Western Hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla, Sarg.)—Noble pyramidal tree, too to zoo feet high, 6 to to feet in diameter, with drooping, horizontal branches and feathery tip. Bark reddish brown, with broad, scaly, interrupted ridges and shallow fissures. Wood tough, durable, hard, light, strong, brown. Buds brown, ovate, small. Leaves grooved on top, lustrous, pale below, rounded at tip; petioles slender. Flowers : moncecious, terminal, solitary; staminate yellow; pistillate purple. Fruit oval, pointed cones inch long; scales often constricted in the middle, broad, thin. Preferred habitat, moist valleys and uplands from tidewater to 6,000 feet elevation. Distribution,- southeastern Alaska to Cape Mendocino in California; east to Montana and Idaho. Uses: Wood used chiefly in building; bark for tanning. Indians eat a cake made from the inner bark. Successfully used for ornamental planting in Europe. Not hardy in our Eastern States.
This greatest of all the hemlocks dominates the magnificent forests of the Pacific coast plain, in size as well as in numbers. It extends east into Idaho and Montana, and north into British Columbia. The tideland spruce is its companion in the lowlands. Superb trees are found on the mountains at an altitude of 6.000 feet, but only in moist situations. On dry, high ridges, the tree is stunted. But in the rich river valleys, with the breath of the Japan current to make the air humid, this hemlock is a giant— handsome, graceful, the delight of the artist and the lumberman; the most superb and the most useful of the hemlocks.
The root system of this tree is remarkably copious and aggressive. Mosses often a foot in thickness and saturated with moisture clothe the fallen trunks and other rubbish in those deep forests in the neighbourhood of Vancouver. The light seeds of the hemlocks often germinate on some elevated arm of a giant tree long dead. Such a mistake will first be discovered by the roots which go down until they anchor the tree in the earth. The dead trunk rots away, and the growing tree stands on stilts of its own sturdy roots, as confident and thrifty as any of its neigh bours.
The little cones of the Western hemlock have scales like scallop shells, marked with radiating lines. This is before they loosen. Afterward each scale shows a narrow neck behind this "shell," and a long blade extending backward.
This tree has the strongest and most durable wood of all the hemlocks. It is a staple commercial lumber on the coast, lum ber authorities claiming that it is harder, heavier and otherwise superior to the Eastern hemlock.
Mountain Hemlock (Tsuga Mertensiana, Sarg.)—A broad. open pyramidal tree, 75 to loo feet high, with much-branched, often prostrate limbs. Bark cinnamon red, furrowed, scaly. Wood light, soft, brownish red, close grained, weak. Buds brown, small, pointed. Leaves not 2-ranked, rounded below, flat, often grooved above, petioles set on prominent bases, colour, blue-green.
Flowers : staminate blue, pendant on stalk ; pistillate erect, with purplish or yellow bracts. Fruit oblong cones t to 3 inches long, borne on upper branches; scales broad, entire, striate, yellow or purple, turning out and back at maturity. Preferred habitat, high, rocky ridges in exposed situations. Distribution, south eastern Alaska to British Columbia; south to central California, Montana and Idaho. Uses: Wood occasionally used in building and bark in tanning.
This hemlock, which has been variously called a spruce, a fir and a pine by botanical explorers, is not likely to be exterminated by lumber companies, for it grows in inaccessible mountain fast nesses, and battles with storms to the very timber line. " Between 5,000 and 7,000 feet above the sea on ridges and along the margins of alpine meadows in groves of exquisite beauty, and pushing the advance guard of the forest to the edge of living glaciers"—thus Sargent describes the habitat of the tree which he considers "the loveliest cone-bearing tree of the American forest." During the larger half of each year the mountain hemlocks are buried in snow, their tough limbs cramped beneath their burden; but with .summer comes freedom, and these limbs are flung out again with singular grace to brave the lashing of the winds. A tall tree in the humid lowlands, the trunk diminishes with the ascent of the mountains. At an altitude of almost io,000 feet the treetop rests upon the ground, a flattened mass of graceful limbs, the trunk practically eliminated by natural selection.
John Muir, describing the forests of the Yosemite Park, tells how the young trees of the lower levels receive the light burden of the first snow in the early autumn, and gradually bending under the load left by succeeding storms, at length form graceful arches, and are buried from sight for five or six months. He has ridden for miles over a smooth snow bank that covered in this fashion trees 4o feet high. They return to their normal position, un harmed, when the snow goes off.
The blue-green foliage, the whorled leaf arrangement, the triangular leaf itself, pencilled with white on all sides, and the large cones—all set this hemlock in a class by itself. The spray, exceedingly beautiful, even for a hemlock, bears flowers that are unusual in their rich colouring. The pistillate blossoms are royal purple; the staminate, blue as forget-me-nots—"of so pure a tone that the best azure of the high sky seems to be condensed in them."—Muir.
Seeds of this alpine hemlock planted in England and in our Eastern States grow slowly, and show none of the grace and vigour of the wild sapling trees. It is the old story of the hardy moun taineer, languishing in luxury, dying of homesickness for the life of abstinence and struggle to which its race is born.