American Forest Trees Part 35

Botanists prefer to call this tree broadleaf maple. The name is not inappropriate, as its extraordinarily broad leaves const.i.tute the most striking feature of the tree where it stands in the woods. The leaf is usually wider than it is long. Some exceed a foot in both measurements.

Bigleaf maple is not an uncommon name for the tree in Oregon, where it attains its highest development in damp valleys where the soil is good.

The name white maple is not particularly descriptive of any feature of the tree, though the name is applied in both Oregon and Was.h.i.+ngton. In California it is known simply as maple. There is small likelihood in that region that it will be confused with any other member of the maple household; nor is there much danger of such a thing in any part of the Pacific coast, for, though four species of maple occur there, no one of them bears close enough resemblance to this one to be mistaken for it.

The Oregon maple's range north and south covers twenty degrees of lat.i.tude. In that particular it is not much surpa.s.sed, if surpa.s.sed at all, by any maple of this country. Its northern limit lies in Alaska, its southern close to the Mexican boundary, in San Diego county, California. Its range east and west is restricted. It has a width of about one hundred and fifty miles in California, where it grows from the coast to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. An alt.i.tude of 5,600 feet appears to be the limit of its range upward. It attains alt.i.tudes above 5,000 feet at several points in the Sierra Nevada range.

It descends nearly to sea level. Its geographical range is similar to the ranges of several other Pacific coast species which occupy long ribbons of territory stretching north and south parallel with the coast of the Pacific ocean.

This maple's leaves change to a clear reddish-yellow before falling.

Flowers appear after the leaves are grown, and the seeds ripen late in autumn. Some of them hang until late in winter, but the habit varies in different parts of the range, as is natural in view of its great extension north and south. The trees which stand in open ground are very abundant seeders, but those in dense stands produce sparingly, in that particular following the habit of most trees. This maple often grows in dense, nearly pure stands in Oregon and Was.h.i.+ngton where soil and other conditions are favorable.

The sizes and forms of Oregon maple vary greatly. John Muir spoke of forests whose trees were eighty or one hundred feet high, so dense with leaves and so abundantly supplied with branches that moss and ferns formed a canopy with foliage and limbs high over head, like an aerial garden; while George B. Sudworth described it in certain situations as a short-stemmed, crooked tree from twenty-five to thirty feet high and under a foot in diameter.

This maple has been called the most valuable hardwood of the Pacific coast, but that claim is made also for other trees. Some persons rate it with the hard maple of the East, in properties which commend it for use.

It is doubtful if the claim can be substantiated. According to Sargent's figures for strength, stiffness, weight, and fuel value, it lacks much of equalling the eastern tree. It is twelve pounds per cubic foot lighter; has not three-fourths the fuel value; and is little more than half as strong or as stiff. The comparison is more in favor of the western tree when color of wood and appearance of grain are considered.

The wood is light brown with pale tint of red. The rings of annual growth are tolerably distinct, with a thin, dark line separating the summerwood of one year from the springwood of the next. The pores are scattered with fair evenness in all parts of the ring. They are small and numerous. The medullary rays are thin and abundant. In quarter-sawed wood they show much the same as in hard maple, but are rather darker in color. The mirrors are decidedly tinged with brown. The wood is reported poor in resisting decay when in contact with the soil.

The largest use of Oregon maple appears to be for furniture, second, for interior finish, and following these are numerous miscellaneous uses.

Statistics of the cut of this wood, as shown by sawmill reports, are unsatisfactory. Census returns include it with all other maples of the country, without figures for species. The cut of maple for all the western states seems too small to give this wood justice. The amount reported used in Was.h.i.+ngton, Oregon, and California exceeds the total reported sawmill cut in the West.

Oregon maple is an important handlewood. The smooth grain appeals to broom makers. The wood is made into ax handles, but for that use it is much below hickory, or even hard maple or white oak. It is converted into pulleys in Was.h.i.+ngton, also into saddle trees, and tent toggles.

Boat makers employ it for finish material, in which capacity it fills the same place, and must meet the same requirements as in interior finish for houses. Curly or wavy wood is occasionally found and this is worked into finish and also into furniture. The figure is as handsome as in eastern maple, but birdseye is less frequent. Counter tops for stores and bar tops for saloons are sometimes made of figured maple. It is seen also in grill work and show cases, but in order to show the figured wood to the best advantage it should be worked in flat surfaces.

Oregon maple is converted into flooring of the ordinary tongued and grooved kind, and also into parquet flooring. Rotary veneers are made into boxes and baskets. Solid logs are turned for rollers of various sizes and kinds. Mill yards use them for offbearing lumber, and house movers find them about the best local material to be had. This maple has been successfully stained in imitation of mahogany, and is said to pa.s.s satisfactory tests where the color is the princ.i.p.al consideration.

The amount of this species available in the Northwest is not definitely known, but it is a relatively scarce wood. No attention has ever been given to planting it as a commercial proposition. It is not of very rapid growth, and unless it is in dense stands, it develops a short trunk and large crown. It is better suited for shade and ornament, and is to be seen as a street tree in some western towns. It does not flourish in the eastern states, but has found the climate of western Europe more congenial and is occasionally found as an ornamental tree there.

The relative importance of this maple in the state of Was.h.i.+ngton is indicated by the amount used annually compared with certain other hardwoods. In 1911 the consumption of willow was 2,000 feet, vine maple 10,000, Oregon ash 58,000, Oregon oak 197,000, western birch 315,000, Oregon maple 932,500, red alder 1,881,500, and black cottonwood 32,572,200.

VINE MAPLE (_Acer circinatum_) is sometimes called mountain maple, though the name is misleading. It may grow among mountains, but always near streams. It is found at various alt.i.tudes from near sea level to 5,000 feet above. It ranges from the coast region of British Columbia southward through Was.h.i.+ngton and Oregon to Mendocino county, California.

This tree is more useful than might be inferred from its name, or even from a study of it in its usual form. Only an occasional tree is good for the wood user. A height of twenty feet and a diameter of six inches are above the average. It is called vine maple because of its habit of sprawling on the ground like a vine. The trunk lacks sufficient stiffness to hold it erect. It grows upward to a certain point, then leans over and the branches lie on the ground. Some of them take root and in course of time what was first a single stem becomes a thicket of branches and stems. The winter snow often has much to do with bending the trunk, which appears to have no power to get back to the perpendicular when once bowed down. The damp situation where this tree thrives best, induces a luxuriant growth of moss and mold which help to bury the branches that lie on the ground.

The tree prospers in deep shade. The young leaves are rose red, and in the fall become yellow or scarlet. The fruit is the characteristic maple key. The wing becomes rose-red before falling in autumn. Though this tree is more a curiosity than a lumberman's a.s.set, it is not without value. Handle makers use 10,000 feet of it a year in the state of Was.h.i.+ngton. It is shaved and turned for ax and shovel handles. It has two-thirds the strength and less than half the stiffness of eastern hard maple. The tree grows slowly and the annual rings are very narrow and indistinct. Seventy or eighty years are required to produce a trunk five inches in diameter. The wood is hard, and checks badly in seasoning. The bark is very pale brown--suggesting the color of a potato sprout that has grown in a dark cellar. The Indians liked the wood for fish net bows, though there appears to have been no very good reason why they preferred it to other woods of the region. Its most extensive use at present is as fuel, but it is not particularly sought after. The tree's future is not promising. Under domestication it does not take on its fantastic, moldy, moss-grown form, and its forest growth will never be encouraged by lumbermen.

DWARF MAPLE (_Acer glabrum_) is one of the smallest of the maples, but in a north and south direction its range is equal to that of any other.

Its southern limit is among the canyons of Arizona, and its northern on the coast of Alaska within six or seven degrees of the Arctic circle. It extends to Nebraska, and is found east of the continental divide far north in British America. It reaches its largest size on Vancouver island and on the Blue mountains in Oregon. It here is large enough to make small sawlogs, but it is usually shrubby in other parts of its range. It grows from sea level in Alaska to 9,000 feet alt.i.tude among the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. Two forms of leaf occur. One is three-lobed; the other is a compound leaf, the lobes having formed separate leaves. The bright upper surface of the leaf gives the species its botanical name. The seeds have large, wide wings. It cannot be ascertained that the wood of this maple has ever been used for anything.

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BOX ELDER

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BOX ELDER

(_Acer Negundo_)

Attempts to ascertain the meaning of the word _negundo_ which botanists apply to this species have not been crowned with entire success. It is known to be a word in the Malayalam language of the Malabar coast of India, and is there applied to a tree, apparently referring to a peculiar form of leaf. The name was transferred to the box elder by Moench, and has been generally adopted by botanists, although at least seven other scientific names have been given the tree. It bears ten or more English names in different regions. Among these names are ash-leaved maple, known from Ma.s.sachusetts to Montana and Texas; cut-leaved maple in Colorado; three-leaved maple in Pennsylvania; black ash in Tennessee; stinking ash in South Carolina; sugar ash in Florida; water ash in the Dakotas; and box elder wherever it grows.

The tree's geographical range does not fall much short of 3,000,000 square miles, and is equalled by few species of this country. It extends from New England across Canada to Alberta, thence to Arizona, and includes practically all the United States east and south of those lines. It thrives in hot and cold climates, and high and low elevations; in regions of much rain, and in those with little. That fact has been turned to account by tree planters, particularly in the years when the western plains were being settled by homesteaders. The box elder was the chief tree on many a timber claim where the letter of the law rather than the spirit was carried out. It afforded the earliest protection against scorching summer sun and the keen winds of winter about many a frontiersman's cabin on the plains. It was the earliest street tree in many western towns. The people planted it because they knew it would grow, and they were not so sure of a good many other trees. Green ash was often its companion in pioneer plantings on the plains. Many towns which set box elders along the streets when they did not know of anything better, still have the trees, though they would willingly exchange them for something else. They are not ideal street and park trees; do not produce shapely trunks and crowns; and drop leaves all summer and seeds all winter. The tree is reputed to be short lived, yet some of those planted a generation or two ago show no symptoms of decline.

There is no good reason why this tree should be called an elder, or an ash, except that its leaves are compound. If that is a reason, it might be called a hickory or a walnut, since they bear compound leaves. It is clearly a maple. Its fruit shows it to be so, and Indians of the far Northwest who had no other maple, formerly manufactured sugar from this tree, collecting the sap in wood or bark troughs and boiling it with hot stones.

The compound leaf does not necessarily take it out of the maple group.

It requires no great exercise of imagination to understand how a lobed leaf, by deepening the sinuses between the lobes, might become a compound leaf in the process of evolution. There may be no visible evidence that the box elder's leaf reached its present form by that process, but there is another maple which is at the present time developing a compound leaf in that way, or seems to be doing so. It is the dwarf maple (_Acer glabrum_) of the Northwest coast. Lobed leaves and compound leaves may occur on the same tree.

The seeds of box elder resemble those of other maples. They ripen in the fall, and are blown off by wind, few at a time, during several months.

The trees are from fifty to seventy feet high, and from one and a half to three feet in diameter. The trunk is apt to divide near the ground in several large branches, and is not of good form for sawlogs, being often crooked as well as short. The small branches, particularly those less than a year old, are usually nearly as green as the leaves. This fact may a.s.sist in identifying the tree when the leaves are off. The bark bears more resemblance to ash and ba.s.swood than to maple.

The wood is lightest of the maples. It weighs less than twenty-seven pounds to the cubic foot; has less than half the strength and about forty per cent of the stiffness of sugar maple; and is much inferior to it in most mechanical properties. It is equal, if not superior to most maples in whiteness. The pores are small, numerous, and scattered through all parts of the growth ring, as is characteristic of maple wood. The tree grows rapidly. The summerwood is a thin, dark line, separating one annual ring from another. The medullary rays are many and obscure, but when wood is sawed or split along a radial line, they are easily seen, and show the true maple l.u.s.ter.

The uses of box elder are similar to those of soft maple. The wood is seldom reported under its own name. In fact, an examination of wood-using reports of various states, shows that in only two states, Michigan and Texas, has box elder been listed separately. Its uses in the former state were for boxes, crates, flooring, handles, woodenware, and interior finish, while in Texas it was made into furniture. The tree is of commercial size in at least thirty states, and is cut and marketed in all of them. Tests of the wood for pulp are said to be satisfactory, and it finds its way in rather large amounts to cooper shops where it is made into slack barrels. It is cut as acid wood along with other maples, beech, and birch, and is converted into charcoal and other products of distillation.

It may be expected that box elder will exist in the United States as long as any other forest tree remains. It is willing to be crowded off good land into low places, which are almost swamps, and there it grows free from disturbance; but if given the opportunity it will appropriate the most fertile soil within reach of it; and by scattering seeds during four or five months of the year, it manages to do much effective planting.

CALIFORNIA BOX ELDER (_Acer negundo californic.u.m_) is a variety of box elder, and not a separate species. As the name implies, it is a California tree, and it occurs in the valleys and among the Coast Range mountains from the lower Sacramento valley to the western slopes of the San Bernardino mountains. The tree is from twenty to fifty feet high and from ten to thirty inches in diameter. The leaves and young twigs are hairy, in that respect differing from the eastern box elder. The seeds are scattered during winter. The wood is very pale lemon-yellow or creamy-white, the heart and sapwood hardly distinguishable. The wood is soft and brittle, but is suited to the same purposes as the eastern box elder. No reports of its uses appear to have been made. It is found on the borders of streams and in the bottoms of moist canyons. It is believed to be a short-lived tree.

STRIPED MAPLE (_Acer pennsylvanic.u.m_) is usually thirty or forty feet high, and eight or ten inches in diameter. Its range extends from Quebec to northern Georgia, westward to Minnesota, and is of largest size on the slopes of Big Smoky mountains of Tennessee, and the Blue Ridge in North and South Carolina. It grows best in shade, but maintains itself in open ground; is generally shrubby in the northern part of its range. The name refers to the bark. The stripes are longitudinal and are caused by the parting of the outer bark and the exposure to view of the lighter colored inner layers. The bark of small trees is greenish, but later in life the color is darker, and the stripes largely disappear. Among its names are moosewood, so called because it is good browse for moose and other deer; goosefoot maple, a reference to the form of the leaf; whistlewood, an allusion to the ease with which the bark slips from young branches in spring when boys with jack-knives are on the search for whistle material.

The names mountain alder and striped dogwood are based on misunderstanding of the tree's family relations.

The young leaves are rose colored when they unfold, and when full grown are six inches wide. The wood is light and soft, and light brown in color, the thick sapwood lighter. The wood is liable to contain small brown pith flecks, which in longitudinal sections appear as brown streaks an inch or less in length and as thick as a pin, and in cross section they are brown dots. They are not natural to the wood but are caused by the larvae of certain moths which burrow into the cambium layer, or soft inner bark, and excavate narrow galleries up and down the trunk. The galleries afterwards fill with dark material. The insects sometimes attack other maples, the birches, service, and other trees. The wood of striped maple is little used, because of the small size of the trees. The species is planted for ornament in this country and Europe.

BLACK MAPLE (_Acer nigrum_) has been by some considered a variety of sugar or hard maple, and by others a separate species. It is as large as the sugar maple and its range is much the same, but it is more abundant in the western part of its range than in the East. The name refers to the color of the bark of old trunks. If the name had considered the bark of young twigs it would have been yellow or orange maple, because the twigs are of that color. In summer the peculiar drooping posture of the leaves calls attention to this tree. However, the bark, twigs, and leaves combined are not sufficient to set it apart, in the eyes of most people, for it generally pa.s.ses without question as sugar maple, even when it stands side by side with that tree. It yields sugar abundantly. The wood is a little heavier than that of sugar maple, but the difference cannot be noticed except when the two woods are weighed.

Their uses are the same. No maker of furniture, flooring, or finish ever protests against black maple. The tree generally prefers lower and damper ground than sugar maple, and is often found along streams.

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SERVICEBERRY

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SERVICEBERRY

(_Amelanchier Canadensis_)

This tree will never be other than a minor species in the United States, but it is not a worthless member of the forest. It belongs to the rose family, and therefore is near akin to the haws, thorns, and crabapples.

The genus is found in Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as in the United States. Two tree species occur in this country, or, according to some botanists, three, one west of the Rocky Mountains, two east.