This lowly dwarf
reaches a far greater age than would be guessed. A specimen that I
examined, growing at an elevation of 10,700 feet, yet looked as though
it might be plucked up by the roots, for it was only three and a half
inches in diameter and its topmost tassel reached hardly three feet
above the ground. Cutting it half through and counting the annual rings
with the aid of a lens, I found its age to be no less than 255 years.
Another specimen about the same height, with a trunk six inches in
diameter, I found to be 426 years old, forty years ago; and one of its
supple branchlets hardly an eighth of an inch in diameter inside the
bark, was seventy-five years old, and so filled with oily balsam and
seasoned by storms that I tied it in knots like a whip-cord.
The Nut Pine
In going across the Range from the Tuolumne River Soda Springs to Mono
Lake one makes the acquaintance of the curious little Nut Pine (Pinus
monophylla). It dots the eastern flank of the Sierra to which it is
mostly restricted in grayish bush-like patches, from the margin of the
sage-plains to an elevation of from 7000 to 8000 feet. A more contented,
fruitful and unaspiring conifer could not be conceived. All the species
we have been sketching make departures more or less distant from the
typical spire form, but none goes so far as this.
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