Casting your eye over the general forest from some ridge-top, the color alone of its spiry summits is sufficient to identify it in any company.
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.