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Updated: May 21, 2025
No two are so much alike as to hide their individuality from any observer. Every tree is appreciated as a study in itself and proclaims in no uncertain terms the surpassing grandeur of the species. The branches, mostly near the summit, are sometimes nearly forty feet long, feathered richly all around with short, leafy branchlets, and tasseled with cones a foot and a half long.
As Smeaton Chase expresses it, "The fine smooth arms, set in regular formation, divide and redivide again and again ad infinitum, weaving at last into a maze of exquisitely symmetrical twigs and branchlets." Red Fir. The range of the red fir is irregular.
Fallen branchlets snapped beneath my heedless feet and the sounds rang in my ears like pistol-shots. A saucy robin cocked his care-free eye on me from the top of a crab-tree, and I could have envied him as I stumbled by. It was perhaps fourscore yards through, and half-way I stopped to listen. Yes, there came to my ear the slow trot-ot-ot of hoofs on the hard road.
Finally, rising to the top, the long serpent stem opens out in a flat disc-shaped mass of close-packed branchlets and twigs densely set with small round leaves, dark dull green and tough as parchment. One could only suppose that thorn and ivy had been partners from the beginning of life, and that the union was equally advantageous to both.
Immense and concentrated exertion is necessary to draw far-flung branchlets and leaves together, and the feverish host accomplishes a seemingly impossible feat by an organised combination of engineering with co-operative labour.
The flat, drooping, plume-like branchlets hang edgewise, giving the trees a thin, open, airy look. Nearly every tree that I saw in a long walk was more or less marked by the knives and axes of the Indians, who use the bark for matting, for covering house-roofs, and making temporary portable huts.
A peculiar appearance is produced by the arrangement of the flowers on one side only of the branchlets of the inflorescence. The botanical history of the plant is well known, and our illustration is sufficient to show the general appearance of the plant. It is decidedly one of the best recent additions to the number of hardy deciduous flowering shrubs.
'It is distinguished from all the other pines by the softness and delicacy of its tufted foliage, from the spruce by its slender, tapering branchlets and the smoothness of its limbs, and from the balsam-fir by its small terminal cones, by the irregularity of its branches and the gracefulness of its whole appearance. The delicate green of the young trees forms a rich mass of verdure, and at this season each twig has on the end a tuft of new leaves yellowish-green in color and making a beautiful contrast to the darker hue of last year's foliage.
A particularly knotty, angular, ungovernable-looking branch, from five to seven or eight feet in diameter and perhaps a thousand years old, may occasionally be seen pushing out from the trunk as if determined to break across the bounds of the regular curve, but like all the others it dissolves in bosses of branchlets and sprays as soon as the general outline is approached.
The branchlets, however, after they have wound round thin twigs, become deeply sinuous or zigzag. Moreover the whole end of the petiole or tendril, if it seizes nothing, bends after a time abruptly downwards and inwards, showing that its outer surface has gone on growing after the inner surface has ceased to grow.
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