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A tree, sometimes exceeding 200 feet in height, with a trunk 4 to 20 feet in diameter, tapering above its enlarged and buttressed base; in Alaska dwindling to a low shrub. Bark with large, thin, red-brown scales. Branchlets yellow, shining, glabrous. Buds ovoid, acute at the apex, with ovate obtuse scales. Leaves arranged on lateral branchlets as in Picea ajanensis, ending in sharp cartilaginous points; deeply keeled on the ventral green surface, and almost convex on the dorsal surface, which has two white broad bands of stomata. The male catkins are solitary at or near the ends of the branchlets, and are of an orange reddish colour.

Cones: on short straight stalks, cylindrical-oval, blunt at the free end, 2½ to 4 inches long by 1 to 1½ inches wide, composed of oblong or oblong-oval scales, rounded towards the apex, denticulate and scarcely erose in margin; bracts lanceolate, denticulate, about half as long as the scales, and peeping out between them towards the base of the cone. The cones when ripe are yellow or brown, and generally fall off in the autumn and winter of the first year. Seeds, with a wing, three to four times as long as the seed itself.

The Sitka spruce seems to vary considerably over its wide area. There are specimens at Kew from the Columbia River, with pubescent young shoots, and bearing small cones which have oval, not oblong, scales, and minute almost orbicular bracts. Other specimens from Alaska have larger cones than usual, but with bracts shorter than usual, and the leaves are not so deeply keeled or so sharp-pointed as in the type.

Cultivated trees are generally broadly pyramidal in outline, and when old, often show the enlarged and buttressed base, so characteristic of wild trees; the roots sometimes extending superficially above the ground for several feet. The tree often produces on its lateral branches small erect shoots, on which the leaves spread radially in all directions.