it as well as the spruce, for the pine is a lover of a sandy soil and a dry long winter, with a hot sunny summer.
Dr. Schübeler, in his Viridarium Norvegicum, i. 375, gives many details about the pine, from which I gather that its range extends from the south, where it reaches an elevation of 3500 feet above the sea, to the inner valleys of Finmark, where in lat. 70° N. it attains in Alten and Porsanger fjords as much as 60 feet high and 7½ feet in girth. He tells us that formerly there were pines on the Dovrefjeld, near Jerkin, at an elevation of 3200 feet, as much as 1 foot in diameter, where no trees now exist; and that near Roros, now one of the bleakest and coldest towns in Norway, the forest was, in 1773, so dense as to be almost impassable. The tallest pines in Norway that he mentions were near Holden in Lower Thelemarken, where one was measured 104 feet high, with a diameter at the ground of 2 feet 10 inches, and at 70 feet high of 9½ inches. Another at the same place was 105 feet high, and 5 inches in diameter at 96 feet up. At Klosterskogen in Skien, one was measured 108 feet by 6 feet 5 inches at breast height. The greatest girth that he mentions is about 15½ feet.
I have myself measured at Graddis in Junkersdal, within the Arctic Circle, and at an elevation of at least 1200 feet, pines of over 50 feet high and 12 to 13 feet in girth. One of these, which was cut down, was 34 inches in diameter and about 240 years old, but the outer rings were so close that I could not count them accurately, the first 100 years' growth being over 26 inches in diameter, showing that in this latitude at least the increase after this time is very slow. The tallest that I saw in this valley was 84 feet high near the Government Forest Nursery at Storjold. I observed that in Junkersdal the natural regeneration from seed was poor, and that in the upper parts of the valley the young seedlings were very small and stunted, and birch seemed to be taking their place. In this valley on July 10, 1904, vegetation had only just commenced, and the pines had not pushed their young growth, though Cypripedium Calceolus was in flower. A severe frost which took place in April, –14° to –16° Réaumur, after warm weather in March, had killed most of the young shoots where not protected by snow.
Schübeler gives several illustrations of the curious forms which this tree sometimes assumes. His Fig. 59 shows a tree in which the branches are very short and which has the shape of a northern spruce rather than that of a pine. Fig. 60 shows a branch with a great bunch of forty to fifty closely packed cones surrounding it. Figs. 61 and 62 show the power which the tree possesses of sending out upright stems of considerable size from a fallen trunk whose roots still retain their hold on the ground. Fig. 63 shows an immense witches' broom, forming a dense mass of living twigs in a ball 10 feet in diameter, which surrounds the trunk of a pine growing at Aaseböstäl in Nordfjord.
It is occasionally planted in Iceland,[1] but does not long survive the severe climate, though Hooker was told that a single dwarf tree grew on an island in a lake between the head of Borgarfjord and Reyholt.
As little is known with regard to the so-called Riga pine, which was for long
- ↑ Babington, in Journ. Linn. Soc. (Bot.) xi. 50 (1870).
