar extremes, 

 but in Owen's Valley, at Casa Diablo Hot Springs, it is little higher than one's head, 

 where we reached up from the ground and plucked the cones, and yet a few yards 

 off, at exactly the same level, were tree's one hundred feet high. Similar remarks 

 apply to P. Torreyaaa, etc. — on the contrary, it is just what we are prepared to 

 expect of P. tuberculata, because so familiar with groves of it laden with cones, 

 only a few feet high, on white magnesian hills; a little larger on the wind-buffeted 

 coasts, but near Mount Shasta, east, southwest, and north, one hundred feet high, 

 quite reversing the habit of the Tanbark Chestnut Oak above referred to. Truly, 

 conditions must be very congenial or otherwise — say variable — to produce these 

 surprising contrasts, not a tithe of which can be enumerated. Our excuse for this gen- 

 eral note of even these, if any were needed, is seen in the absolute necessity for due 

 allowance being made respective observers and the writer, as well as for climatic and 

 other environment, and for these reasons we see plainly why absolute measurements 

 appear to be of so little value. 



