EVERGREEN TREES AND SHRUBS. 521 
australis . — This is the great timber tree of the southern forests and 
pine barrens in the Carolinas and the Gulf States, and is not hardy 
north of Richmond. It grows to sixty or seventy feet in height, with 
a slender trunk. The leaves are from eight inches to a foot or 
more in length, in three’s, of a beautiful brilliant green, and collected 
in bunches at the extremities of the branches. This pine is put to 
more varied uses than any other. Its timber is close and heavy, 
and valuable both for house and ship-building. Its sap is the raw 
turpentine of commerce (from which the spirits of turpentine is 
distilled), and is gathered in the same manner as that from the sugar 
maple. Tar is made from the dead wood, which has the curious 
property, as the wood decays, of absorbing from it year after year 
all the resinous matter ; so that the heart-wood, already filled with 
resinous juice, becomes surcharged to such a degree as to double 
Its weight in a year, and continues to draw from the sap-wood till 
the latter rots off. Pine-knots, which are so largely used for torches 
and fires at the south are the butts of small branches from which 
the sap-wood has rotted off, leaving them full of rosin. 
P. australis excelsa is a variety from the northwest coast ot 
America, which has proved hardy in north Germany, and ought to 
be tried in our northern States. 
The Loblolly Pine. P. tcEda.-~H\\\^ tree is peculiar to the 
sand-barrens of the southern States, and is the first tree to occupy 
grounds exhausted by cultivation. It rises to the height of eighty 
feet with a clear stem of forty or fifty feet without a branch, and 
above, a wide-spreading head. Not hardy, and of no value north 
of Virginia. 
The Jersey Scrub Pine. P. imps. — A low tree of rough and 
straggling growth, a native of New Jersey. Not desirable as an 
ornamental tree. 
Banks’, or Gray Pine. P. banksiana . — A dwarf variety from 
the north of Canada, which does not seem to refine with cultivation, 
and is described by Sargent as “a stunted scrubby straggling 
bush.” Loudon, however, considered it quite interesting on 
account of its curious manner of growth, and another waiter 
(Richardson) describes it as a “ handsome tree, with long spread- 
