Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/354

350 Georgia to an altitude of about 3,000 feet, while Pinus Tæda grows from Cape May to Arkansas, Texas and Central Florida, rarely more than 1,000 feet above sea-level. The former grows in dry soils somewhat below the average in fertility, while the latter prefers or tolerates a little more moisture and humus. Both are usually more or less mixed with oaks and hickories, or with each other, so that opportunities for getting satisfactory photographs of them are not very numerous.

The distribution of P. echinata corresponds approximately with mean temperatures of 55°-70°, and P. Tæda with about 60°-72°. The latter does not seem to be capable of enduring temperatures much below zero (Fahrenheit). It may be regarded more appropriately than any other as the typical tree of the South. Where it abounds cotton is the principal money crop, about half the population is colored, and a large majority of the white voters are Democrats. In South Florida, where it is unknown, there are no cotton fields, few negroes, few southern traditions, and many northern people; and substantially the same might be said of the southern Appalachian region, western Texas, and several other places just outside of the range of this tree.

Both species when mature have bark thick enough to withstand any ordinary forest fire, and the dead leaves in the woods in which they grow are likely to be burned nearly every year, with little apparent injury to the trees. Trees of either species less than ten years old probably suffer somewhat from fire, though.

Both are very abundant and important timber trees, not far inferior to the long-leaf pine mentioned below, and together they are now being cut at the rate of several billion feet annually. Probably even more trees have been cut by farmers than by lumbermen, for the soil in which they grow is adapted to many staple crops. They reproduce themselves very readily in abandoned fields, though, so that they are in no immediate danger of exhaustion.

The Black Pine (Pinus serotina), which looks very much like P. Tæda, but is more closely related to P. rigida (whose range it overlaps very little if at all), is strictly confined to the sandier parts of the coastal plain, where the summers are wetter than the winters. It is frequent from southeastern Virginia to central Florida and southeastern Alabama, but not very abundant except in eastern North Carolina, where it is the dominant and characteristic tree of the "pocosins." Its favorite habitat is sour sandy or peaty swamps, where the water-level varies little throughout the year.

Its relations to fire have not been specially investigated. Its wood is similar to that of P. Tæda, from which it is not usually distinguished in the lumber markets.