THE SUGAR PINE
"The largest, noblest, and most beautiful of all pine trees in the world"
The piñon (P. edulis, Engelm.) ranges from the eastern foothills of the Colorado Rockies to western Texas and westward to the eastern borders of Utah, southwestern Wyoming, central Arizona and on into Mexico, often forming extensive open forests, and reaching an elevation of seven thousand feet. Short, stiff leaves in clusters of two or three, dark green, ridged, stout, often persist for eight or nine years. The tree is a broad compact pyramid; in age, dense, round-topped, with stout branchlets and abundant globose cones. Each scale covers two seeds, wingless, about the size of honey locust seeds, oily, sweet, nutritious and of delicious flavor. This is the pine nut par excellence, whose newest market is among confectioners and fancy grocers throughout the states.
The one-leaved nut pine (P. monophylla, Torr.), spreads like an old apple tree, and forms a low, round-topped, picturesque head, its lower limbs drooping to the ground. The reduction of the leaves in the clusters to lowest terms, gives the tree a starved look, and the eighteen or twenty rows of pale stomates on each leaf give the tree-top a ghostly pallor. The vigor of the tree is expressed in its abundant fruit, short, oblong, one to two inches in length, with rich plump brown seeds upon which the Indians of Nevada and California have long depended. The wood supplies fuel and charcoal for smelters; and this stunted tree, rarely over twenty feet in height, forms nut orchards for the aborigines and the scattered population of whatever race, between altitudes of five and seven thousand feet. From the western slopes of the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, it ranges to the eastern slopes of the southern Sierra Nevada, to their western slopes at the head waters of King's River, and southward to northern Arizona and to the mountains of southern California.
John Muir says:
"It is the commonest tree of the short mountain ranges of the Great Basin. Tens of thousands of acres are covered with it, forming bountiful orchards for the red man. Being so low and accessible, the cones are easily beaten off with poles, and the nuts are procured by roasting until the scales open. To the tribes of the desert and sage plains these seeds are the staff of life. They are eaten either raw or parched, or in the form of mush, or cakes, after being pounded into meal. The time of nut harvest is the merriest time of the year. An industrious, squirrelish family can gather fifty or sixty bushels in a single month before the snow comes, and then their bread for the winter is sure."
THE PITCH PINES
Pitch pines have usually heavy coarse-grained, dark-colored wood, rich in resin—a nuisance to the carpenter. The leaf-bundles have persistent sheaths. The cone scales are thick and usually armed. "Hard pine" is a carpenter's synonym. The group includes some of the most valuable timber trees in American forests.
The Longleaf Pine
P. palustris, Mill.
The longleaf pine is preëminent in importance in the lumber trade and in the production of naval stores. It stretches in a belt about one hundred and twenty-five miles wide, somewhat back from the coast, all the way from Virginia to Tampa Bay and west to the Mississippi River. Isolated forests are scattered in northern Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas.