Nikko Fir wood is used for general structural timber.

And we walked through one of the most splendid sites in America, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, with, its jewel, the serene Japanese garden, complete with Nikko firs, baldcypresses, cherry trees, a waterfall, a pond with geese and a sedate Shinto shrine.

THE Nikko firs rose 70 feet over our heads, their soft needles and elegant branching more suggestive of a mountain on the coast of Japan than the rivers of traffic around their home at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.

To the Editor: Am I to understand from Anne Raver's "Rare Firs Stand Tall Against Extinction" (March 16) that the irreplaceable legacy of the New York Botanical Garden, the Nikko firs, for instance, are in decline from the drought of last summer?