and subspecies that flourish within Oregon's 96,000 square miles.
Western Oregon offers a warm and sheltered conservatory for the development of plant growth. A large area is covered with Douglas fir, interspersed with cedar, yew and hemlock, while along the coast grow gigantic tideland spruce and contorted thickets of lodgepole pine. In the southern Cascades and in the Siskiyous, firs give place to the massive pillars of the sugar pine. Near the southern coast are extensive groves of Port Orford cedar, redwood, and the rare Oregon myrtle found nowhere else in America. Eastward of the Cascades are the widely distributed forests of yellow pine, lodgepole pine and Englemann spruce. On the desert uplands grows the western juniper, hardy and sparse, furnishing the only shade. In the valleys and on the adjacent hills of the Columbia, Willamette, Umpqua, Rogue and other rivers, appear numerous hardwoods and deciduous trees—oaks, maples, alders, willows, and those unsurpassed flowering trees, the red-barked madrona and the Pacific dogwood.
Along the sea beaches and on the wave-cut bluffs are verbenas and wild asters, tangled thickets of devil's club, laurel, sweet gale, and rhododendron, and watery sphagnum bogs lush with the cobra-leaved pitcher plant and the delicate sundew. In June, on the windy headland of Cape Blanco, a party of visitors picked sixteen varieties of flowers within a single acre.
In Oregon valleys great fields are seasonally blue with the wild flag, pastures are bright with buttercups, and the moist woods with violets, trilliums, and adder's-tongues. Alpine regions are deeply carpeted with sorrel, and orchids lend their pastel shades. Deeper in the forest grow the waxy Indian pipe, the blood-red snow plant, and the rare moccasin flower. In the Siskiyous are more than fifty plants found nowhere else in the world.
Both on the coast and in the interior valleys Scotch broom glows goldenly, but is regarded by farmers as a pest. In the spring and early summer, the wild currant's crimson flame, sweet syringa, ocean spray, and Douglas spirea form streamside thickets of riotous blossom; and the glossy-leaved Oregon grape, by its omnipresent neighborliness, justifies its selection as the State flower.
Eastward of the Cascades there is a decided topographical and botanical change. A hiker on a mountain trail will sometimes notice an almost knife-edge break between the two floras. A high inland plateau, broken by deep river canyons and small scattered mountain ranges, stretches away to the state's borders. This seeming waste is an empire of fertility
