Page:Atlantis Arisen.djvu/245



broad-leaved C. pubescens, ash, cotton-wood, and balsam-poplar. On the low ground are roses, crab-apple, buckthorn, wild cherry; a little higher, service-berry, wild cherry again, red-flowering currant, white spircea, mock-orange, honeysuckle, low blackberry, raspberry, dogwood, arbutus, barberry, snowberry, hazel, elder, and alder. Gradually mixing with these, as they leave the line of high water, begin the various firs, which will not grow with' their roots in water. As the forest increases in density the flowering shrubs disappear, to reappear at the first opening. The blue elder becomes a handsome tree forty feet in height in the Columbia region, and two other varieties, with red and yellow berries, are highly ornamental.

It would be impossible to exaggerate the heauty of such masses of luxuriant and flowering shrubbery covering the shores of the streams. Even the great walls of basalt which are frequently exposed along the Columbia are so overgrown with minute ferns, and vivid-green mosses and vines, as to be much more beautiful and picturesque than they are forbidding.

In the Southern Oregon forests one finds some trees and shrubs not found in the Wallamet division of Oregon, nor in that part of Washington drained towards the Columbia,—namely, the myrtle, Umbellularia Californica (oreodaphne ), a beautiful tree with glossy foliage, and one hundred feet in height \ Port Orford cedar, Cupressus lawsoniana (chamcecyparis ), one of the most valuable trees of commerce, growing two hundred feet high; redwood ( Sequoia semper Virens'), two hundred and fifty feet in height; nutmeg, resembling the myrtle, and found in the same habitat, bearing a smaller nut than that of commerce. In the southern valleys the live-oak ( Quercus chrysolepis ), chestnut-oak (Quercus densiflora) ; on the foot-hills of the Cascade Range, the chinquapin ( Castanopsis chrysophylla), sugar-pine ( Pinus lamber- tina), a magnificent tree, two hundred and fifty feet in height, bearing cones eighteen inches in length, and having a sweet and viscid sap, which when dry resembles sugar; and Pinus tuber - culata, a small tree found in patches. The flowering shrubs of Southern Oregon, not common to the Columbia and Wallamet regions, are the manzanita ( Arctostaphylos pungens), blue spiraea, found on the Umpqua and at Coos Bay, and the Rhododendron maximus, found there and also on the foot-hills of the Cascades.