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The young trees grow spiry and perfectly upright, but as soon as they overtop the surrounding trees and get the full influence of the sun and wind, the highest branches grow out laterally, killing those beneath their shade, and thus a dome-shaped top is produced.
Yonder stands a spiry cathedral nearly five thousand feet in height, nobly symmetrical, with sheer buttressed walls and arched doors and windows, as richly finished and decorated with sculptures as the great rock temples of India or Egypt.
There was scarce a sign of culture; only about Bleymard, the white high-road from Villefort to Mende traversed a range of meadows, set with spiry poplars, and sounding from side to side with the bells of flocks and herds. From Bleymard after dinner, although it was already late, I set out to scale a portion of the Lozere.
Aubert, 'where its spiry form is intermingled with the pine, and the cypress, and where it plays over light and elegant porticos and colonnades, it, unquestionably, adorns the scene; but among the giants of the forest, and near a heavy gothic mansion 'Well, my good sir, said M. Quesnel, 'I will not dispute with you. You must return to Paris before our ideas can at all agree.
The land here answered well to the description that he has given of it: close to the beach it was covered with high spiry trees, which he mentions as having the appearance of pines; behind these there seemed to be salt-water creeks, and many mangroves, interspersed however with cocoa-nut trees: The flat land at the beach appeared in some places to extend inward two or three miles before the rise of the first hill; in this part, however, we saw no appearance of plantations or houses, but great fertility, and from the number of fires, we judged that the place most be well peopled.
The spiry habitable city, ships, the divided fields, and browsing herds, and the straight highways, tell visibly of man's active and comfortable ways; and you may be never so laggard and never so unimpressionable, but there is something in the view that spirits up your blood and puts you in the vein for cheerful labour.
By the time the sapling is five or six hundred years old this spiry, feathery, juvenile habit merges into the firm, rounded dome form of middle age, which in turn takes on the eccentric picturesqueness of old age. No other tree in the Sierra forest has foliage so densely massed or presents outlines so firmly drawn and so steadily subordinate to a special type.
Here were gardens and orchards; there groves of superb chestnut-trees in blossom; here, fields of golden grain or green pasture-land; there, Arcadian thickets overgrown with clematis and wild rose; here, lofty poplars growing beside the streams; there, spiry cypresses looking down from the slopes: and all blended in one whole, so rich, so grand, so gorgeous, that I scarcely breathed when it first burst upon me.
Other variations are more lasting, as when, for instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen through some windless hours, and the thin, spiry, mountain pine trees stand each stock-still and loaded with a shining burthen.
The white cedar, or cypress, is a very graceful tree which generally grows in swamps. 'It is entirely free from the stiffness of the pines, and to the spiry top of the poplar it unites the airy lightness of the hemlock.
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