INCENSE CEDAR (Libocedrus decurrens)

The Incense Cedar is another of the giants quite generally distributed throughout this portion of the forest, without exclusively occupying any considerable area, or even making extensive groves.  It ascends to about 5000 feet on the warmer hillsides, and reaches the climate most congenial to it at about from 3000 to 4000 feet, growing vigorously at this elevation on all kinds of soil, and in particular it is capable of enduring more moisture about its roots than any of its companions, excepting only the Sequoia.

The largest specimens are about 150 feet high, and seven feet in diameter.  The bark is brown, of a singularly rich tone very attractive to artists, and the foliage is tinted with a warmer yellow than that of any other evergreen in the woods.  Casting your eye over the general forest from some ridge-top, the color alone of its spiry summits is sufficient to identify it in any company.

In youth, say up to the age of seventy or eighty years, no other tree forms so strictly tapered a cone from top to bottom.  The branches swoop outward and downward in bold curves, excepting the younger ones near the top, which aspire, while the lowest droop to the ground, and all spread out in flat, ferny plumes, beautifully fronded, and imbricated upon one another.  As it becomes older, it grows strikingly irregular and picturesque.  Large special branches put out at right angles from the trunk, form big, stubborn elbows, and then shoot up parallel with the axis.  Very old trees are usually dead at the top, the main axis protruding above ample masses of green plumes, gray and lichen-covered, and drilled full of acorn holes by the woodpeckers.  The plumes are exceedingly beautiful; no waving fern-frond in shady dell is more unreservedly beautiful in form and texture, or half so inspiring in color and spicy fragrance.  In its prime, the whole tree is thatched with them, so that they shed off rain and snow like a roof, making fine mansions for storm-bound birds and mountaineers.  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.  The fertile cones are about three fourths of an inch long, borne on the outside of the plumy branchlets, where they serve to enrich still more the surpassing beauty of this grand winter-blooming goldenrod.

[Illustration:  INCENSE CEDAR IN ITS PRIME.]

WHITE SILVER FIR (Abies concolor)

[Illustration:  FOREST OF GRAND SILVER FIRS.  TWO SEQUOIAS IN THE FOREGROUND ON THE LEFT.]