Trees Worth Knowing Part 8

It is a wonderful sight to see the evening sunlight streaming through the loose, open head of a laurel oak. No wonder people plant it for shade and for the beauty it adds to home grounds and public parks.

=The Mountain Live Oak=

_Q. chrysolepis_, Liebm.

The mountain live oak cannot be seen without climbing the western slopes of the mountains from Oregon to Lower California, and eastward into New Mexico and Arizona. On levels where avalanches deposit detritus from the higher slopes, sufficient fertility and moisture are found to maintain groves of these oaks, wide-domed, with ma.s.sive, horizontal branches from short, b.u.t.tressed trunks--the Western counterpart of the live oak of the South, but lacking the familiar drapery of pale green moss.

The leaves are leathery, polished, oval blades, one or two inches in length, with unbroken margins, abundant on intricately divided, supple twigs, that droop with their burden and respond to the lightest breeze. The leaves persist until the bronze-green new foliage expands to replace the old, and keep the tree-tops evergreen.

The acorns are large, and their thick, shallow saucers are covered with yellow fuzz. For this character, the tree is called the gold-cup oak. In June, the copious bloom is yellow. Even at an alt.i.tude of eight thousand feet the familiar gold-cup acorns are borne on shrubby oaks not more than a foot high!

The maximum height of the species is sixty feet. The wood is the most valuable oak of the West Coast. It is used for wagons and agricultural implements.

=The Live Oak=

_Q. agrifolia_, Nee.

The live oak (_Q. agrifolia_, Nee.) called also "Encina," is the huge-limbed, holly-leaved live oak of the lowlands, that reaches its greatest abundance and maximum stature in the valleys south of San Francis...o...b..y. The giant oaks of the University campus at Berkeley stretch out ponderous arms, in wayward fas.h.i.+on, that reach far from the stocky trunk and often rest their mighty elbows on the ground. The pointed acorns, usually exceeding an inch in length, are collected by woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, and tucked away for further reference in holes they make in the bark of the same oaks.

From the mountain slopes to the sea, and from Mendocino County to Lower California, groves of this semi-prostrate giant are found, furnis.h.i.+ng abundant supply of fuel, but no lumber of any consequence, because the trunks are so short and the limbs so crooked.

THE HORSE-CHESTNUTS, OR BUCKEYES

=The Horse-chestnut=

_Aesculus Hippocastanum_, Linn.

At the head of this family stands a stately tree, native of the mountains of northern Greece and Asia Minor, which was introduced into European parks and planted there as an avenue tree when landscape gardening came into vogue. By way of England it came to America, and in Eastern villages one often sees a giant horse-chestnut, perhaps the sole remnant of the street planting of an earlier day.

Longfellow's "spreading chestnut tree" was a horse-chestnut. And the boys who watched the smith at his work doubtless filled their pockets with the s.h.i.+ny brown nuts and played the game of "conquerors" every autumn as regularly as they flew their kites in spring. What boy has not tied a chestnut to each end of a string, whirled them round and round at a bewildering rate of speed and finally let them fly to catch on telegraph wires, where they dangle for months and bother tidy folks?

The glory of the horse-chestnut comes at blooming time, when the upturning branches, like arms of candelabra, are each tipped with a white blossom-cl.u.s.ter, pointed like a candle flame. (_See ill.u.s.tration, page 54._) Each flower of the pyramid has its throat-dashes of yellow and red, and the curving yellow stamens are thrust far out of the dainty ruffled border of the corolla.

Bees and wasps make music in the tree-top, sucking the nectar out of the flowers. Unhappily for us humans, caterpillars of the leopard and tussock moths feed upon the tender tissues of this tree, defacing the foliage and making the whole tree unsightly by their presence.

Sidewalks under horse-chestnut trees are always littered with something the tree is dropping. In early spring the s.h.i.+ny, wax-covered leaf buds cast off and they stick to slate and cement most tenaciously. Scarcely have the folded leaflets spread, tent-like, before some of them, damaged by wind or late frosts or insects'

injury, begin to curl and drop, and as the leaves attain full size, they crowd, and this causes continual shedding. In early autumn the leaflets begin to be cast, the seven fingers gradually loosening from the end of the leaf-stalk; then comes a day when all of the foliage ma.s.s lets go, and one may wade knee deep under the tree in the dead leaves. The tree is still ugly from clinging leaf-stems and the slow breaking of the p.r.i.c.kly husks that enclose the nuts.

With all these faults, the horse-chestnut holds its popularity in the suburbs of great cities, for it lives despite smoke and soot. Bushey Park in London has five rows of these trees on either side of a wide avenue. When they are in bloom the fact is announced in the newspapers and all London turns out to see the sight. Paris uses the tree extensively; nearly twenty thousand of them line her streets, and thrive despite the poverty of the soil.

The American buckeyes are less st.u.r.dy in form and less showy in flower than the European species, but they have the horse-shoe print with the nails in it where the leaf-stalk meets the twig. The brown nuts, with the dull white patch which fastens them in the husk, justifies the name "buckeye." One nibble at the nut will prove to any one that, as a fruit, it is too bitter for even horses. Bitter, astringent bark is characteristic of the family.

=The Ohio Buckeye=

_Ae. glabra_, Willd.

The Ohio buckeye has five yellow-green leaflets, smooth when full grown, pale, greenish yellow flowers, not at all conspicuous, and bitter nuts in spiny husks. The whole tree exhales a strong, disagreeable odor. The wood is peculiarly adapted to the making of artificial limbs.

The great abundance of this little tree in the Ohio Valley accounts for Ohio being called the "Buckeye State."

=The Sweet Buckeye=

_Ae. octandra_, Marsh.

The sweet buckeye is a handsome, large tree with greenish yellow, tubular flowers and leaves of five slender, elliptical leaflets.

Cattle will eat the nuts and paste made from them is preferred by bookbinders; it holds well, and book-loving insects will not attack it. These trees grow on mountain slopes of the Alleghanies from western Pennsylvania southward, and west to Iowa and Texas.

=The California Buckeye=

_Ae. californica_, Nutt.

The California buckeye spreads wide branches from a squat trunk, and clothes its st.u.r.dy twigs with unmistakable horse-chestnut leaves and pyramids of white flowers. Sometimes these are tinted with rose, and the tree is very beautiful. The brown nuts are irregular in shape and enclosed in somewhat pear-shaped, two-valved husks.

This western buckeye follows the borders of streams from the Sacramento Valley southward; they are largest north of San Francis...o...b..y, in the canyons of the Coast Range.

Shrubby, red-flowered buckeyes, often seen in gardens and in the shrubbery borders of parks, are horticultural crosses between the European horse-chestnut and a shrubby, red-flowered native buckeye that occurs in the lower Mississippi Valley.

THE LINDENS, OR Ba.s.sWOODS

This tropical family, with about thirty-five genera, has a single tree genus, _tilia_, in North America. This genus has eighteen or twenty species, all told, with representatives in all temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, with the exception of Central America, Central Asia, and the Himalayas.

Tilia wood is soft, pale-colored, light, of even grain, adaptable for wood-carving, sounding-boards of pianos, woodenwares of all kinds, and for the manufacture of paper. The inner bark is tough and fibrous. It has been used since the human race was young, in the making of ropes, fish nets, and like necessities. It was a favorite tying material in nurseries and greenhouses until the more adaptable raffia came in to take its place. The bark of young trees is stripped in spring to make the shoes of the Russian peasantry. An infusion of ba.s.swood flowers has long been a home remedy for indigestion, nervousness, coughs, and hoa.r.s.eness. Experiments in Germany have successfully extracted a table oil from the seed-b.a.l.l.s. A nutritious paste resembling chocolate has been made from its nuts, which are delicious when fresh. In winter the buds, as well as the tiny nuts, stand between the lost trapper and starvation. The flowers yield large quant.i.ties of nectar, and honey made near linden forests is unsurpa.s.sed in delicacy of flavor.

About the time of Louis XIV, the French fas.h.i.+on arose of planting avenues to lindens, where horse-chestnuts had formerly been the favorite tree. The fas.h.i.+on spread to England of bordering with "lime trees" approaches to the homes of the gentry. "Pleached alleys" were made with these fast-growing trees that submitted so successfully to severe pruning and training. All sorts of grotesque figures were carved out of the growing lime trees in the days before topiary work in gardens submitted to the rules of landscape art, and slower growing trees were chosen for such purposes.

In cultivation, lindens have the virtues of swift growth, superb framework, clean, smooth bark, and late, profuse, beautiful and fragrant bloom, which is followed by interesting seed cl.u.s.ters, winged with a pale blade that lightens the foliage ma.s.s. One fault is the early dropping of the leaves, which are usually marred by the wind soon after they reach mature size. Propagation is easy from cuttings and from seed.

=The American Linden, or Ba.s.swood=

_Tilia Americana_, Linn.

The American linden or ba.s.swood is a stately spreading tree reaching one hundred and twenty feet in height and a trunk diameter of four feet. The bark is brown, furrowed, and scaly, the branches gray and smooth, the twigs ruddy. The alternate leaves are obliquely heart-shaped, saw-toothed, with prominent veins that branch at the base, only on the side next to the petiole. (_See ill.u.s.tration, page 86._) Occasionally the leaf blades are eight inches long. A dense shade is cast by a linden tree in midsummer.

The blossoms, cream-white and cl.u.s.tered on pale green, leaf-like blades, open by hundreds in June and July, actually dripping with nectar, and illuminating the platforms of green leaves. A bird flying overhead looks down upon a tree covered with broad leaf blades overlapping like s.h.i.+ngles on a roof. It must look underneath to see the flowers that delight us as we look up into the tree-top from our station on the ground.

In midsummer the linden foliage becomes coa.r.s.e and wind-whipped; the soft leaf-substance is attacked by insects that feed upon it; plant lice deface them with patches of honey-dew, and the sticky surfaces catch dust and soot. Riddled and torn, they drop in desultory fas.h.i.+on, their faded yellow not at all like the satisfying gold of beech and hickory leaves.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _See page 31_

THE BLACK WALNUT