Chapter V: Part II: The Nut Trees (2)

The head of this oak is usually narrow and rounded; the branches, short and stout, are inclined to go their own way, giving the tree more of picturesqueness than of symmetry, as age advances. Sometimes the dome is broad and rounded like that of a white oak, and in the woods, where competition is keen, the trunk may reach one hundred and fifty feet in height.

The red oak leaf is large, smooth, rather thin, its oval broken by triangular sinuses and forward-aiming lobes, that end in bristly points. The blade is broadest between the apex and the middle, where the two largest lobes are. No oak has leaves more variable than this.

Under the dark brown, close-knit bark of a full-grown red oak tree is a reddish layer that shows in the furrows. The twigs and leaf-stems are red. A flush of pink covers the opening leaves, and they are lined with white down which is soon shed.

The bloom is very abundant and conspicuous, the fringe-like pollen-bearing aments four or five inches long, drooping from the twigs in clusters, when the leaves are half-grown in May.

The acorns of the red oak are large, and set in shallow saucers, with incurving rims. Few creatures taste their bitter white kernels.

=The Willow Oak=

_Q. Phellos_, Linn.

The willow oak has long, narrow, pointed leaves that suggest a willow, and not at all an oak. The supple twigs, too, are willow-like, and the tree is a lover of the waterside. But there is the acorn, seated in a shallow, scaly cup, like a pin oak's. There is no denying the tree's family connections.

A southern tree, deservedly popular in cities for shade and ornamental planting, it is nevertheless hardy in Philadelphia and New York; and a good little specimen seems to thrive in Boston, in the Arnold Arboretum. As a lumber tree, the species is unimportant.

=The Shingle, or Laurel, Oak=

_Q. imbricaria_, Michx.

The shingle or laurel oak may be met in any woodland from Pennsylvania to Nebraska, and south to Georgia and Arkansas. It may be large or small; a well-grown specimen reaches sixty feet, with a broad, pyramidal, open head.

The chief beauty of the tree, at any season, is the foliage mass--dark, lustrous, pale lined, the margin usually unbroken by any indentations. In autumn the yellow, channelled midribs turn red, and all the blades to purplish crimson, and this color stays a long time. 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 massive, horizontal branches from short, buttressed 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 altitude 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_, NA(C)e.

The live oak (_Q. agrifolia_, NA(C)e.) 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 Francisco Bay. The giant oaks of the University campus at Berkeley stretch out ponderous arms, in wayward fashion, 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 woodpeckers, 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, furnishing 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 shiny 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-cluster, pointed like a candle flame. (_See illustration, 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 shiny, 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 mass 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 prickly 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 sturdy 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 sturdy 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 Francisco Bay, 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 BASSWOODS

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 basswood flowers has long been a home remedy for indigestion, nervousness, coughs, and hoarseness. Experiments in Germany have successfully extracted a table oil from the seed-balls. 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 quantities of nectar, and honey made near linden forests is unsurpassed in delicacy of flavor.

About the time of Louis XIV, the French fashion arose of planting avenues to lindens, where horse-chestnuts had formerly been the favorite tree. The fashion 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 clusters, winged with a pale blade that lightens the foliage mass. 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 Basswood=

_Tilia Americana_, Linn.

The American linden or basswood 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 illustration, 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 clustered 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 shingles 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 coarse 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 fashion, their faded yellow not at all like the satisfying gold of beech and hickory leaves.

THE BLACK WALNUT

The young shoots are velvety and aromatic. The pistillate
flowers, in groups of 3 to 5, are on terminal spikes]

SHAGBARK HICKORY IS KNOWN AND NAMED BY ITS LOOSE,
STRIPPING BARK]

The flight of basswood seeds on their wing-like blades goes on throughout the winter. This alone would account for the fact that basswoods greatly outnumbered all other trees in the virgin forests of the Ohio Valley. The seeds are not the tree's sole dependence. Suckers grow up about the stump of a tree the lumberman has taken, or the lightning has stricken. Any twig is likely to strike root, and any cutting made from a root as well.

The finest specimen I know grew from a walking-stick cut in the woods and thrust into the ground, by a mere chance, when the rambler reached home. It is the roof tree of a mansion, tall enough to waft its fragrance into the third-story windows, and to reach high above the chimney pots.

The range of this tree extends from New Brunswick to Dakota and south to Virginia and Texas. Its wood is used for carriage bodies, furniture, cooperage, paper pulp, charcoal, and fuel.

=The Bee Tree, or White Basswood=

_T. heterophylla_, Vent.

The bee tree or white basswood of the South has narrower leaves than the species just described, and they vary in form and size; but always have linings of fine, silvery down, and the fruits are fuzzy. A wonderful, dazzling play of white, pale green, and deeper shades is seen when one of these trees flutters its leaf mass against a background, sombre with hemlocks and an undergrowth of rhododendron. The favorite haunts of this species are the sides of mountain streams. Wild bees store their hoard of honey in the hollow trunks of old trees; and it is the favorite holiday of many country folk to locate these natural hives and despoil them. In order to do this the tree must come down, and the revenge of the outraged swarm is sometimes a high price to pay for the stolen sweets.

This linden is found from Ithaca, New York, southward along the Appalachian Mountains to northern Alabama, and westward into Illinois and Tennessee. It is best and most abundant in the mountains of eastern Tennessee and North Carolina, at a considerable altitude.

=The Downy Basswood=

_T. pubescens_, Ait.

The downy basswood has leaves that are green on both sides, but its young shoots and leaf-linings are coated with rusty hairs. It is a miniature throughout of the American basswood, except that the blade that bears the flower-cluster is rounded at its base, while the others taper narrowly to the short stem. This species occurs on Long Island, and is sparingly seen along the coast from the Carolinas to Texas.

=The Common Lime=

_T. vulgaris_

"Unter den Linden," the famous avenue in Berlin, is planted with the small-leaved common lime of Europe, beside which the American basswood is a coarse-looking tree. Very disappointing docked trees they are, along this thoroughfare; for city streets are never places where a tree can reach its best estate. In the rural sections of France and Germany this tree reaches noble stature and great age.

Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, had his name from a fine linden tree, when his peasant father rose to the dignity of a surname. "Linn" is the Swedish word for linden. "Carl Linne," meaning "Charles of the linden tree," it was at first when he played as a boy in the shadow of its great branches. "Carolus Linnaeus" he became when he was appointed professor of the university at Upsala, and through all time since.

Gerarde discourses quaintly upon the linden tree in his "Grete Herball" published in England in 1597. "The male tree," he says, "is to me unknown." We smile at his notion that there are male and female trees in this family, but we wonder at the accuracy of observation evinced by one who lived and wrote before the science of botany had any existence. Evidently Master Gerarde had a good pair of eyes, and he has well expressed the things he saw. I quote a paragraph:

"The female line, or linden tree waxeth very great and thicke, spreading forth its branches wide and fare abroad, being a tree which yieldeth a most pleasant shadow, under and within whose boughs may be made brave summer houses and banqueting arbors, because the more that it is surcharged with weight of timber and such like, the better it doth flourish. The bark is brownish, very smooth and plaine on the outside, but that which is next to the timber is white, moist and tough, serving very well for ropes, trases and halters. The timber is whitish, plaine, and without knots; yea, very soft and gentle in the cutting and handling. The leaves are smooth, greene, shining and large, somewhat snipt or toothed about the edges: the floures are little, whitish, of a good savour, and very many in number; growing clustered together from out of the middle of the leaf: out of which proceedeth a small whitish long narrow leafe: after the floures succeed cornered sharp pointed nuts, of the bignesse of hasell nuts. This tree seemeth to be a kinde of elme, and the people of Essex (whereas great plenty groweth by the waysides) do call it broad-leafed elme."