A tree, 50°—60° high, with a trunk usually 12′—18′; or rarely 30′ in diameter, spreading branches forming a handsome symmetrical slender-pyramid, the lower branches soon dying from trees crowded in the forest, and slender branchlets pale yellow-green and coated with fine pubescence at first, becoming light gray tinged with red, and often when four or five years old with purple. Winter-buds nearly globose, ⅛′—¼′ in diameter, with lustrous dark orange-green scales. Bark on old trees often ½′ thick, rich brown, much broken on the surface into small plates covered with scales. Wood light, soft, not strong, coarse-grained, perishable, pale brown streaked with yellow, with thick lighter colored sapwood; occasionally made into lumber principally used for packing-cases. From the bark of this tree oil of fir used in the arts and in medicine is obtained.
Distribution. From the interior of the Labrador peninsula westward to the shores of Lesser Slave Lake, southward through Newfoundland, the maritime provinces of Canada, Quebec and Ontario, northern New England, northern New York, northern Michigan to the shores of Saginaw Bay, and northern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa, and along the Appalachian Mountains from western Massachusetts and the Catskills of New York to the high mountains of southwestern Virginia; common and often forming a considerable part of the forest on low swampy ground; on well-drained hillsides sometimes singly in forests of spruce or forming small almost impenetrable thickets; in northern Wisconsin and vicinity occurs a form with longer and more crowded leaves and larger cones (var. macrocarpa Kent); near the timber-line on the mountains of New England and New York reduced to a low almost prostrate shrub.
Sometimes planted in the northern states in the neighborhood of farmhouses, but usually short-lived and of little value as an ornamental tree in cultivation; formerly but now rarely cultivated in European plantations; a dwarf form (var. hudsonica Englm.) growing only a few inches high and spreading into broad nests is often cultivated.
3. [Abies lasiocarpa] Nutt. Balsam Fir.
Leaves marked on the upper surface but generally only above the middle with 4 or 5 rows of stomata on each side of the conspicuous midrib and on the lower surface by 2 broad bands each of 7 or 8 rows, crowded, nearly erect by the twist at their base, on lower branches 1′—1¾′ long, about 1/12′ wide, and rounded and occasionally emarginate at apex, on upper branches somewhat thickened, usually acute, generally not more than ½′ long, on leading shoots flattened, closely appressed, with long slender rigid points. Flowers: male dark indigo-blue, turning violet when nearly ready to open; female with dark violet-purple obovate scales much shorter than their strongly reflexed bracts contracted into slender tips. Fruit oblong-cylindric, rounded, truncate or depressed at the narrowed apex, dark purple, puberulous, 2½′—4′ long, with scales gradually narrowed from the broad rounded or nearly truncate apex to the base, usually longer than broad, about three times as long as their oblong-obovate red-brown bracts laciniately cut on the margins, rounded, emarginate and abruptly contracted at the apex into long slender tips; seeds ¼′ long, with dark lustrous wings covering nearly the entire surface of the scales.
A tree, usually 80°—100°, occasionally 175°, or southward rarely more than 50° high, with a trunk 2°—5° in diameter, short crowded tough branches, usually slightly pendulous near the base of the tree, generally clothing the trunks of the oldest trees nearly to their base and forming dense spire-like slender heads, and comparatively stout branchlets coated for three or four years with fine rufous pubescence, or rarely glabrous before the end of their first season, pale orange-brown, ultimately gray or silvery white. Winter-buds subglobose, ⅛′—¼′ thick, covered with light orange-brown scales. Bark becoming on old trees ¾′—1½′ thick, divided by shallow fissures and roughened by thick closely appressed cinnamon-red scales; on the San Francisco Mountains, Arizona, thicker and spongy (var. arizonica Lem.). Wood light, soft, not strong, pale brown or nearly white, with light-colored sapwood; little used except for fuel.
Distribution. High mountain slopes and summits from about latitude 61° in Alaska, southward along the coast ranges to the Olympic Mountains of Washington, over all the high mountain ranges of British Columbia and Alberta, and southward along the Cascade Mountains of Washington and Oregon to the neighborhood of Crater Lake, over the mountain ranges of eastern Washington and Oregon, and of Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah to the San Francisco peaks of northern Arizona, and on the Sandia and Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico.
Occasionally planted as an ornamental tree in the northern United States and in northern Europe, but of little value in cultivation.