American Forest Trees Part 14

Trees containing 100,000 to 120,000 feet each 2 Trees containing 80,000 to 100,000 feet each 13 Trees containing 60,000 to 80,000 feet each 49 Trees containing 40,000 to 60,000 feet each 112 Trees containing 20,000 to 40,000 feet each 251 Trees containing less than 20,000 feet each 353 "Little bigtrees" 2,682 ----- Total 3,462

Bigtree is distantly related to southern cypress, and the shapes of very old trees of both species bear some resemblance. Bigtree leaves do not fall annually as those of bald cypress do. They are from one-eighth to one-fourth of an inch long, and on the leading shoots they may be half an inch in length. Cones are from two to three and a half inches long, and they ripen their seeds the second year, but the empty cones may adhere to the branches several years. The seeds are a quarter of an inch long, and have wings sufficient to carry them a hundred yards or more.

The trees bear abundance of seeds, in proportion to the small number of branches. Though shapely and well clothed with limbs when young, the crown contracts with age, and consists of a few enormous, crooked limbs, almost dest.i.tute of twigs and small branches. One of these trees may actually bear more twigs when the trunk is only a foot in diameter than will be on the same trunk when it is fifteen or twenty feet in diameter.

The old tree trunks are often without limbs to a height of 100 or 150 feet.

The Douglas squirrel is the bigtree's greatest enemy. In proportion to size, this little creature probably eats ten times as many tree seeds as the most ravenous hog that roams the forest. One of the first things that impresses a visitor in a grove of bigtrees is the rich brown of the bark of some of the trunks. All are not brown alike, or at all seasons.

The trees on which the seed harvest is ready are the brownest, thanks to the sharp claws, the tireless energy, and keen appet.i.te of the Douglas squirrel. He goes up and down the trunks for three square meals a day among the cl.u.s.ters of cone-bearing branches two hundred or three hundred feet above, and makes several extra trips for exercise; and at each scratch of his briery foot he kicks off scales of bark, until the whole trunk is "scratched raw." The detached scales of bark acc.u.mulate in a mound about the base of the tree, where they have been so acc.u.mulating for centuries. It is fortunate that those old trees have bark from one to two feet thick. They can afford to be scratched for a month or two each year.

These are the heaviest trees in America, notwithstanding their wood is light. It weighs less than northern white cedar. The largest bigtree trunks weigh more than 2,000,000 pounds. In order to stand at all, they must stand plumb. It is a provision of nature that the old trees are almost branchless, otherwise the wind would force them out of plumb and they would go down. It has been claimed that the overthrow of one of these giants is always brought about by one of two causes. The development of larger limbs on one side than on another unbalances them; or the wash of gullies undermines the roots on one side, and draws the tree that way. It is currently believed that no bigtree ever dies from natural causes.

A good deal of pure fiction has been published regarding the size and age of the largest of these trees. They are old enough and large enough without drawing upon the imagination. The tree's base is greatly enlarged, but tapers rapidly the first few feet. There is little doubt that some of the trunks are over forty feet in diameter, one foot above ground, but that is not a fair measurement. The point should be five or six feet at least. Measured thus, about twenty-five feet inside the bark would represent the largest. With the bark added, the diameter would be nearly thirty feet. Probably not one tree in fifty, taking them as they occur in the whole range and counting veterans only, is fifteen feet in diameter five feet from the ground.

There is also some extravagant guessing as to height. Too many tourists measure with the unaided eye, or accept a guidebook's figures. An authentic height of 365 feet--the measurement of a fallen trunk--is probably the greatest. Very few reach three hundred feet. Many unreliable figures have been published concerning the age of bigtrees.

One thing can be accepted without question; size is no proof of age, in comparing one tree with another; neither is the number of annual rings in a block cut from the side of a tree a reliable factor to determine age. The only sure way to determine the age of one of these trees is by counting all the rings from the pith to bark. Care should be taken not to count the same ring twice, as may be done when the wood is curly.

John Muir counted 4,000 rings in a bigtree stump. It is believed that no higher age is backed by the evidence of yearly rings. It was twenty-four feet in diameter. The count of another of like size made it 2,200 years old; and of still another of the same size placed its age at 1,300 years. The Forest Service has made accurate measurement and record of every ring of growth in a tree that was over twenty-four feet in diameter, and it is shown that during certain periods of years the tree grew three or four times as rapidly as during other periods.

The wood of bigtree is very light, soft, moderately strong, brittle, summerwood thin and dark rendering the rings of annual growth easily seen; the medullary rays are thin, numerous, and very obscure. The wood is light to dark red, the thin sapwood nearly white; it works easily, splits readily, and polishes well. It is very durable in contact with the soil. Trunks lie in the woods long periods before decay seriously attacks them; but forest fires hollow them, and finally burn them up.

Enormous depressions are found in the forest where logs once lay, but which disappeared long ago, judging by the size of trees which have since grown in the depressions. The interior of some large trunks which have been worked up on sawmills showed the scars of forest fires centuries ago. The annual rings which covered one such scar showed that the burning took place 1,700 years ago.

Not much can be said for the commercial uses of bigtree. Many a species of insignificant size is much more useful. Considerable quant.i.ties have been cut by sawmills. The waste is great, heavy trunks crus.h.i.+ng badly in fall. Logs are so large that many of them are split with gunpowder to facilitate handling them. Some of the wood has been exported for lead pencils; other has been used for fence posts, s.h.i.+ngles, and grapevine stakes, while the soft bark has been worked into novelties.

MACNAB CYPRESS (_Cupressus macnabiana_) is a California tree of limited range and little commercial value. It grows in Napa, Lake, Mendocino, and Trinity counties; is often little more than a branching shrub, but the largest specimens may be thirty feet high and fifteen inches in diameter. The wood is light, soft, and usually of slow growth. The medullary rays are numerous but thin, and the bands of summerwood are distinct. The cones are generally less than one inch long, and the seeds have narrow wings. The foliage is grayish which is due to white glands in the leaves. Forest foliage is fragrant. The tree is known as white cedar, Shasta cypress, and California mountain cypress.

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REDWOOD

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REDWOOD

(_Sequoia Sempervirens_)

This tree's color is responsible for its name. It is sometimes spoken of as coast redwood to distinguish it from bigtree which grows in the interior of California. In European markets it is known as California redwood to distinguish it from other redwoods growing in distant parts of the world. Its botanical name, _Sequoia sempervirens_, means evergreen sequoia. The other species of sequoia is also evergreen. In reality, the coast redwood is less of an evergreen than the bigtree is, because the leaves of redwood turn brown two years before they fall, but there are always plenty of green leaves on the branches. The leaves are from one-quarter to one-half inch in length.

The geographical range of redwood covers about 6,000 square miles, but the commercial range is scarcely one-fifth as much. The redwood belt extends 500 miles along the Pacific coast from southern Oregon to central California. It varies from ten to thirty miles in width. It is strictly a fog belt tree, and grows poorly outside the region of ocean fog, which seldom reaches an alt.i.tude more than 2,800 feet above sea level. Where fog is thick and frequent, and soil is moist and otherwise suitable, redwood forests have grown in such luxuriance that no species in this country exceeds it. Stands running much over 100,000 feet per acre are frequent, and it is said 1,000,000 feet have been cut from a single acre.

Redwood cones are one inch or less in length. They ripen in one season.

Seeds are quite small, and are equipped with wings. The bark is thick, but is much thinner than the bark of bigtrees, though it is in great ridges like the bark of that species. The habits of the two species, as to form of crown, are similar. Young redwoods, particularly if they grow in the open, develop symmetrical and conical crowns which they retain until the trunks are a foot or more in diameter. Lower limbs die and fall off after that, and old trees have crowns so small that it would seem impossible that they could supply the wood-building material for trunks so large. That the growth should be slow under such circ.u.mstances is to be expected. The ages of mature trees vary from 500 to 800 years, but an extreme age of 1,373 years is on record. The average is, therefore, considerably below that of bigtrees.

Redwoods grow as tall as bigtrees, but do not equal them in diameter of trunk, though trees twenty feet in diameter occur.

A noticeable feature of the forests is that, in a given stand, nearly all trees are of the same height, irrespective of size of trunk. The crowns go up to the light and when they reach the common level of others, and secure a share of light, they show no disposition to go higher. The doctrine which they silently put into practice is to live and let others live. That habit makes it possible for redwoods to grow in very dense stands, which they could not do if a few trees domineered over the others, and appropriated the light to themselves.

When old age overtakes the giant redwoods, they exhibit the first symptoms of weakened vitality by dying at the top. Most trees over five hundred years old are "stag-headed." From that period they die slowly, but usually survive two or three hundred years after the visible signs of approaching death strike them.

Redwood has an advantage over nearly all other needle-leaf trees in that it propagates by both seeds and sprouts. Few softwoods send up sprouts from stumps or roots. Redwoods of large size are produced that way, and the stumps of very old trees send up many vigorous shoots. Sometimes a ring of large trees surrounds a depression in the ground where the parent tree grew, died, and decayed.

Sprouts are of course confined to the immediate proximity of the parent tree, but redwood seeds are scattered by the wind over vacant s.p.a.ces.

This results in dense stands where other conditions are favorable, but the species has never been able to establish itself far inland or high on mountains.

In 1880 the Federal census made a rough estimate of the available redwood, and placed it at 25,825,000,000 feet. More than twenty years later, with heavy cutting all the time, private estimates placed the remaining stand at over 50,000,000,000 feet. The second estimate was unquestionably nearer correct than the first. The stand of no important timber tree in this country is more easily estimated than redwood. The forests are compact, the trees large, the trunks similar in form, and the well-timbered area is comparatively small. Redwood has been called the most important timber tree of the Pacific coast. The t.i.tle probably confers too much, though the tree's importance is beyond question. The annual cut of Douglas fir is nearly ten times as large as of redwood, and the supply still in the forests is much greater than that of redwood. The cut of western yellow pine likewise exceeds the output of redwood, and the remaining supply is larger. The cut of western red cedar, including s.h.i.+ngles, is about the same, and the remaining stand of cedar is very large. Western hemlock, too, exists in large quant.i.ty, and its importance as a source of timber supply may be equal to redwood.

Redwood is frequently referred to as one of the lightest in this country. Its weight per cubic foot, oven-dry, is 26.2 pounds. On the same basis, white pine is 24, southern white cedar 20.7, northern white cedar 19.7, and bigtree 18.2. There are woods in Florida lighter than any of these. Redwood is very soft, yet it dulls tools quickly. It is moderately strong, a little below white pine; it is brittle, again ranking below white pine; it splits and works easily and polishes well.

Few, if any woods surpa.s.s this one in splitting properties. Boards twelve feet long and a foot wide may be rived from selected logs, and they present surfaces nearly as smooth as if cut with a saw. However, curly and wavy redwood is not uncommon, and that, too, splits well, but the surface is not smooth. The width of annual rings varies, usually wide in young timber and narrow in old. The bands of summerwood are narrow and clearly defined. The surface of redwood lumber absorbs water quickly, yet, for some reason, creosote and other preservatives can be forced into the wood only with the greatest difficulty. Fortunately, it is not necessary to treat this timber to prevent decay, for, in almost any position, it wears out before it rots. s.h.i.+ngles, and window and door frames of the old barracks buildings at Eureka, California, remained in place until fifty years of wind and driven sand wore them away.

Railroads use the wood for ties until they wear out, not until they rot out. Farmers near some of the California railroads gather up the rejected worn ties by thousands and use them for fence posts. When redwood is employed as city paving blocks it is wear and not decay that puts them out of commission.

The medullary rays of redwood are thin and very obscure, but numerous.

Few woods show them to less advantage in quarter-sawing. The lack of l.u.s.ter in the surface of polished panels is well known. The wood's beauty is in its sameness and richness of color. Except curly specimens and burls, the wood may be said to have no figure, though in planks cut tangentially, the contrast of spring and summerwood displays some figure in a modest way. It is possible to wash much of the coloring matter out of the wood, if it is first chipped fine. It washes from the surface by ordinary exposure to weather. Red rainwater runs from a roof of new redwood s.h.i.+ngles, and weatherboarding, posts, and picket fences fade perceptibly in a few months. This coloring matter when washed out in large amounts in the process of paper making has been manufactured into fuel gas.

A complete list of the uses of redwood is not practicable, for this material goes into most of the large wood-using factories of this country, and much is exported--nearly 60,000,000 feet annually going to foreign countries. It has been much employed in California cities and towns for picket fences, and as posts for wire and plank fences. It is, next to western red cedar, the most important s.h.i.+ngle wood of the Pacific coast. One western railroad alone had in its tracks 12,000,000 redwood ties at one time. Builders of tanks, flumes, and water pipes procure some of their best material, and large quant.i.ties of it, from redwood sawmills. Few woods are more universally found in furniture factories.

GOWEN CYPRESS (_Cupressus goveniana_) follows the California coast from Mendocino county, California, to San Diego, and ascends mountains to the height of 3,000 feet in some localities. At its best it is fifty feet high and two feet in diameter; but it extends as a shrub over many sandy tracts. Specimens no more than a foot high sometimes bear cones. The Gowen cypress sheds its leaves the third and fourth years. Cones are from one-half to one inch long, and each bears about 100 seeds. The wood is light, soft, weak, light brown in color, the thick sapwood nearly white. The medullary rays are numerous but obscure. The wood is used for posts and other ranch purposes. Woodp.e.c.k.e.rs attack the trunks, picking holes through the bark to suck the juice from the cambium layer beneath.

DWARF CYPRESS (_Cupressus pygmaea_) was formerly supposed to be a stunted form of Gowen cypress. The ranges of both lie in the same region, on the coast of California in Mendocino county. The average height of dwarf cypress is from ten to twenty feet, with trunk diameter from six to twelve inches; but in peat swamps and on sterile sands it may not exceed three or four feet in height. It bears abundant cones at that size, and sometimes a tree no more than a foot high has mature cones. They ripen the second year, but remain a long time on the branches. The trees thrive in the most forbidding places, and are sometimes the only occupants of bogs or sand dunes.

The wood is necessarily of little value, because of the small size of trees. There seems to be no record of a dwarf cypress over sixty years of age; but it is believed that much older trees have fallen victims to fire.

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HEMLOCK

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HEMLOCK

(_Tsuga Canadensis_)

Seven hemlocks are known in the world, four of them in America. Two of these are in the East, two in the West. The eastern species are the Canadian and Carolinian. The former is _Tsuga canadensis_, the latter _Tsuga caroliniana_. The western species are, mountain hemlock (_Tsuga mertensiana_), and western hemlock (_Tsuga heterophylla_). The word _tsuga_ is j.a.panese and means hemlock.

The hemlock lumber in eastern markets is practically all from one species, which is known as hemlock in Maine, New Hamps.h.i.+re, Vermont, Ma.s.sachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Ontario. In Vermont, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina; in England it is called hemlock spruce; spruce tree in Pennsylvania and West Virginia; spruce pine in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia; to the New York Indians it was known as oh-neh-tah, which being interpreted means "greens on the stick."

The range of hemlock extends east and west more than fifteen hundred miles, from Nova Scotia to western Wisconsin; south to Delaware and southern Michigan, and along the Appalachian mountains to northern Alabama and Georgia. The original quant.i.ty of timber was enormous, for large areas were covered with dense stands. The largest trees are found near the southern part of its range, among the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina; but the bulk of the timber has always been in the North. It thrives best in well drained soil, but it likes cool situations and often develops dense forests on northern slopes or in deep ravines; but it maintains a foothold on ridges, on the banks of streams, and around the borders of swamps.

The cones are very small, about a half inch in length, growing singly from the lower side of the branchlet. Their scales are rounded and thin, light brown in color. The seeds are winged and even when ripe the cones do not spread apart perceptibly. The seeds escape, however, slowly during the winter following their maturity. They are very small, and their wings distribute them a hundred feet or more. The seeds germinate best on leaf mold, but the seedling takes several years to thrust its roots deep into the mineral soil. During that time, growth is very slow.