A bushy tree, with a short trunk rarely more than a foot in diameter and a broad round-topped head, usually 15°—20° high, stout spreading branches, and slender dark orange-colored branchlets covered at first with matted pale deciduous hairs, dark brown and sometimes nearly black at the end of five or six years; in sheltered cañons on the mountains of Arizona and in Lower California occasionally 50° or 60° tall. Bark about ½′ thick, irregularly divided by remote shallow fissures and separated on the surface into numerous large thin light red-brown scales. Wood light, soft, close-grained, pale clear yellow. The large oily seeds are an important article of food in northern Mexico, and are sold in large quantities in Mexican towns.
Distribution. Mountain ranges of central and southern Arizona, usually only above elevations of 6500°, often covering their upper slopes with open forests; in an isolated station on the Edwards Plateau on uplands and in cañons at the headwaters of the Frio and Nueces Rivers, Edwards and Kerr Counties, Texas; on the Sierra de Laguna, Lower California, and on many of the mountain ranges of northern Mexico; passing into the following varieties differing only in the number of the leaves in the leaf-clusters, and in their thickness.
Pinus cembroides var. Parryana Voss. Nut Pine. Piñon.
Pinus quadrifolia Sudw.
Leaves in 1—5 usually 4-leaved clusters, stout, incurved, pale glaucous green, marked on the three surfaces by numerous rows of stomata, 1¼′—1½′ long, irregularly deciduous, mostly falling in their third year.
A tree, 30°—40° high, with a short trunk occasionally 18′ in diameter, and thick spreading branches forming a compact regularpyramidal or in old age a low round-topped irregular head, and stout branchlets coated at first with soft pubescence, and light orange-brown. Bark ½′—¾′ thick, dark brown tinged with red, and divided by shallow fissures into broad flat connected ridges covered by thick closely appressed plate-like scales. Wood light, soft, close-grained, pale brown or yellow. The seeds form an important article of food for the Indians of Lower California.
Distribution. Arid mesas and low mountain slopes of Lower California southward to the foothills of the San Pedro Mártir Mountains, extending northward across the boundary of California to the desert slopes of the Santa Rosa Mountains, Riverside County, where it is common at elevations of 5000° above the sea-level.
Pinus cembroides var. edulis Voss. Nut Pine. Piñon.
Pinus edulis Engelm.