When you gather the cones in the wood, you may know at once whether they have fallen from pine trees or from fir trees. A pine cone looks like a single piece of carved solid wood until it opens, and then each hard scale shows a thick, square head; but the fir cones are made of broad, papery scales, with thin edges laid neatly one over the other.
Now you will never have any difficulty in knowing the pines from the firs, even in the far distance—colour, form, dress, fruit, all are different.
How is it we make a mistake, and call the Scotch pine by the name of Scotch fir? Perhaps it is because this tree is the only one of the great pine and fir family that is a real native of Britain. Our stay-at-home ancestors who lived above three hundred years ago never saw a real fir, and so their one pine had to represent all its relations. They knew it perhaps better than we do, for in their days there were many forests that have since been cut down to make room for houses and gardens and fields.
Sometimes when you have been walking over the moorland you have run to gather some bright yellow moss, and have suddenly found your foot sinking into wet, black mud, and you have heard stories of men and horses sucked down by just such dreadful slime. Hundreds of years ago forests stood where now lie these dangerous bogs, and the trees and shrubs rotting and decaying in the wet have changed into black, brown swamps. Many bogs have been drained, and the trunks of pine trees have been found in them standing as they grew. In one bog in Yorkshire pine trees were found sawn across and left to lie and rot. Who felled these trees which have been lying there hundreds of years? Can we tell? Yes; for among the trees are scattered axe-heads and Roman coins, and we are able to picture the old story of the place. There was once a forest there, and the ancient Britons hid themselves in its shelter, and the Romans cut down the trees to drive them from their hiding-place.
There are two common kinds of firs which you will find in the woods. One is the spruce fir, a very prim and proper tree, with slightly curving branches turned up at the tips. It looks as if the branches had been all cut to a pattern, and their length and the distances between them carefully measured. When you have been washed and brushed and pulled and straightened, and had every hair and bow set in its proper place, so that you look particularly trim and neat, you sometimes laugh and call one another spruce, like the spruce fir.
Some people think the name “spruce” means the pruce, or Prussian tree; others say it means the sprouting tree, the tree that sprouts at the ends of its branches. In some countries these bright-green sprouts are cut off and made into a kind of beer called spruce beer.
The spruce fir is at home on the high mountains of Europe where it often grows one hundred and fifty feet high. You long for the time when you will be taken to Switzerland to see the snow-capped Alps. Then standing out against the white snow and the glittering ice rivers you will see the dark spruce forests. This fir is also at home in Norway and the cold lands of the North, and so we call it the Norway Spruce to distinguish it from other kinds of spruce fir that grow in America. In Norway many old men and women earn a living by gathering and selling in the markets pieces of fir for the people to strew on the graves as we do flowers.
What sort of cones has the spruce? Can you find some in the fir wood? They are five or six inches long and perhaps two inches thick. You will see them hanging from the ends of the upper branches, and perhaps you may find some empty ones on the ground. Look at them. Those thin scales are very different from the tough walls of the pine cone: each one is shaped off to a point, and this point is divided into two sharp teeth.
Perhaps when you are looking for the cones, you will find growing fast to the branches among the leaves some fanciful things that look like little cones. These are very gay; every scale has a border of crimson velvet and a green spine in the middle of its back, like a little tusk. If you open them you will find some brown, soft things inside. Do you know what they are? Perhaps, if you have not already made friends with the real cone, you will think these are seeds; but some of you are growing wise, and know that you have intruded into a little nest of insects. If you tie a net round the branch and keep watch, you may see them come out. Their mother pierced a hole in a brown bud last autumn and laid her eggs there; then when the buds burst in spring the lower leaves grew fast together and made this comfortable house, and those green tusks you see are the leaf points.
But what is the other kind of fir that grows in our wood? It is rather like the spruce in shape, but it is not quite so stiff and prim and proper, and underneath each little leaf there are two silver lines, and so we call this the silver fir. You may always know it from the spruce by these silver lines. Each stiff little leaf has its edges rolled under as if ready for hemming, and there is a thick green rib down the middle of the under side, so the silver lining just peeps out in single streaks between the rib and the hems.