e to enrich still
more the surpassing beauty of this winter-blooming tree-goldenrod.

The Silver Firs

We come now to the most regularly planted and most clearly defined
of the main forest belts, composed almost exclusively of two Silver
Firs--Abies concolor and Abies magnifica--extending with but little
interruption 450 miles at an elevation of from 5000 to 9000 feet above
the sea. In its youth A. concolor is a charmingly symmetrical tree
with its flat plumy branches arranged in regular whorls around the
whitish-gray axis which terminates in a stout, hopeful shoot, pointing
straight to the zenith, like an admonishing finger. The leaves are
arranged in two horizontal rows along branchlets that commonly are less
than eight years old, forming handsome plumes, pinnated like the fronds
of ferns. The cones are grayish-green when ripe, cylindrical, from three
to four inches long, and one and a half to two inches wide, and stand
upright on the upper horizontal branches. Full-grown trees in favorable
situations are usually about 200 feet high and five or six feet in
diameter. As old age creeps on, the rough bark becomes rougher and
grayer, the branches lose their exact regularity of form, many that are
snow-bent are broken off and the axis often becomes double or otherwise
irregular from accidents to the terminal bud or shoot. Nevertheless,
throughout all the vicissitudes of its three or four centuries of life,
come what may, the noble grandeur of this species, however obscured, is
never lost.

The magnificent Silver Fir, or California Red Fir (Abies magnifica)
is the most symmetrical of all the Sierra giants, far surpassing its
companion species in this respect and easily distinguished from it by
the purplish-red bark, which is also more closely furrowed than that
of the white, and by its larger cones, its more regularly whorled and
fronded branches, and its shorter leaves, which grow all around the
branches and point upward instead of being arranged in two horizontal
rows. The branches are mostly whorled in fives, and stand out from the
straight, red-purple bole in level, or in old trees in drooping collars,
every branch regularly pinnated like fern-fronds, making broad plumes,
singularly rich and sumptuous-looking. The flowers are in their prime
about the middle of June; the male red, growing on the underside of the
branches in crowded profusion, giving a very rich color to all the
trees; the female greenish-yellow, t