Trees Worth Knowing Part 34

The genus _chamaecyparis_ includes three American species, of tall, narrow pyramidal habit and flat leaf-spray like that of the arbor-vitae. Annual erect globular cones of few, woody scales, produce one to five seeds under each.

This white cedar is the swamp-loving variety of the Atlantic seaboard--its range stretches from Maine to Mississippi. The durability of its white wood gives it considerable importance as a lumber tree. It is particularly dependable when placed in contact with water and exposed to weather. Cedar s.h.i.+ngles, fence posts, railroad ties, buckets, and other cooperage consume quant.i.ties each year. The trees are important ornamental evergreens, planted for their graceful spray and their dull blue-green leaves. Their maximum height is eighty feet.

=The Lawson Cypress=

_C. Lawsoniana_, A. Murr.

The Lawson cypress lifts its splendid spire to a height of two hundred feet, on the coast mountains of Oregon and California, forming a nearly continuous forest belt twenty miles long, between Point Gregory and the mouth of the Coquille River. Spire-like, with short, horizontal branches, this species bears a leaf-spray of feathery lightness, bright green, from the mult.i.tude of minute paired leaf-scales, and adorned with the cl.u.s.tered pea-sized cones, which are blue-green and very pale until they ripen.

The wood of this giant cypress is used in house-finis.h.i.+ng and in boat-building; for flooring, fencing, and for railroad ties.

=The Bald Cypress=

_Taxodium distichum_, Rich.

The bald cypress is the one member of the cypress group that sheds its foliage each autumn, following the example of the tamarack. In the Far South, river swamps are often covered with a growth of these cypresses whose trunks are strangely swollen at the base, and often hollow. The flaring b.u.t.tresses are prolonged into the main roots, which form humps that rise out of the water at some distance from the tree. These "cypress knees" are not yet explained, though authorities suspect that they have something to do with the aeration of the root system.

Inundated nine or ten months of the year, these cypress swamps are often dry the remaining time, and it is a surprise to Southerners to find these trees comfortable and beautiful in Northern parks.

Cleveland and New York parks have splendid examples.

The leaves of the bald cypress are of two types. They are scale-like only on stems that bear the globular cones. On other shoots they form a flat spray, each leaf one half to three-fourths of an inch long, pea-green in the Southern swamps, bright yellow-green on both sides in dry ground, turning orange-brown before they fall. The twigs that bear these two-ranked leaves are also deciduous, a unique distinction of this genus.

Cypress wood is soft, light brown, durable, and easily worked.

Quant.i.ties of it are s.h.i.+pped north and used in the manufacture of doors and interior finis.h.i.+ng of houses, for fencing, railroad ties, cooperage, and s.h.i.+ngles.

THE JUNIPERS

The sign by which the junipers are most easily distinguished from other evergreens, is the juicy berries instead of cones. In some species these are red, but they are mostly blue or blue-black.

Before they mature it is easy to see the stages by which the cone-scales thicken and coalesce, instead of hardening and remaining separate, as in the typical fruit of conifers.

Juniper leaves are of two types: scale-like in opposite pairs, pressed close to the twig, as in the cypresses; and stiff, spiny, usually channelled leaves, which stand out free from the twig in whorls of threes.

The wood is red, fragrant, durable, and light.

=The Dwarf Juniper=

_Juniperus communis_, Linn.

The dwarf juniper departs from the pyramidal pattern and forms a loose, open head above a short, stout trunk. The slender branchlets are clothed with boat-shaped leaves which spread nearly at right angles from the twigs in whorls of three. Each one is pointed and hollowed, dark green outside, snowy white inside, which is really the upper side of the leaf. It requires three years to mature the bright blue berries, and they hang on the tree two or three years longer. Each fruit contains two or three seeds, and these require three years to germinate.

It is plain to see that time is no object to this slow-growing dwarf juniper, found in both the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, covering vast stretches of waste land. From Greenland to Alaska it is found and south along the highlands into Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and California. Its hardiness gives it importance as a cover for waste land on seash.o.r.es and for hedges and wind-breaks in any exposed situation. It is a tree reaching thirty feet in height on the limestone hills of southern Illinois. In other situations it is usually a sprawling shrubby thing, the cringing parent of a race of dwarf junipers, known in many and various horticultural forms.

=The Western Juniper=

_J. occidentalis_, Hook.

The giant of its race is the Western juniper, one of the patriarchial trees of America, ranking in age with the sequoias.

Never a tall tree, it yet attains a trunk diameter of ten feet, and an age that surely exceeds two thousand years. At elevations of seven to ten thousand feet this valiant red cedar is found clinging to the granite domes and bare glacial pavements where soil and moisture seem absolutely non-existent. Suns.h.i.+ne and thin air are abundant, however, and elbow room. Upon these commodities the tree subsists, crouching, stubbornly clinging, while a single root offers foothold, its gnarled branches picturesque and beautiful in their tufts of gray-green leaves. Avalanches have beheaded the oldest of these giants, but their denuded trunks throw out wisps of new foliage with each returning spring. When they succ.u.mb, their trunks last almost as long as the granite boulders among which they are cast by the wind or the ice-burden that tore them loose.

The stringy bark is woven into cloth and matting by the Indians, and the fine-grained, hard, red wood finds no better use than for the mountaineer's fencing and fuel.

=The Eastern Red Cedar=

_J. Virginiana_, Linn.

The Eastern red cedar is a handsome, narrow pyramid in its youth, often becoming broad and irregular, or round-topped above a b.u.t.tressed, twisted trunk, as it grows old. The scale-like leaves are four-ranked, blue-green when young, spreading, and sometimes three fourths of an inch long, on vigorous new shoots. The dark blue berries are covered with a pale bloom and have a resinous, sweet flesh. This juniper is familiar in abandoned farms and ragged fence-rows, becoming rusty brown in foliage to match the stringy red bark in winter time. The durable red wood is used for posts and railroad ties, for cedar chests and pencils. The tree is profitably planted by railroad companies, as cedar ties are unsurpa.s.sed. In cultivation the tree forms an interesting, symmetrical specimen, adapted to formal gardens. (_See ill.u.s.tration, page 230_.)

=The Red Juniper=

_J. Barbadensis_, Linn.

The red juniper, much more luxuriant than its close relative of the North, is the handsomest juniper in cultivation. Its pyramid is robbed of a rigid formal expression by the drooping of its fern-like leaf-spray. The berries are silvery white and abundant. The wood is used princ.i.p.ally for pencils. This species grows in the Gulf states.

THE LARCHES, OR TAMARACKS

The notable characteristic of the small genus, _larix_, is that the narrow leaves are shed in the autumn. Here is a tall pyramidal conifer which is not evergreen. It bears an annual crop of small woody cones, held erect on the branches, and the leaves are borne in crowded cl.u.s.ters on short lateral spurs, except upon the terminal shoots, where the leaves are scattered remotely but follow the spiral plan. Larch wood is hard, heavy, resinous, and almost indestructible. The tall shafts are ideal for telegraph poles and posts.

=The Tamarack=

_Larix Americana_, Michx.

The tamarack or American larch (_see ill.u.s.tration, page 263_) goes farther north than any other tree, except dwarf willows and birches.

Above these stunted, broad-leaved trees pure forests of tamarack rise, covering Northern swamps from Newfoundland and Labrador to Hudson Bay and west across the Rocky Mountains, the trees dwindling in size as they approach the arctic tundras, the limit of tree growth. The wood of these bravest of all conifers is a G.o.d-send over vast territories where other supply of timber is wanting. The tough roots of the larch tree supply threads with which the Indian sews his birch canoe.

In cultivation the American species is too spa.r.s.e of limb and foliage to compete with the more luxuriant European larch, yet it is often planted. Its fresh spring foliage is lightened by the pale yellow of the globular staminate flowers and warmed by the rosy tips of the cone flowers. In early autumn the plain, thin-scaled cones, erect and bright chestnut-brown, shed their small seeds while the yellow leaves are dropping, and the bare limbs carry the empty cones until the following year.

=The Western Larch=

_L. occidentalis_, Nutt.

The Western larch is the finest tree in its genus, reaching six feet in trunk diameter and two hundred feet in height, in the Cascade forests from British Columbia to southern Oregon and across the ranges to western Montana. This tree has the unusual distinction of exceeding all conifers in the value of its wood, which is heavy, hard, strong, dense, durable, of a fine red that takes a brilliant polish. It is used for furniture and for the interior finish of houses. Quant.i.ties of it supply the demand for posts and railroad ties, in which use it lasts indefinitely, compared with other timber.

PART IX

THE PALMS