The Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts Bay south has a cypress whose common name, "white cedar," is unfortunate. There ought to be distinct names enough to go around. All the species of a genus ought to have the same generic name in English as well as in Latin or Greek. However, white cedar is the trade name of the lumber, and there is little chance that the cedar mud dle will be cleared by calling this tree a cypress.
The tree is a lover of swamps and doesn't get far back from the coast. In cultivation it thrives in any sandy loam, if not too dry. It is lumbered to some extent and devoted to uses that test its durability in contact with water and exposure to sun and wind.
The Sitka Cypress (C. Noofkatensis, Lamb.) grows over loo feet tall, with a trunk over 5 feet through, near the coast of Alaska. Its yellow branchlets lighten the gloom of its blue-green foliage, and the treetop is warmed by the ruddy colour of the oldest leaves, which remain for some time on the tree after they are dead. The range of the species is from Alaska into Oregon, climbing the mountains to the altitude of 3,000 feet, where the tree is reduced to a shrub.
The hard wood is very close of texture and pale yellow. It is durable and pleasantly aromatic. Carpenters employ it in the interior finishing of houses. It is made into furniture, and used in boat building.
Horticultural forms of this species are astonishingly numerous. Sudworth gives sixty-eight varieties in his "Check List." Lawson Cypress (Chaincecyparis Lawsoniana, A. Murr.)— A spire-like tree,15o to 200 feet high, with short horizontal branches ending in a flat spray. Bark very thick, with rounded scaly ridges, dark red. Wood hard, light, strong, pale yellow, close grained, resinous, fragrant, easily worked. Leaves minute, bright green, in opposite pairs. Flowers: minute, numerous; staminate bright red; pistillate dark coloured. Fruit clustered cones, pea sized, of few scales; seeds 2 to 4 under each scale. Preferred habitat, mountain slopes. Distribution, coast mountains of Oregon and California. Uses: A valuable ornamental tree. Wood used in house finishing, flooring, and in boat building and for railroad ties and fence posts. Matches are made of it.
Somewhat of the beauty of those Western cypresses can be appreciated by looking in gardens and nurseries at the multitude of varieties of each of them in cultivation in this country and abroad. In their own country the parents of these precocious
ornamental offspring are to be seen. No horticultural substitute for the original will suffice the tree lover. To go to Oregon is his fondly cherished plan. To see that twenty-mile forest belt of Lawson cypresses that stretches from Point Gregory to the mouth of the Coquille River—only this will satisfy. There are men who name as "the handsomest of the conifers" trees outside of this genus, but the visitor to this splendid grove of Lawson cypresses will be inclined to deny it. It is hard to keep to a sliding scale and avoid superlatives in judging those Western trees.
The Japanese Retinosporas, beautiful evergreen of this type, widely cultivated in many horticultural forms, were assigned to a separate genus by Siebold and Zuccarini, but other authorities consider them all to be juvenile forms of the genus Chammcyparis, too or Thuya. These evergreens have in youth different foliage from that of the adult trees—a sufficient reason for confusion, especially before the trees bear cones. Whatever botanical affinities are eventually established, the trade name will probably remain Retinospora, and people will plant these handsome evergreens in increasing numbers. In his Manual, 1905, Professor Sargent includes two Japanese Retinosporas in the genus Chamxcyparis.
3. Genus TAXODIUM, Rich.
The bald cypress has two sister species in the genus Taxodium. One, a shrub, is native to China; the other, a large tree, to Mexico. Forests of bald cypresses covered large areas of Europe and central North America during the Tertiary Period, but they perished in the Glacial Era. The rocks tell the story.
Bald cypresses rank among the oldest and largest trees in the world. The Mexican species, T. mucronatum, is estimated to live 4,000 years. The far-famed "Cypress of Montezuma," in Che pultepec, is nearly zoo feet high and its trunk has a diameter of 15 feet. It is believed to be less than 800 years old—a tree still in the vigour of youth. The largest trunk known in this species is 4o feet in diameter at base. Beside this giant our own bald cypress seems small and short lived, but among our native trees it ranks high in size and age.