In youth, say up to the age of seventy or eighty years, no other tree
forms so strictly tapered a cone from top to bottom. The branches swoop
outward and downward in bold curves, excepting the younger ones near the
top, which aspire, while the lowest droop to the ground, and all spread
out in flat, ferny plumes, beautifully fronded, and imbricated upon one
another. As it becomes older, it grows strikingly irregular and
picturesque. Large special branches put out at right angles from the
trunk, form big, stubborn elbows, and then shoot up parallel with the
axis. Very old trees are usually dead at the top, the main axis
protruding above ample masses of green plumes, gray and lichen-covered,
and drilled full of acorn holes by the woodpeckers. The plumes are
exceedingly beautiful; no waving fern-frond in shady dell is more
unreservedly beautiful in form and texture, or half so inspiring in
color and spicy fragrance. In its prime, the whole tree is thatched with
them, so that they shed off rain and snow like a roof, making fine
mansions for storm-bound birds and mountaineers. But if you would see
the _Libocedrus_ in all its glory, you must go to the woods in
winter.
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