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The stumps were all about three feet high, and that meant the waste of many thousands of feet of good lumber. Only the straight, unbranched trunks had been used. The tops of the pines had not been lopped, and lay where they had fallen. It was a wilderness of yellow brush, a dry jungle. The smell of pine was so powerful that I could hardly breathe.
They diverge from their common prototype in nearly all attributes, the flowers not showing the essential differentiating characters as in the V. tricolor. Some have their flower-stalks erect, and in others the flowers are held nearly at right angles to the stem. V. pallescens is a small, almost unbranched species with small pale flowers.
Stem 3 in. to 5 in. high, and about 3 in. in diameter, egg-shaped, unbranched, rarely producing offsets at the base. Ribs fifteen or sixteen, spiral, with closely-set cushions of stiff, whitish spines, which interlace and almost hide the stem; there are from fourteen to twenty-two spines to each cushion, and they are ¼ in. long.
Burbank of Santa Rosa, California, is also a very curious variety, the kernel of which is fully developed but naked, no hard substance intervening between it and the pulp. More curious still are the unbranched varieties consisting of a single stem, as may be seen sometimes in the corn or maize and in the fir.
They are moderately long, thin, and unbranched, with their tips slightly curved. Whilst young they are sensitive on all sides, but chiefly on the concave side of the extremity. They have no spontaneous revolving power, but are at first inclined upwards at an angle of about 45 degrees, then move into a horizontal position, and ultimately bend downwards.
When unbranched as I saw them, they resemble at a distance pine-apple plants thirty times magnified.
Of the deer kind there are several species: rusa, the stag, of which some are very large; kijang, the roe, with unbranched horns, the emblem of swiftness and wildness with the Malayan poets; palandok, napu, and kanchil, three varieties, of which the last is the smallest, of that most delicate animal, termed by Buffon the chevrotin, but which belong to the moschus.
The stems are often quite unbranched, or branched only at the base of the spike. Strong secondary stems are a striking attribute of the lamarckiana parent, but they are lacking, or almost so in the dwarfs. The stem is straight and short, and this, combined with the large crown of bright flowers, makes the dwarfs eminently suitable for bed or border plants.
B. speciosa possesses similar powers of movement as the last species, but it cannot twine round a stick, though it can ascend by clasping the stick horizontally with one or both of its unbranched tendrils.
In some countries the young shoots are used for flavoring cakes and other culinary preparations. From the very persistent underground parts annual, usually unbranched stems, sometimes 3 feet tall, are produced in more or less abundance. They bear much-divided, oval, oblong leaves and numerous small, yellow flower-heads in usually crowded corymbs.