Forest Trees and Forest Scenery

by G. Frederick Schwarz

Courtesy of the Bureau of Forestry

A Pinery in the South

In connection with the longleaf pines of the Southern States, the bull pine of the West deserves to be noticed on account of its near botanical relationship and the somewhat similar economic position which it occupies. It is the most widely distributed of western trees, being found in almost every kind of soil and climate along the Pacific coast and throughout the Rockies. Over so wide a range, growing under very different conditions of soil, temperature, light, and moisture, it varies greatly in form and appearance. We encounter it on dry, sterile slopes or elevated plateaux in the interior, and walk for miles through the monotony of these dark bull pine forests, in which the trees are of small stature and seem to be struggling for their life. Again we meet it on the humid western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, associated with the sugar pine and other lofty trees. Here we scarcely recognize it. It holds its own among the company of giants, and is full of vitality, freedom, and strength; with brighter, redder bark and stout, sinuous branches; with longer needles and larger cones. The sunlight fills its ample crown spaces, and the wind murmurs in the foliage overhead; for the pines are the master musicians of the woods.

The Bull Pine in its California Home

The Southern States and the Gulf region furnish us with a conifer of striking originality and great usefulness. This is the bald cypress, which may have caught the reader’s eye in some northern park by the elegant forms of its spirelike growth. It rises high and erect, a narrow pyramid clothed in the lightest green foliage. The latter is composed of delicate feathers of little elliptical leaves that hang drooping among the finely interwoven short branches. This is in its cultivated northern home, where it seems to thrive well on the carefully kept greensward. But in reality it is a tree of deep swamps, seeking the dank, flooded shores of southern rivers, or impenetrable morasses, where few other trees can live. Here we may paddle our boat through the strange-looking cypress knees that it sends up above the water from the roots in the muddy soil beneath, and may admire the straight, firm trunks that are ridged and buttressed below to form wide, spreading bases. In this, its native home, when it has grown to maturity, it looks far different from the trim, tall pyramid that we see in the park. In place of the lofty spire it bears a broad, flat crown, that is poised upon the tall, fibrous, reddish-gray trunk. Such crowns, if the tree has had room to spread, may measure as much as a hundred feet across; but where closely pressed at the sides by other trees, they are contracted to much narrower dimensions. The foliage is soft in texture as ever, and interspersed with little globular cones. With the coming of winter, however, the sprays of foliage turn brown and fall from the tree, the bald cypress being one of the very few cone-bearers that shed their leaves.

In the South, especially in Florida and along the Gulf, the cypress trees are likely to be overloaded with streamers of gray, mosslike tillandsia. This epiphytic plant, commonly known as “Florida moss” or “hanging moss,” sometimes hides the entire mass of foliage, and lends a funereal aspect to whole groves and forests of these trees, detracting much from their beauty.

One of the prettiest coniferous trees in the East is the hemlock. Whatever may be the prejudice against the commercial qualities of this tree,—for the value of its wood is not now appreciated as it should be,—its appearance is admired by all who know it. I call it “pretty” because it is fine and neat when young and grows to be comely and graceful in middle age, rather than beautiful in the ordinary meaning of that word. It is an easy, airy tree. And yet the time comes when it loses its ease and grace, when its trunk grows darker and its boughs become straggly and rough, when it puts on the strength of age without its decrepitude and bears unflinchingly the weight of winter snows. Is it now less interesting than in its youth? I think not. It makes the woods rough and natural, and we admire its simplicity, self-sufficiency, and endurance.

When young there is no tree with such elegant and yet loose and pretty effects in the foliage, unless it should be one of its western cousins. The spray hangs delicately from the sides of the tree and the top is gracefully pendent. The little shoots, as they peep out from hundreds of recesses, buoyant and lifelike, and the pendent top, are in some way suggestive of a playing fountain, especially in quite young trees. In the forest the symmetry of the hemlock is not always preserved; yet it fits into the scene gracefully, whether fringing the mountain stream or grouping itself among the other trees of the forest.