What the best azure of the
mountain sky seems to be condensed in them. Though apparently the most
delicate and feminine of all the mountain trees, it grows best where
the snow lies deepest, at a height of from 9000 to 9500 feet, in
hollows on the northern slopes of mountains and ridges. But under all
circumstances, sheltered from heavy winds or in bleak exposure to them,
well fed or starved, even at its highest limit, 10,500 feet above the
sea, on exposed ridge-tops where it has to crouch and huddle close in
low thickets, it still contrives to put forth its sprays and branches in
forms of invincible beauty, while on moist, well-drained moraines it
displays a perfectly tropical luxuriance of foliage, flowers and fruit.
The snow of the first winter storm is frequently soft, and lodges in due
dense leafy branches, weighing them down against the trunk, and the
slender, drooping axis, bending lower and lower as the load increases,
at length reaches the ground, forming an ornamental arch. Then, as storm
succeeds storm and snow is heaped on snow, the whole tree is at last
buried, not again to see the light of day or move leaf or limb until set
free by the spring thaws in June or July. Not only the young saplings
are thus carefully covered and put to sleep in the whitest of white beds
for five or six months of the year, but trees thirty feet high or more.
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