Mountain Hemlock

At the summit of Mount Hoffman, John Muir stood to admire not only the wide view, but also the mountain hemlock right beside him: "The hemlock (Tsuga Mertensiana) is the most beautiful conifer I have ever seen; the branches and also the main axis droop in a singularly graceful way, and the dense foliage covers the delicate, sensitive, swaying branchlets all around. It is now in full bloom, and the flowers, together with thousands of last season's cones still clinging to the drooping sprays, display wonderful wealth of color, brown and purple and blue. Gladly I climbed the first tree I found to revel in the midst of it. How the touch of the flowers makes one's flesh tingle! The pistillate are dark, rich purple, and almost translucent, the staminate blue,--a vivid, pure tone of blue like the mountain sky,--the most uncommonly beautiful of all the Sierra tree flowers I have seen. How wonderful that, with all its delicate feminine grace and beauty of form and dress and behavior, this lovely tree up here, exposed to the wildest blasts, has already endured the storms of centuries of winters!"

The fully-clothed guy on the left of the slope is the sturdy hemlock mountaineer.

A few months after the early summer bloom of the hemlock, Muir made his way up Cathedral Peak to find "two-leaved pine, mountain pine, albicaulis pine, silver fir, and the most charming, most graceful of all the evergreens, the mountain hemlock." 

You can see he was a huge fan of the mountain hemlock. What I found most beautiful about this tree and what makes it stand out against the other pines, is the way its soft, full wings droop at the ends. It looks like the most inviting and cozy tree to embrace: all the tree-huggers out there take note. I've noticed a few of the European hemlocks here in Spain, and their elegance impresses me every time. It truly is one of the most beautiful trees on the globe. 




"We are air exhaled by hemlocks..." -Kathleen Dean Moore