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Updated: June 28, 2025
It is commonly said that the pines produce a crop of cones once in five or seven years, which is true in part, just as the statement that every seventh wave at sea is larger than any of its preceding six is occasionally borne out by the facts. I do not recall years in which the pines have failed to put forth both staminate and pistillate blossoms.
Its flowers are in catkins, as with the rest of the family, and, like other poplars, they are in two kinds, male and female, or staminate and pistillate, which accounts for some troubles the inexperienced investigator has in locating them.
All the year the pasture cedars are beautiful, and it is hard to say whether they are at their best in the spring glow of staminate delight or now when their bronze robes bear the round, exquisitely blue berries which are really cones. I have an idea the birds like them best now.
In cleft grafting walnuts is it necessary to use scions with only a leaf bud, or with staminate or pistillate buds? Is cutting the pith of the scion or stock fatal to the tree? In grafting walnuts it is usual to take shoots bearing wood buds, and not the spurs which carry the fruit blossoms, although a part of the graft containing also a wood bud can be used, retaining the latter.
But if you would see the Libocedrus in all its glory, you must go to the woods in winter. Then it is laden with myriads of four-sided staminate cones about the size of wheat grains, winter wheat, producing a golden tinge, and forming a noble illustration of Nature's immortal vigor and virility.
While I am innocent of either ability or intent to write botanically of the great oak family, I ought perhaps to transcribe the information that the flowers we see if we look just at the right time in the spring are known as "staminate catkins," which, being interpreted, means that there are also pistillate flowers, much less conspicuous, but exceedingly necessary if acorns are to result; and also the fact that the familiar "pussy-willow" of our acquaintance is the same form of bloom the catkin, or ament.
The staminate flowers are still more showy on account of their great abundance, often giving a reddish-yellow tinge to the whole mass of foliage and filling the air with pollen. No other pine on the Range is so regularly planted as this one, covering moraines that extend along the sides of the high rocky valleys for miles without interruption.
The Hortensia of our gardens is another instance of a sterile form which has been observed to throw out a branch with cymes bearing in their center the usual small staminate and pistillate flowers instead of the large radiate and neutral corollas of the variety, thereby returning to the original wild type. Crisped weeping-willows, crisped parsley and others have reverted in a similar manner.
The leaves show me their silky completeness, rustling above the stream in softest tree talk; the curious staminate flower-clusters hang like bunches of inverted commas; the neat little burs, with their inoffensive prickles, mature and discharge the angular nuts but I am not again, I fear, to be present at the hour of the leaf-birth of the beech's year.
The staminate cones occur in clusters, about an inch wide, down among the leaves, and, as they are colored bright rose-purple, they give rise to a lively, flowery appearance little looked for in such a tree. Pines are commonly regarded as sky-loving trees that must necessarily aspire or die.
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