66 WOODY PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 
at the but, and a height from root to top of sixty-two feet six 
inches, having thus grown almost an inch in diameter and two 
feet in height annually. 
J. 1. Sp.2 Tse Prrce Pure. Pinus rigida. L. 
Figured in Lambert’s Pinus, Plate 16. 
Michaux ; Sylva, I, plate 143. 
Loudon; Arboretum, VIII, beautifully, plate 326. 
This tree is distinguished by its leaves being in threes, by the 
rigidity and sharpness of the scales of its cones, by the rough- 
ness of its bark, and by the denseness of the brushes of its stiff, 
crowded leaves. It has not great beauty, but it produces an 
agreeable contrast, by the deep green of its foliage, with the 
lighter colors of the deciduous trees; and there is an irregularity 
about it, which often gives a single tree a picturesque appear- 
ance when seen ata distance. It is free from the stiffness of 
most of the other pines, and a hill clothed with it 1s a desirable 
addition to a prospect. 
The pitch pine is commonly forty or fifty feet high, and one 
or two feet in diameter at base. In the most favorable situa- 
tions in which it occurs, which are sands mixed with loam, and 
plentifully supplied with moisture, it sometimes attains the 
height of seventy or eighty feet, and even more, with a diame- 
ter of nearly three feet. Such trees are now very rare. About 
the ponds in Plymouth, where these pines rise considerably 
above the uniform growth of oaks, they must be seventy feet 
high, and I found the average size of several of the largest to be 
five feet and seven inches in circumference, at three feet from the 
ground. In other parts of the lower counties, I have found the 
largest sometimes over six feet. In a single instance, the cir- 
cumference was six feet seven inches.* 
On the hills in the southwestern corner of the State, they are 
* One which I measured in Lyman, York County, Maine, was eight feet six 
inches in circumference at the ground, seven feet six inches at three and one-half 
feet above, and, by the estimation of a friend who was experienced in trees, 
ninety feet high. Several measured in Chester, N. H., were over seven feet in 
girth at the ground, and one was seven feet at three feet from the surface, and 
eighty feet high. 
