Hi Osprey,

"Picea engelmanni and glauca????"

Both Picea engelmanni, just individual variation.

"Pinus reflexa. Left, low elevation, Right, high elevation. Are they both Pinus reflexa"

Yep. High elevation trees, with less heat available, usually tend to have smaller cones, shorter needles, et.c, on average. But they share the same scale structure.

Quiz . . . sending separately!

Resin

Sorry, I meant to say P. pungens not P. glauca. How can you tell them apart?..... leaves, buds?????
One last thing I noticed, I saw and extra blue form of A. concolor.. I'm sure some people will be willing to propagate it.....
About the quiz, yes, you got it right.

osprey

There are several factors that influence cone size, and based on one cone it is simply not prudent to draw conclusions about the elevation of the cone's origin. Besides, in arid country, a high elevation species is often less stressed at the upper part of its zone than in the lower, drier part. Not good to push scant data.

I did say 'usually tend to have ... on average' - that is true, and (while applicable to these two cones), is not data derived solely from them!

Resin

well, I collected about 10 cones, and I saw hundreds... they all have about the same size. The lower you go, the bigger the cones. Enough samples to draw some conclusions

osprey

If casual after the fact observation was all you needed to draw size conclusions, there'd be no discipline called statistics.
Those spruces in pics 1&2 are P. pungens (left) and P. engelmannii (right). You were visiting the southernmost site of pungens.
Pungens -- sharper tipped stiffer needles, buff hairless twigs, bigger buff cones, very bitter foliage. Engelmannii -- less sharp and stiff, reddish hairy twigs, smaller reddish cones, less bitter foliage.

It depend on what you call statistics... I'm not an expert on plants, but I know enough of statistics. In this case, my population size is the Sierra Blanca, and not the entire range of P. reflexa. I collected cones from at least 8 different locations, which I think is enough to make conclusions.
I didn't say anything about the plant itself, which isn't my field. All I made was an observation.

osprey

You haven't said whether the Abies lasiocarpa was typical lasiocarpa or corkbark.

Rocky Mountain subalpine fir is being called Abies bifolia these days.

Here is a link that might be useful: Abies bifolia in Flora of North America @ efloras.org

Pinetree30

I don't know, Resin told me that it should be arizonica.
BTW, thanks on the information about P pungens and P engelmannii. You two seem to disagree. For me, they look very different, but I'm not the expert!

osprey

Hi pinetree - "If casual after the fact observation was all you needed to draw size conclusions, there'd be no discipline called statistics" - you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not trying to draw statistical conclusions from Osprey's cones, merely saying that his cones follow known patterns of variation

"You haven't said whether the Abies lasiocarpa was typical lasiocarpa or corkbark" ... "Rocky Mountain subalpine fir is being called Abies bifolia these days" - not many botanists have taken up Abies bifolia as a distinct species; the evidence for it being distinct at species rank isn't too good. Much of the problem at least appears to be that FNA discouraged use of the rank of subspecies; in most other parts of the world, the small differences between coastal, northern interior, and southern interior populations of Subalpine Fir would be recognised as distinct subspecies within one species. The southern interior population has been so published, as Abies lasiocarpa subsp. arizonica (Merriam) A.E.Murray, but with the only recent recognition of the differences between coastal and northern interior populations, no-one has published the combination Abies lasiocarpa subsp. bifolia yet.

"P pungens and P engelmannii" - I'm not convinced the left-hand cone in the 1st pic at the top of the page is P. pungens; the scales don't appear to me to have the right character for it, but do fit P. engelmannii. But possible I'm wrong (more pics of the cone from different angles would help, please!!).
Below: left pic P. engelmannii, right pic P. pungens; the lower left cone in the first pic is from the Sierra Blanca:
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Resin

Hi Resin -- The statistics reference was not to your statement but to that of osprey, to which he has replied.
For Abies bifolia to be persuasive, the data in Hunt & Rudloff 1979 would have to be very strong, to show not a cline in characters but a clear line between bifolia and lasiocarpa. But their paper is not a strong one. The data are very selective, the localities they cite are only to within 15 minutes, and no elevations of the localities are given. Hunt wrote the Abies chapter for FNA and clearly had an axe to grind. Seventeen years after their 1979 paper I found that in Forestry Abstracts, out of 57 citations to these taxa in that period, only one used the bifolia name, which shows the lack of acceptance of bifolia. Further, in a 1984 paper in Amer.J.Bot. Parker & Mace conclude there are two varieties of lasiocarpa, coastal and interior, but never mention bifolia. Hunt has emphasized that bifolia and lasiocarpa differ in periderm color and bud scales, but says nothing about the resin canal characters they share, which are not found in other western firs. When I reviewed the Pinaceae chapter for FNA I pointed all this out, but they kept it pretty much as Hunt sent it in.
A few years ago I quit work on a book of Rocky Mountain trees. Had I continued I think I would have used the name Abies arizonica, which gets some use in the SW, and which might get corkbark fir the attention it deserves. A pity it has been so ignored.
Both spruces occur in the Sierra Blanca. It is possible they hybridize here as they do in some other places in the SW, like SW Colorado.