Distribution. Cape May, New Jersey, through southern Delaware and eastern Maryland and southward to the shores of Indian River and Tampa Bay, Florida, westward to middle North Carolina and through South Carolina and Georgia and the eastern Gulf states to the Mississippi River, extending into southern Tennessee and northeastern Mississippi; west of the Mississippi River from southern Arkansas and the southwestern part of Oklahoma through western Louisiana to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and through eastern Texas to the valley of the Colorado River; on the Atlantic coast often springing up on lands exhausted by agriculture; west of the Mississippi River one of the most important timber-trees, frequently growing in nearly pure forests on rolling uplands. 14. Pinus rigida Mill. Pitch Pine. [Illustration: Fig. 19] Leaves stout, rigid, dark yellow-green, marked on the 3 faces by many rows of stomata, 3′—5′ long, standing stiffly and at right angles with the branch, deciduous during their second year. Flowers: male in short crowded spikes, yellow or rarely purple; female often clustered and raised on short stout stems, light green more or less tinged with rose color. Fruit ovoid, acute at apex, nearly sessile, often clustered, 1′—3½′ long, becoming light brown, with thin flat scales armed with recurved rigid prickles, often remaining on the branches for ten or twelve years; seeds nearly triangular, full and rounded on the sides, ¼′ long, with a thin dark brown mottled roughened shell and wings broadest below the middle, gradually narrowed to the very oblique apex, ¾′ long, ⅓′ wide. A tree, 50°—60° or rarely 100° high, with a short trunk occasionally 3° in diameter, thick contorted often pendulous branches covered with thick much roughened bark, forming a round-topped thick head, often irregular and picturesque, and stout bright green branchlets becoming dull orange color during their first winter and dark gray-brown at the end of four or five years; often fruitful when only a few feet high. Bark of young stems thin and broken into plate-like dark red-brown scales, becoming on old trunks ¾′—1½′ thick, deeply and irregularly fissured, and divided into broad flat connected ridges separating on the surface into thick dark red-brown scales often tinged with purple. Wood light, soft, not strong, brittle, coarse-grained, very durable, light brown or red, with thick yellow or often white sapwood; largely used for fuel and in the manufacture of charcoal; occasionally sawed into lumber.