Forest Trees and Forest Scenery

by G. Frederick Schwarz

The leaves are narrow, flat, and linear, usually about as long as a pin or a needle, glossy green on the upper side, and streaked with a longitudinal whitish line underneath. They are crowded horizontally at the right and left sides of the shoot or twig, like the hairs on the quill of a feather. The twigs themselves, and, in turn, the boughs and branches, have a similar tendency to assume a horizontal position; and thus the tree is built up in neat symmetrical stages, dwindling in size to the summit, and presenting the typical conical form of the cone-bearers.

Let it not be presumed, however, that there is anything awkward or stiff in the appearance of the firs. Young firs are among the neatest and most elegant objects in a park. The smooth gray bark, the lifelike air in the distribution of the boughs and smaller branches, the glossy green as seen from the side or above, varied to a blue or gray when we stand beneath, redeem them from every charge of conventionality.[4]

The lowland fir as a young tree, and where it is afforded sufficient room, has more of the drooping, plume-like, graceful air than is usual with the members of this genus. The leaves are somewhat curled and scattered about the stem. Like most trees it becomes more expressive as it grows older and little by little rejects the features and traces of its earlier years. Its arms gradually bend inward, and the whole tree becomes more cylindrical, till in its maturity it speaks freely through its broken and twisted boughs of storms and battles and insect ravages of long ago; yet it strives to cover its scars with luxuriant masses of verdure and numberless purplish cones—a truly magnificent spectacle of a hoary veteran of crisp and sturdy aspect.

The Engelmann spruce, though a smaller tree than either the red fir or the lowland fir, is one of the most important of the spruces. Its home is in the elevated regions of Colorado, whence it spreads westward and northward throughout the Rocky Mountains. Its well rounded hole is scaly with small cinnamon-red plates, and its foliage is composed of sharp, short, needlelike leaves, that bristle around the stem and are bluish-green in color. Its small brown cones droop from the extremities of the boughs and mass themselves in the top of the tree. Like most of the spruces, this one climbs to high elevations. Many a wild mountain slope in the West is covered by the dense ranks of these straight, slender trees, with tapering spires that are green in summer and frosted with snow and rime in winter.

The glory of our western forests, however, are the sequoias, those gigantic trees of California that have become widely famous. The two sequoias, the big tree of the Sierra Nevada and the redwood of the Pacific coast, constitute the last remnants of a mighty race that covered vast areas in North America and Europe in past geological ages. It is believed that their days are almost over, for the big tree groves are few in number and small in extent, and even these are falling rapidly under the ax and saw. Nor does this species appear to reproduce itself easily; for, although numberless seeds fall from the old trees, they rarely sprout, and therefore are slow to replace what has been taken away. The redwoods, too, are threatened with extinction, though they still cover considerable tracts along the northern half of the California coast. They are coveted even more than the big trees and are disappearing with a rapidity that only modern industry has made possible.

Fortunately the redwood possesses two gifts of inestimable value that will prolong, but cannot perpetuate, its existence. The unusual amount of moisture in its wood and the absence of pitch in the sap lessen the danger from fire; while the same remarkable trait that we noticed in the pitch pine, otherwise very rare in coniferous trees, of sprouting from dormant buds at the edge of the stump will replace, for a time at least, many of the giants that are taken away.

The general appearance or type of the sequoias resembles that of the cypresses and cedars. The bald cypress is their nearest relative. The big tree often has the same spreading base, and both have the fluted, shreddy bark, traits that may also be noticed in the common white cedar and in arbor-vitæ. The diameter of the trunk of the big tree is strikingly large even for its wonderful height. Both trees lift their crowns rather high, and have comparatively short boughs, with dense, bushy, somewhat straggly-looking foliage. In its youthful stage the foliage of the redwood, like its congener’s, has a bluish tinge, which with advancing years turns to a dark and somber green that contrasts strangely with the red color of the thick, spongy bark. But the individuality of both trees, especially that of the big tree, is so impressive and magnificent that all these minor essences become involved in the majesty of the whole. The mighty bole rises in splendid proportions to where the distant fronds hang loosely down, disappearing within their somber shadows, but still carrying upward the masses of foliage, as if striving to reach the very clouds. As we view their stately and incomparable forms, so masterly wrought, so unapproachable in their magnificence, we need hardly be told that these trees are strangers from a distant and forgotten age.

Courtesy of the Bureau of Forestry