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extending from 1200 feet up to timber line at about 4500 feet, and forming, with the Western Hemlock, a large part of the forest between 3000 and 4000 feet. In the Cascade Mountains it extends south to about 20 miles north of Crater Lake where Mr. Coville found it on the east side of Diamond Mountain. It occurs! in the extreme south-eastern end of Alaska, at the Boca de Quatre inlet, ranging from sea-level to 1000 feet altitude ; but has not yet been found between this point and the northern end of Vancouver Island. It is the common fir? in south-western Vancouver Island, where it grows abundantly from sea-level up to the summits of the highest mountains. Near the sea it often forms groves of almost pure growth, the trees standing close together and having very tall slender trunks, about 3 feet in diameter at the base, and often unbranched to a height of 100 feet or more. At an altitude of 3000 feet it is a comparatively small tree, often clothed with branches to the base. Plate 220, taken from a photograph, for which I am indebted to Mr. J.M. Macoun of the Geological Survey of Canada, shows the tree as growing near Kamloops, in British Columbia.
Sargent says, "unsurpassed among fir trees in the beauty of its snowy bark, dark green lustrous foliage, and great purple cones, 4dzes amadbilis can never be forgotten by those who have seen it in the alpine meadows covered with lilies, dog’s-tooth violets, heaths, and other flowers which make the valleys of the northern Cascade Mountains the most charming natural gardens of the continent.”
Engelmann in a letter, dated “Portland, Or., August 6,” 1880, and quoted in Gardeners’ Chronicle of December 4, 1880, says of it:—“A. amabilis, on the same mountain where Douglas discovered it, just south of the Cascades of the Columbia, is a magnificent tree, at about 4000 feet, attaining 150 to 200 feet high with a trunk 4 feet in diameter, branching to the ground and forming a perfect cone. The bark of old trees is 14 to 2 inches thick, furrowed and reddish grey, that of younger trees, less than 100 years, is quite thin and smooth, light grey or almost white. It is certainly very closely allied to A. grandis, but readily distinguished by its very crowded dark green foliage and its large dark purple cones. It has the purple cones and sharp-pointed leaves (on fertile branches) of A. subalpina, but this latter has much smaller cones, and not such crowded leaves.”
Though I saw this tree in abundance on Mount Rainier I cannot say that I know how to distinguish it in the forest from A. nobilis without the leaves and cones. It has, according to Plummer, a wider range of elevation than that species, and grows from 800 up to 5500 feet. The cone is as large as that of A. nobilis, but without the projecting bracts. From A. lasiocarpa,? with which it was mixed in the upper part of its range, it is distinguished by its habit, which is much less slender and spiry, by its greater size, and by its cones, which are nearly twice as large. Plummer says that it attains 200 feet in height by 15 feet in girth, but I saw none so large as this that I could identify. It is a slow-growing tree, one 20 inches in diameter having 288 rings.
1 U.S, Forest Service, Sylvical Leaflet, 22, p. 1 (1908). Its most southerly point in the coast range is Saddle Mountain, 25 miles south of the mouth of the Columbia River.
2 Cf. Butters, Condfers of Vancouver Island, in Postelsia, 187 (St. Paul, Minn., 1906).
3 Sargent, Silva, xii. 126, adnot., mentions the occurrence in a wild state of a hybrid between these two species.