Page:All Over Oregon and Washington.djvu/293

Rh at the same time with the service-berry, when the woody thickets along the rivers are gleaming with their snowy sprays.

A broad-leafed evergreen is the arbutus (A. Menziesii), commonly called laurel, which is found in the forests of the middle region from Puget Sound, north of the Columbia, to California and Mexico. In Spanish countries it is known as the madrono-tree. The trunk is from one foot to four feet in thickness, and when old is generally twisted. The bark undergoes a change of color annually; the old, dark, mahogany-colored bark scaling off, as the new, bright, cinnamon-colored one replaces it. The leaves are a long oval, of a bright, rich green, and glossy. It flowers in the spring, and bears scarlet berries in autumn—resembling those of the mountain ash. Altogether, it is one of the handsomest of American trees.

On the slopes of the Cascade Mountains is found a beautiful tree—the western chinquapin—the flower and fruit resembling the chestnut. Though commonly only a shrub, it here attains a height of thirty feet. This tree is the Castanea chrysophylla of Douglas.

A very peculiar and ornamental shrub, is the holly-leaved barberry (Berberis aquifolium). It has rather a vining stalk, from two to eight feet high, with leaves shaped like holly leaves, but arranged in two rows, on stems of eight or ten inches in length. It is an evergreen, although it seems to cast off some of its foliage in the fall to renew it in the spring. While preparing to fall, the leaves take the most brilliant hues of any in the forest, and shine as if varnished. The fruit is a small cluster of very acid berries, of a dark, bluish purple, about the size of the wild grape, from which it takes its vulgar name of "Oregon grape."