EVERGREEN TREES AND SHRUBS. 531 
bottom branches creeping on the ground, but growing in favorable 
situations, into a small tree twenty or thirty feet high, with a gray 
and rather smoothish bark.” “ At great elevations on the mountains 
it becomes merely a spreading bush creeping along the ground.” 
The largest specimens we have seen are about twelve feet high 
and twenty feet in diameter, and are well described by the above 
quotation. This and the mugho pines are often confounded from 
the fact of being about equally dwarfish. The mugho has a more 
compact form and a warmer green color. 
The Swiss Stone Pine. Pinus cemhra .- — A tree of 
very compact, erect, ovate-conical form, dark foliage, 
and slow growth. On account of its formality of out- 
line it has been much employed in gardening. Fig. 170 
illustrates its characteristic form. It retains its lower 
branches and foliage to a considerable age. The greatest 
peculiarity of its foliage is the dense mass of globular 
tufts of leaves which compose the entire surface of the 
tree. Its rate of growth is from six inches to one foot per year, 
and it grows to thirty or forty feet in height. 
Pyrenean Pine. Finns pyre7ieaca ( P. 77ionspellknsis^ P. his- 
pa7iica ). — Leaves two in a sheath, from five to seven inches long, 
fine, stiff, straight, thickly-set on the branches, of a clear green 
color. Cones two and a half inches long, conical-oblong, smooth, 
light yellow color, at right angles to the branches. “Branches 
stout, of an orange color, numerous, regular, spreading in all direc- 
tions around the stem, and well furnished with laterals ” (Gordon). 
A large, wide-spreading tree, native of the most elevated forests 
of the Pyrenees. 
It is extraordinary that a tree so distinct and beautiful, and 
seemingly hardy as this, should be almost unknown in this country. 
The largest tree of the species we have seen is growing in the 
specimen grounds of Parsons & Co., Flushing, L. I. It is now 
thirty feet high, and so far assumes about the same form as a very 
spreading white pine. But its leaves are much longer than those 
of the white, Scotch, or Austrian pines, and quite as long as those 
Fig. 170. 
