Part 15 (1/2)
[R] _Generic characters._ Flowers monoecious. Cones woody, with numerous 2-seeded scales, thickened and angular at the end. Seeds with a crustaceous coat, winged. Leaves acerose, in cl.u.s.ters of from 2 to 5, surrounded by scarious scales at the base.
The Scotch Fir or Pine, and its varieties, are indigenous throughout the greater part of Europe. It also extends into the north, east, and west of Asia; and is found at Nootka Sound in Vancouver's Island, on the north-west coast of North America. In the south of Europe it grows at an elevation of from 1000 to 1500 feet; in the Highlands of Scotland, at 2700 feet; and in Norway and Lapland, at 700 feet. Widely dispersed, however, as the species is throughout the mountainous regions of Europe, it is only found in profusion between 52 and 65 N. lat. It occurs in immense forests in Poland and Russia, as well as in northern Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Lapland, up to the 70 of N. lat. The indigenous forests of Scotland, which formerly occupied so large a portion of its surface, have been greatly reduced within the last sixty years, chiefly on account of the pecuniary embarra.s.sments of their proprietors.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Foliage, Flowers, Cones; Cone opened, showing the Seeds.]
The Scotch Fir, in favourable situations, attains the height of from eighty to one hundred feet, with a trunk from two to four feet in diameter, and a head somewhat conical or rounded, but generally narrow in proportion to its height, as compared with the heads of other broad-leafed trees. The bark is of a reddish tinge, comparatively smooth, scaling off in some varieties, and rough and furrowed in others.
The branches are disposed in whorls from two to four together, and sometimes five or six; they are at first slightly turned upwards, but finally become somewhat pendant, with the exception of those branches which form the summit of the tree. The leaves are in sheaths, spirally disposed on the branches; they are distinguished at first sight from all other pines in which the leaves are in pairs, by being much more glaucous, more especially when in a young state, and straighter. The general length of the leaves, in vigorous young trees, is from two to three inches; but in old trees they are much shorter; they are smooth on both surfaces, stiff, obtuse at the extremities, with a small point, and minutely serrated; dark green on the upper side, and glaucous and striated on the under side. The leaves remain green on the tree during four years, and generally drop off at the commencement of the fifth year, Long before this time, generally at the beginning of the second year, they have entirely lost their light glaucous hue, and have become of the dark sombre appearance which is characteristic of this tree at every season except that of summer, when the young glaucous shoots of the year give it a lighter hue. The flowers appear commonly in May and June. The barren flowers are from half an inch to upwards of an inch long, are placed in whorls at the base of the young shoots of the current year, and contain two or more stamens with large yellow anthers, which discharge a sulphur-coloured pollen in great abundance. The fertile flowers, or embryo cones, appear on the summits of the shoots of the current year, generally two on the point of a shoot, but sometimes from four to six. The colour of these embryo cones is generally purple and green; but they are sometimes yellowish or red. It requires eighteen months to mature the cones; and in a state of nature it is two years before the seeds are in a condition to germinate. The cone, which is stalked, and, when mature, begins to open at the narrow extremity, is perfectly conical while closed, rounded at the base, from one to two inches in length, and about an inch across in the broadest part; as it ripens, the colour changes from green to reddish brown. The scales of the cone are oblong, and terminate externally in a kind of depressed pyramid, which varies in shape and height. At the base of each scale, and close to the axis of the cone, two oval-winged seeds or nuts are lodged. From these nuts the young plant appears in the shape of a slender stem, with from five to six linear leaves or cotyledons. In ten years, in the climate of London, plants will attain the height of from twenty-five to thirty feet; and in twenty years, from forty to fifty feet.
The great contempt in which the Scotch Fir is commonly held, says Gilpin, ”arises, I believe, from two causes--its dark murky hue is unpleasing, and we rarely see it in a picturesque state. In perfection it is a very picturesque tree, though we have little idea of its beauty.
It is a hardy plant, and is therefore put to every servile office. If you wish to screen your house from the south-west wind, plant Scotch Firs; and plant them close and thick. If you want to shelter a nursery of young trees, plant Scotch Firs; and the phrase is, you may afterwards weed them out as you please. I admire its foliage, both for the colour of the leaf, and its mode of growth. Its ramification, too, is irregular and beautiful, and not unlike that of the stone pine; which it resembles also in the easy sweep of its stem, and likewise in the colour of the bark, which is commonly, as it attains age, of a rich reddish brown. The Scotch Fir, indeed, in its stripling state, is less an object of beauty.
Its pointed and spiry shoots, during the first years of its growth, are formal; and yet I have sometimes seen a good contrast produced between its spiry points and the round-headed oaks and elms in its neighbourhood. When I speak, however, of the Scotch Fir as a beautiful individual, I conceive it when it has outgrown all the improprieties of its youth; when it has completed its full age, and when, like Ezekiel's cedar, it has formed its head high among the thick branches. I may be singular in my attachment to the Scotch Fir. I know it has many enemies; but my opinion will weigh only with the reasons I have given.” Sir Thomas d.i.c.k Lauder, in his commentary on this pa.s.sage, says, ”We agree with Gilpin to the fullest extent in his approbation of the Scotch Fir as a picturesque tree. We, for our part, confess, that we have seen it towering in full majesty, in the midst of some appropriate Highland scene, and sending its limbs abroad with all the unconstrained freedom of a hardy mountaineer, as if it claimed dominion over the savage regions around it; we have then looked upon it as a very sublime object.
People who have not seen it in its native climate and soil, and who judge of it from the wretched abortions which are swaddled and suffocated in English plantations, in deep, heavy, and eternally wet clays, may well call it a wretched tree; but, when its foot is among its own Highland heather, and when it stands freely on its native knoll of dry gravel, or thinly covered rock, over which its roots wander afar in the wildest reticulation, whilst its tall, furrowed, and often gracefully sweeping red and gray trunk, of enormous circ.u.mference, rears aloft its high umbrageous canopy, then would the greatest sceptic on this point be compelled to prostrate his mind before it with a veneration which, perhaps, was never before excited in him by any other tree.”
Some of the most picturesque trees of this kind, perhaps, in England, adorn Mr. Lenthall's mansion, of Basilsleigh, in Berks.h.i.+re. The soil is a deep rich sand, which seems to be well adapted to them. As they are here at perfect liberty, they not only become large and n.o.ble trees, but they expand themselves likewise in all the careless forms of nature.
There is a remarkably fine specimen of the Scotch Fir at Castle Huntly, in Perths.h.i.+re. In 1796, it measured thirteen feet six inches in girth, at three feet from the ground; and close to the ground, it measured nineteen feet, and is thought not unlikely to be the largest planted Fir in the country. The word _planted_ is very properly used here, as many examples of larger _natural_ Firs have been produced. Professor Walker observes, that few Fir-trees were planted before the beginning of the present century; and that as the Fir is a tree which, from the number of rings found in it, will probably grow four hundred years, it is impossible that the planted Firs can have arrived at perfection. ”This,”
says Sir T. Lauder, ”may be all true; but as the reasoning proceeds upon the fact of a natural Swedish tree, perfectly sound, having three hundred and sixty circles in it, it by no means follows that a planted Fir will not rot in a premature state of disease, and die before it has sixty circles.”
The acerose or needle leaf of the Pine seems necessary to protect the tree from injury; for if their leaves were of a broader form, the branches would be borne down, in winter, by the weight of snow in the northern lat.i.tudes, and they would be more liable to be uprooted by the mighty hurricane. It is, however, enabled thus to evade both; as the snow falls through, and the winds penetrate between, the interstices of its filiform leaf. Struggling through the branches, the wind comes in contact with such an innumerable quant.i.ty of points and edges, as, even when gentle, to produce a deep murmur, or sighing; but when the breeze is strong, or the storm is raging abroad, it produces sounds like the murmuring of the ocean, or the beating of the surge and billows among the rocks:--
The loud wind through the forest wakes With sounds like ocean roaring, wild and deep, And in yon gloomy Pines strange music makes, like symphonies unearthly heard in sleep; The sobbing waters wash their waves and weep: Where moans the blast its dreary path along, The bending Firs a mournful cadence keep, And mountain rocks re-echo to the song, As fitful raves the wind the hills and woods among.
Drummond.
Wordsworth, also, thus speaks of Pine-trees moved by a gentle breeze:--
An idle voice the Sabbath region fills Of deep that calls to deep across the hills, Broke only by the melancholy sound Of drowsy bells for ever tinkling round; Faint wail of eagle melting into blue Beneath the cliffs, and Pine-wood's steady sugh.
The quality of the timber of the Scotch Fir, according to some, is altogether dependent on soil, climate, and slowness of growth; but, according to others, it depends jointly on these circ.u.mstances, and on the kind of variety cultivated. It is acknowledged that the timber of the Scotch Fir, grown on rocky surfaces, or where the soil is dry and sandy, is generally more resinous and redder in colour, than that of such as grow on soils of a clayey nature, boggy, or on chalk. At what time the sap wood is transformed into durable or red wood, has not yet been determined by vegetable physiologists. The durability of the red timber of this tree was supposed by Brindley, the celebrated engineer, to be as great as that of the oak; and some of it, grown in the north Highlands, is reported to have been as fresh and full of resin after having been three hundred years in the roof of an old castle, as newly-imported timber from Memel.
The red wood timber of the Scottish forests, similar, in every respect, to the best Baltic Pine, is the produce of trees that have numbered from one to two or more centuries. In Norway, it is not considered full-grown timber till it has reached from one hundred and thirty to two hundred years. It seems, then, rather preposterous, that any one should expect that plantation Fir timber, cut down when, perhaps, not more than thirty years old, and consisting entirely of sap wood, should be adapted to all those purposes which require the best full-grown and matured timber; and yet such seems very generally to have been the case, and to the disappointment at not finding those expectations realized, may be attributed a large portion of that prejudice and dislike so generally entertained towards this tree.
On Hampstead Heath, near London, there are a number of Pines which are said to have been raised from seed brought from Ravenna. If so, the cones are very different from those of the Ravenna Pine described by Leigh Hunt:--
Various the trees and pa.s.sing foliage there,-- Wild pear, and oak, and dusky juniper, With bryony between in trails of white, And ivy, and the suckle's streaky light, And moss warm gleaming with a sudden mark, Like flings of suns.h.i.+ne left upon the bark; And still the Pine long-haired, and dark, and tall, In lordly right, predominant o'er all.
Much they admire that old religious tree, With shaft above the rest up-shooting free, And shaking, when its dark locks feel the wind, Its wealthy fruit with rough Mosaic rind.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SILVER FIR.]
THE SILVER FIR.
[_Abies[S] picea._ Nat. Ord--_Coniferae_; Linn.--_Monoec. Mon._]
[S] For the generic characters, see p. 221.