TREES REMEMBERED AND REMEMBERING

G. HARRIS COLLINGWOOD.

The General Sherman Bigtree in the Sequoia National Park, California

Long before Maine became known as the Pine Tree State, before the men who accompanied De Soto complained of Florida as "cumbersome with woods and bogs," before Columbus and his intrepid crew from three little wooden ships knelt in reverent thankfulness on the shores of San Salvador Island in the Caribbean Sea, before Leif Ericson and his Norsemen set sail from the North Atlantic coast of an uncharted continent with a cargo of timbers for Greenland, there were, among the seemingly limitless forests of what is now known as North America, many of the same giant sequoias that now tower above their giant associates in isolated areas of the western slopes of the continent. Today, after more than three centuries of exploitation and development, few other trees are standing that may be said to "remember" any of those adventurous explorers. The sequoias could recall them all.

Were Columbus and his crew to return to see what has happened to the new land they discovered 457 years ago, they might find among perhaps a dozen varieties of trees some individuals that were standing when the discovery was reported to their royal patrons. These are the hardy, long-lived ones of more than a thousand tree species that inhabit this country.

Along the east coast a few of the original southern cypress or the bald-cypress still stand but very few. Some of the biggest eastern hemlock could probably look that far back, as could also a few of the Carolina hemlock, in isolated coves of the Great Smoky Mountains. This is the tree that the late Charles Sprague Sargent described as America's most beautiful conifer. Among the broadleaved hardwoods they would find early companions only among the white oaks and post oaks, with possibly a rare old sassafras tree. Beyond the Great Plains, of whose existence those explorers had not the slightest shadow of information, they would find a larger variety and many more individual trees.

Extensive forests of Douglas-fir in Washington and Oregon include trees whose size in 1492 exceeded that of many present-day trees whose trunks are harvested and hauled to a sawmill. Among them, extending in more or less pure stands through British Columbia to the Alaskan coast, are larch, Engelmann spruce, noble fir, western redcedar, Sitka spruce, and Alaska-cedar, whose size and growth rings attest their age. But the biggest trees then, as well as now, were two varieties of sequoia: Sequoia gigantea, the big-tree or giant sequoia of California's high Sierra, and Sequoia sempervirens, the coast redwood, whose magnificent fluted columns rise high into the Pacific fog near the coast of northern California and southwestern Oregon.

Those trees, and more particularly the two sequoias with their associates, are part of an amazing heritage that has contributed immeasurably to the economy, political structure, and spiritual outlook of this Nation. The extent to which they and all other forest trees can continue to help support the national welfare depends on the foresight and efforts of the men and women who now inhabit this broad land.

During four centuries and more, while man has pressed with accelerating force upon the natural resources of the continent, forests that seemed a cumbersome burden to the early pioneers have become an asset whose contribution is only beginning to be fully recognized. As men and women journeyed across the land, broke the soil, and built towns, political needs made necessary division of the country into States, each with an identifying name.

Each State has characteristics, peculiarities, and resources that give rise to local pride, yet all have ideals in common and all bear allegiance to a central government. The struggles and strife that resulted in this common allegiance revealed increasing dependence upon trees. A few States early identified themselves by some of the trees that were characteristic of their area. Eventually, there developed a Nation-wide movement to designate a typical tree for each State a mascot, as it were.

Maine was early dubbed the Pine Tree State, yet no single species of the pine has been officially recognized. That was perhaps too obvious since it could have been none other than the eastern white pine, whose clean, straight boles had early been selected by the King's men to serve as masts and spars for the British Navy and so had borne the blaze of the Broad Arrow.

Remembering her contributions to the development of the great agricultural and industrial Midwest during the turn of the century, Minnesota chose the same white pine for her emblem. Idaho chose the taller western white pine and has been vigorously vociferous in claiming for that tree the official name of Idaho white pine.

Two Southern States bear witness to the fecundity of forests and the economic importance of pines in their development. Alabama designated as her tree the slash pine, a dual-purpose tree. On it and the longleaf pine, a native also of Georgia, depends the naval stores industry which, until the recent age of chemistry, was the source of all our turpentine and rosin. Arkansas chose the shortleaf pine, her most numerous of these southern lumber producers.

Moving to the west, we find Montana has recognized the potential possibilities of the versatile ponderosa pine, whose easily worked wood long struggled under the name of western yellow pine. Wyoming memorialized the home-making efforts of her Indians and accepted the lodgepole pine. Other tribes of Indians were a strong influence upon the selection of New Mexico and of Nevada. New Mexico designated the pinyon pine and Nevada the singleleaf pinyon, whose nutlike seeds formed an important item in the Indian diet.

Recalling the Gothic arch under which General Washington reviewed the Colonial troops at Cambridge, and similar trees that grace her village streets and country highways, Massachusetts honored herself by singling out the American elm.

The Charter Oak, whose cavity played so significant and also so romantic a part in early Colonial history, was a white oak. So history may be said to have made the decision for Connecticut. White oak is also the choice of Maryland, whose Wye Oak, standing on her Eastern Shore, is said to be America's largest oak tree. Neighboring West Virginia, remembering that many families and industries depend on her heavy stands of hardwood forest, also chose the white oak. The settlers who trekked west found counterparts of those trees in the oak openings of the prairies, and Illinois chose the "native oak," the most common being the bur oak.

A sweet tooth and pride in the special quality of a product for which Vermont has long laid claim made the maple her natural choice. To designate this sugar maple, hard maple, or white maple is of little consequence, for all are names for the same tree. Whether New York chose the same tree because of its annual crop of sirup and sugar is a question. The children of Wisconsin, by vote, have asked their legislature to name the sugar maple as their State tree, also. These States may as logically have given weight to the hard, firm, white wood, whose uses range from shoe trees to flooring, and to the symmetry of the leaves and the brilliant autumn foliage.