BYL.H.CR1NDON,

THE TREES OF OLD ENGLAND.

THE

TREES OF OLD ENGLAND :

SKETCHES

ASPECTS, ASSOCIATIONS, AND USES OF THOSE WHICH

CONSTITUTE THE FORESTS, AND GIVE EFFECT TO

THE SCENERY OF OUR NATIVE COUNTRY.

BY

LEO H. GEINDON,

Lecturer on So'any at the Royal School of Medicine, Manchester.

Author of "Life, its Nature, Varieties, and Phenomena;"' "British and Garden Botany;
" The Little Things of Nature," &c., &c.

LONDON :

F. PITMAN, 20, PATERNOSTER ROW, B.C.
1868.

PREFACE.

THE following chapters are reprinted verbatim f^n a Magazine which
has for its chief aim the diffusion of moral and sacred truth, and is
always glad to have this done through the medium, of illustrations
drawn from NATUEE, — that second Book of God, which is everywhere
a commentary upon the first and greatest. They make not the
slightest pretension to a scientific character, seeking, like their fore-
runner on the "Little Things of Nature," simply to set forth, in a
plain and easy manner, some few of the beautiful and refreshing
truths connected with the foresters of Old England. If received in
the kindly spirit which it is hoped they may aid in diffusing and
encouraging, they may probably be followed by a second series.

Bumford- street, Manchester,

January, 1868.

2091 1 50

CONTENTS.

PAGE

General Qualities and Recommendations of Trees 1

Structure of Trees , .. 3

The Oak 6

The Pine 19

The Beech 29

The Elm 37

The Lime 45 '

The Poplar and the Willow .. 55

The Yew 64

The Maple and the Sycamore 69

The Birch and the Alder 77

The Ash 85

The Mountain- Ash 91

The Chesnut 92

Summary of smaller Trees 94

NOTE AND ERRATUM.

Page 27, end. The specimen referred to was destroyed daring the calamitous fire

which took place December 30th, 1866.
Page 65, line 14. For chalcedony, read ruby.

THE TREES OF OLD ENGLAND.

TREES constitute an order of nobility ; for nature has its aristocracy
as well as mankind. If there be "ancient and noble" families in a
nation or a community, — still older, and inheriting yet more dignity, are
the families of living things by which man is encircled. He can claim
no honour on the score of descent or genealogy that is not already
merited by some patrician of the world of plants ; and this not so
much because Trees are the same to-day that they were in the begin-
ning, as by reason of their absolute excellence, their serene and invul-
nerable perfection.

Trees are sanitary agents in the economy of the world we live in.
By the process of "assimilation," which means the abstraction of
carbon from the atmosphere, in order that, in due time, and through
certain vital processes, it may be converted into wood and other vege-
table substances, — by the process of "assimilation," we say, trees,
through the medium of their leaves, preserve the air in a condition fit
for human breathing. Herbaceous vegetation greatly contributes to
this great end ; but the result is mainly referable to arborescent plants,
their size and extent of leaf- surface being so prodigiously large, when
compared with that of the former kind. We little think when we
inhale the fresh air, and quaff it upon the hills, like so much invisible
and aerial wine, that its purity and healthfulness come of the glorious
Trees. But so it is. Nor have we merely the trees of our own
country to think of and be thankful to. The air that we breathe in
England to-day has been purified for us perhaps a thousand miles
away. If the wind blow from the north, we may be grateful to the
Scandinavian birches ; if from the west, it is quite possible that the
magnolias of North America may have helped to strain it ; if from the

1

VALUE OF TREES.

south, were it gifted with language, we might hear a tale of Indian
palms. Every tree in nature makes itself felt in the good it does the
air, — a beautiful return for the new loveliness it receives when its
branches and foliage are stirred and fluttered by the breeze.

Trees supply man with every species of useful article, whether of
nourishment, or of clothing, or of medicine, and with timber whereof to
construct dwellings, and to build ships, so that even the sea shall be a
highway. Not that any single kind is of utility so multiform. Fruits
are supplied by some, as the olive and the fig, the coco-nut and the
date ; the delicate inner bark of the paper-mulberry furnishes the inha-
bitants of the South Sea Islands with materials for their simple apparel ;
medicines are afforded by innumerable species, and "wood" and
"tree" are words almost synonymous. It would be foolish and pre-
sumptuous to say that man could not exist without trees, because, were
there no such productions in existence, the infinite Benevolence would
supply his wants through some other medium. But constituted as man
is, and established as Trees and their functions and properties are,
it is plain that the present exquisite order and harmony of things in
respect to man's welfare, are most intimately and inseparably identified
with Trees. Thus, that when we would consider man and his privi-
leges, the amenities and the enjoyments that encircle life, the comforts
and the ornaments of his home, we cannot possibly do so, if we would
give all things their fair place, without keeping Trees also constantly
before the mind.

Trees are indispensable to the picturesque. A great mountain, or
an extended plain, may have grandeur, though devoid of trees ; and it
is easy to conceive of richly-cultivated valleys, covered with crops of
corn, or unrolling infinite reaches of green pasture, and at the same
time without a tree, except a little one here and there, just sufficient to
serve as a landmark. But in the absence of trees, none of these places
could be picturesque, in the full and proper sense of the word. The
trees break the outlines ; they give variety of colours, movement also,
and shadows, and touch the imagination with agreeable sense of fruit-
fulness; or if they be timber and forest-trees, with the idea of noble-
ness and grandeur. They are to the landscape what living and moving
people are to the street, or to the interior of the hall or temple — an
element that may be dispensed with, but at the expense of the finest
and most impressive influences. We may be overpowered by the stern
and solemn grandeur of a treeless waste, especially if it be composed
of mountains ; and the sensation is one that gives a variety not unac-

LANGUAGE OF TREES. 8

ceptable to our experiences of external nature ; but the scenes that
come home most closely to our sympathies, and that have a perennial
hold, are those that are enriched by the abundance of their trees.

Poetry finds in trees no little of its sustenance. From the most
ancient poets downwards, all verses that have immortality in them,
abound more or less with allusions to trees, finding in them either
images for the events — both glad and sorrowful — of human life, or
emblems, in their higher nature, of what pertains to the heart and mind.
The "Language of Flowers" would be incomplete did it not include
the "Language of Trees," since trees are adapted, by their original
and inalienable constitution, to serve as metaphors for almost every-
thing great and good, and wise and beautiful, in human nature.
Hence the countless citations of trees in Holy Writ, wherein the
cedar and the fir, the vine and the olive, the palm and the fig, are a
portion of the ordinary vocabulary — not mentioned arbitrarily, or as
a sportive act of the fancy, but on account of their being the absolute
representatives and pictured forms in the temporal world of the high
and sacred realities that belong to the invisible and eternal.

Because of these admirable attributes and characters of Trees, we
purpose in this series of papers to examine somewhat closely into their
nature and life -history, marking out the features and physiognomy of
such kinds as belong to our own island, and inquiring into the
specialities that give them their several places in art and poetry. For
a tree is not merely an oak, or an ash, or an elm. It has qualities
for the imagination and the heart, moving men in its own way, and
vindicating prerogatives that are peculiar to it. The mind of the man
who in his youth was accustomed to contemplate oaks, grows up very '
differently from that of him whose boyhood was spent near pines and
firs. Where evergreen trees prevail, and are a daily spectacle, a very
different frame of mind is induced compared with that which exists
where the branches are leafless throughout the winter. As the stars
and planets, from the inaccessible altitude of their sweet lustre, make
the heart great by the contemplation of them ; so, after the same
manner, imposing and magnificent trees, whose branches, when we go
beneath, seem the clouds of a green heaven,*have a power of ennobling
and elevating the soul, such as all who have lived among them are
more or less clearly conscious of, and which is totally unpossessed by
small ones.

In England, the trees are all of the class called " exogenous," that is
to say, they have numerous and spreading branches ; the leaves, when

4 STBUCTURE OF TREES.

held between the eye and the light, are found to be marked in every
portion by a delicate net-work of green lines, technically called the
"veins"; and upon the outside of the trunk there is bark, which can
be removed like the peel of an orange. When one of these exogenous
or branching trees is cut down, or if a branch be lopped off, the exposed
surface, on being polished horizontally, shows elegant concentric circles,
surrounding a central point, which in young parts of the tree indicates
a column of living pith. The concentric circles announce the age of
the tree or branch, which usually is just as many years old in that part
as there are rings. In its earliest stage, or while only in its first season
of growth, the stem of the seedling tree consists only of pith and an
enclosing skin. Woody matter is gradually prepared, and this becomes
deposited in a layer between the pith and the skin, which latter now
assumes the solidity of bark ; and should the stem be cut through at
Christmas, or at the end of its first year, the first of these annual

Section of Exogenous Stem.

rings will be plainly visible. Every successive year this process is
repeated. With the opening of the leaves in spring (for it is the leaves
that really effect the work) the preparation and deposit of a new layer
of wood is commenced, so that by the close of the second season there
are two layers; by the close of the third season, three layers; and so on
as long as the vital lease of the tree endures. The bark is simul-
taneously renewed, enclosing a larger mass every year. This mode of
growth is prettily illustrated in the spreading of the little wave-circles
upon the surface of still water. Standing on the margin of some lovely
lake or mere, and looking at the blue sky and the white clouds that are
reflected in its clear bosom, how often the fairy spectacle is broken in
an instant by the wing of some light bird that, skimming through the
air, just touches the surface and sweeps onwards. But the effect of
that touch is to cause circle after circle of tiny wavelet to move away
from the spot where the touch was given, and as far as the eye can
reach the beautiful phenomenon is continued. Just like this succession

LONGEVITY OF TREES. 5

of wave-circles is that of the annual wood-circles of a tree, only that
on the water we have but an evanescent effect, while in the tree there
is new substance and solidity. The mode of growth and the phenomena
referred to are denoted by this word " exogenous," which is literally
no more than "expansion outwards."

Very different are the mode of growth and the internal condition of the
trees called "endogenous." These show no distinction of bark, and wood,
and pith ; they are destitute of branches (except in a few instances) ;
and their leaves, which are inconceivably enormous to anyone who has
never seen leaves larger than those of English trees, are produced only
upon the summit of the stern. They are chiefly represented in the
illustrious tropical productions known as palm-trees — those soul-moving
emblems of the south and east, and in England are only seen in large
and costly conservatories, where room can be afforded them to lift
their green pride on high. Even then we only see them as juveniles,
no possible structure of glass being competent to shelter them when
full-grown, except in the case of some of the dwarf kinds.

It is among the exogenous trees, accordingly, that in England
we find our delight. It is these which form the sweet and solitary
* arcades of the forest; that are the homes or the resting-places of
the birds ; that shelter us from the storm, and temper the heat of
the sun ; whose trunks are embossed with tender creepers of green
moss, or hidden by the activity of the innumerable and ubiquitous
ivy; — it is these that are so lovely in their youth, so venerable
and patriarchal in their old age ; these that stand still in quiet dignity
while we talk of four-score as a wonderful life-time, and for their own
part watch the rise and fall even of nations. For the nature of an
exogenous tree being to expand and enlarge externally, there is of course
no physical limit to the diameter it may attain, or to the number and
massiveness of its boughs and branches, or to the multiplication of its
twigs and leaves ; and should the lease of life allowed it in the Divine
economy be considerable, as happens with certain kinds of mimosa, and
with many of the pine and cedar kind, it may go on growing and -•>
enlarging for ages, and after a thousand years be still in the full vigour of
its existence. Hence it is that the grand scriptural image acquires such
richness and force — "As the days of a tree are the days of my people."
Hundreds of trees are standing at this moment in America, some in
California, others in Brazil, that were alive when those words were
written, and with a grasp upon life and the earth that seems to assure
them a period of which they have perhaps no more than passed the

6 THE OAK.

meridian. England possesses multitudes of endogenous plants, though
no endogenous trees. Lilies, grasses, rushes, are all structurally of the
same nature as the palm-trees, and now and then they give us a pretty
prototype of the palm ; but the beau ideal of the endogen, as said
before, belongs to the equinoctial regions. It is a proud and inspiring
thought for us nevertheless, that art and the skill of the gardener allow
us the sight of them. By virtue of our hothouses and conservatories,
we who live in this age are introduced to the vegetation of every part
of the world, without the trouble or risk of departing either long or far
from home. England, which stands midway between extreme cold and
extreme heat, with a surface that embodies in miniature every element
and ingredient, except the volcano, that gives variety and sublimity to
the face of the earth ; — England, through its art and science, is the
EXHIBITION of the whole world. We need but ask for Saloon A, or
Saloon B, and all that the heart can desire is displayed to view.
Kew ; Chatsworth ; if we cross the Tweed, Edinburgh ; and Dublin, if
we make our way to the green isle, show collections of palms, among
other things, that amply inform us as to their wonderful nature. In
these glorious places we see the tropical regions as in a concave mirror
or in a stereoscope, with the added charm that all around us is alive. *

Foremost among British trees, alike in grandeur, utility, length of
life, and amplitude of association, stands the Oak, — that famous
production which even in the days of Homer was a time-honoured
proverb for strength and endurance. " Thou," says one of his heroes
to a man who quailed, " art not made of the oak of ancient story."*
In England this noble tree is found under many different forms, the
contour, the endurance of the foliage, the figure of the leaf and acorn,
varying considerably more than the unobservant of minute particulars
would ever suppose. All the varieties are resolvable, however, into
two principal ones, and these two are so nearly connected by inter-
mediates, that it is probable the oak of old England is after all very
like a human face — presented under innumerable profiles and com-
plexions, but always and everywhere the same good old-fashioned
combination of features that was possessed in the beginning. The two
principal forms are the wavy-leaved oak and the flat-leaved, called res-
pectively by men of science, Quercm pedunculata and Quercus sessiliflora.
The former is distinguished by its remarkably tortuous branches, and
the irregular disposition of the foliage, every leaf lying in a different
plane, and the whole presenting an aspect of great massiveness. Leaf-
stalk there is scarcely any ; the acorns, on the other hand, are borne
* Odyssey xix. 163.

THE OAK.

upon peduncles of several inches in length. Individually, the leaves,
as expressed in the name, have a strong tendency to be wavy in their
surface and outline. The flat-leaved oak differs in its compact form,
and strong disposition to roundness ; the branches are more horizontal,
the leaves lie in parallel planes, and individually are flat, and with
rather long stalks. In spring we may further observe that the leaf-
buds are larger; and in autumn that the acorns are shorter and
broader than in the other, and that they are almost or totally destitute
of peduncles ; if present, the peduncles are stout, not slim and delicate
•as in the wave-leaved. These are distinctions very easily made out.

Oak Leaves.

To trace them is at once an agreeable and instructive occupation for
half an hour, when we go into the country for a day's enjoyment.
Nor does it end in the simple discrimination of two different things ;
for the wave-leaved oak has the reputation of being a more excellent
tree than the other, while the flat-leaved is considered better adapted
to excite ideas of the picturesque. A glorious spectacle is that of the
oak in the month of April, when its amber-tinted buds stud the tree
like so many jewels. They do not open hurriedly, like those of the
sycamore or the horse-chesnut. From first to last, the life of the oak
seems characterised by placidity. It lives so long that it can afford to
be leisurely in all its movements, and at every season alike expresses
dignity and calmness. In a little while, when the young leaves are
half-expanded, come the flowers, though not such flowers as we use for
bouquets. Nature has other ways of fashioning flowers than after the
model of the rose or lily. To note these diverse ways is one of the great

8 THE OAK.

rewards and charms of Botany, — which does not mean calling plants
by Latin names, but exploring the wonderful nature of their various
parts, discovering how exquisitely they are fitted for their several uses
and destinies, comparing one form of leaf or flower with another, and
discerning step by step that nature is all one song, but coming forth in
countless tones, or rather like a grand Oratorio, where we never have
two parts exactly alike, yet everywhere repetition and reverberation to
the ear that knows how to listen. Flowers are not necessarily sump-
tuous, and fragrant, and brilliant-hued in order to be flowers. The idea
of a flower implies simply an elegant mechanism for the production of
seed, and that this be large or small is of no more importance than
that the heavenly teachings should be printed in one kind of type or
another. It is worthy of note also that the great timber-trees of the
north are remarkable, as a rule, for the insignificance of their flowers.
The short-lived vegetation of the field and garden seems decked with
its sweet flower-brightness in compensation. Where our hearts are to
be lifted up in admiration of strength and patriarchal majesty, the
allurement of flowers can be dispensed with.

Those of the oak, as said above, make their appearance cotempo-
raneously with the young leaves, and under two different forms. First,
there are innumerable yellowish tufts and fringes depending from near
the extremities of the twigs ; among them are the tips of the rudiments of
the future acorns, scarcely larger than the head of a pin, and of a deep
red colour. The oak is thus one of the trees in which the distinction of
sex is strongly marked. All plants express, in some way or other, the
omnipresence in organic nature of masculine and feminine. ' But it is
not always palpable to the eye. Some philosophers consider that where
it is most plainly shown, we have a nearer step towards perfection of
structure ; and on this ground they regard the oak and its congeners as far
more noble in the scale of vegetable life even than apple-trees or vines.
Acorns would never be developed from the rudiments in question, were
the tasseled fringes not to cooperate, and contrariwise the tasselled
fringes would yield no acorns. Summer aids the development ; then
comes serene October, and the pretty embossed cups, round as a bubble
upon the water, holding them up awhile, as a young mother holds up
her child, cast them to the earth in kindly largess. But although the
acorns may sprout where they fall, none grow to be even saplings
beneath the shade of the parent. Only those that get carried to a little
distance become oaks. And this planting has been observed to be largely
effected through the instrumentality of squirrels. So beautifully are

THE OAK. 9

the necessities of the various realms of nature harmonized one to the
other. The little quadruped fulfils an instinct proper and needful to
its own existence, and in so doing, contributes to the perpetuation of
the tree.

Eepresentatively — that is, as viewed by the light of poetry, which
means, in turn, by the keenest insight of the mind, that penetrating
below the surface, and beholding the centres of things, brings out their
highest value, that is to say, their Significance — representatively, the
oak is strength, endurance, and dignity, holding the same place among
trees that the lion does among animals, and the eagle among birds.
Hence we find it many times referred to in Scripture, and always in
connection with what is understood to be permanent and enduring, —
as when the tables of the law are described as having been set up against
an oak, to signify that the law was given to last for ever. It would
be a very trifling piece of information for the dignity of Scripture to
communicate, if it were no more than the bare physical fact that the
tables were placed against an oak. Scripture always means something —
it does not simply speak. It is not a book of words, but of ideas,
speaking for all time ; which kind of language results from the facts that
it records being not simply literal but representative. It is literally
true, without doubt, that the tables were placed against an oak; it is
no less true that an oak was chosen because of its symbolic meaning
for all ages. The poetical character of the oak is beautifully acknow-
ledged again in the time-honoured allusion to the defenders of our
country as " hearts-of-oak." No one disputes the fact that our sailors
are made of this capital material; yet how absurd the statement if
taken in any other light than that of poetry ! This shows that although
much which holds the form and outward show of poetry may be
unmeaning and foolish, the inmost and true spirit of poetry finds a
response in universal human nature, and that its genuine language
will ever bear interpreting.

The oak is not only a tree ; it is a garden and a country ; for living
things innumerable find their homes, and security, either among the
branches or upon some portion of the surface. Birds, insects, epiphytic
plants, are identified with the natural history of the oak to the number
probably of several hundreds ; so that to study the inmates of an oak-
tree, is literally like exploring the streets and squares of a populous
town, and taking a census of the occupations of the inhabitants. There
is no special or particular bird found only or chiefly amid the foliage,
nor indeed are birds ordinarily found in definite kinds of trees ; only

2

10 THE OAK.

now and then, as in the case of the crossbill and the fir, do we find any
direct consociation. For trees are to birds what the ocean is to the
nations of earth, free to the visits of all in turn, and witnessing, every-
day, new arrivals and new departures. The oak, however, is emphati-
cally of this nature, and the absence of any particular visitant renders
the grand old hospitality of the oak to the feathered tribes even more
remarkable, perhaps, than did any particular species of bird show a
preference for it. In the welcome it extends to them, we see over again
why the oak should be the king of trees, for herein it corresponds with
the princes and patricians of human nature, who are the men that
possess hospitable minds, giving kindly hearing to all ideas, and a
welcome to everything that may hold within it the soul and seed of
truth. The idea and speculations, the theories and hypotheses, that
float about the atmosphere of human intellectual life, are to the little
world of man just what the birds are to the physical atmosphere ; the
wise man gives a courteous ear to all, and leaves it to fools to reject
and condemn before they have listened. Nothing is ever got by shutting
one's self up in a creed. It is better to have an excess of faith than too
little. The Evil One likes no intrenchment better than that which he
finds in the incredulities of pride and ignorance.

Insects are to the oak a supplement so enormous, that were the
tree to be blotted out, the entomologist would weep. Those lovely
creatures that sail on painted pinions, the butterflies, in many kinds ;
beetles, and a multitude of little creeping things that none but the
enthusiast is aware of, flock to it, and abide or lodge upon it ; and
when an oak-tree is felled, it is an earthquake to them. To the casual
observer this wonderful insect-population is of necessity not obvious.
But no one can help noticing the certificate and result of its presence.
We have it in the odd productions termed oak-apples ; also in galls, and
in those beautiful yellowish-rusty spangles which in autumn crowd the
under-surfaces of the leaves, and look like the "fairies' money" of a
fern. Oak-apples, the most conspicuous and familiar of these adventi-
tious productions, have nothing in them, as was once supposed, of the
nature of fruit. They receive their name simply from the rude resem-
blance they bear in colour and figure to the juicy produce of the
orchard, and essentially are nothing more than masses of extravasated
sap, dried and consolidated by exposure to the atmosphere. They
originate in the instinctive actions of a little insect, which punctures
the bark or skin, usually selecting a bud, and deposits her eggs in the
wound ; in consequence of this, some peculiar and abnormal vital action

THE OAK.

11

is set up, which causes the sap that flows towards the wounded part to
ooze out, and in due time to form a globular lump, the eggs lying snug
in the interior. Soon after Midsummer the eggs are hatched, and upon
tearing open one of the so-called apples, the white grubs may be dis-
cerned. Eventually they become winged creatures ; they force their
way to the exterior, and fly away. So wonderful are the " homes
made without hands!" A great and fascinating volume might be
written upon such abodes of creatures. The splendid ingenuities which
man has brought to bear on his dwellings have all been anticipated by
races of beings to whom art and science are unknown. It is grand, in
truth, to contemplate arches and columns, porticos and noble windows,
to say nothing of the countless contrivances intended to promote
domestic convenience and comfort ; but nowhere is the splendid instinct
of self-protection, which in man, enriched by intellect, flowers forth in
its highest form in architecture, more beautifully and exquisitely displayed
than in the methods adopted by insects to secure the same important
end. It has, moreover, the special wonder about it, of being exercised
on such indifferent, and as it would seem at first sight, such insufficient
materials. Marble and granite, metal and timber, are their own assu-
rance of solidity and durableness ; the insect works on substances than
which there are none in nature more soft and tender.

Galls, in their various kinds, are of precisely similar origin. So, in
a word, are galls of every description, and upon whatever species of tree
they may occur. When young, they often resemble cherries, and one
sort, from this circumstance, has been supposed to be the famous
" apple of Sodom," fair to behold, but turning on the lips to dust and
ashes. Later and more scientific investigation has shown this to be
an error, but it is one perfectly natural to have been fallen into, since
the appearance is tempting, and Palestine and the adjacent countries
produce not only oaks, but gall-insects and galls. It is from Smyrna
that a large portion of the galls used in the manufacture of ink are
imported. Our English ones would answer the same purpose, but not
so well, nor are they produced in England in sufficient quantity to
make it worth while to collect them. It would be matter of regret
if they were so produced, because the tree must needs suffer from the
less of so much sap as is needed to form them ; and in England, though
we have plenty of oaks, we require them for other purposes. One kind
of oak-gall is produced in clusters that resemble a thin bunch of red
currants ; another is like a little brown artichoke, being formed from a
leaf-bud which has had its legitimate growth spoiled by the operation

12

THE OAK.

of the insect, and opens its tiny leaves prematurely, and as simple
brown scales. Least of all, but quite as pretty as the oak-apple itself,
are the " oak-spangles" strewed on the under-surface of the leaves, and
which bear, as just now said, no distant likeness to the circular mounds
of fructification of such ferns as the common golden-dotted polypody of
every hedgebank. A single oak-leaf, jewelled by these beautiful little
growths, and shown to an inexperienced observer, might and would be
taken for a genuine fern-frond, so strange is the similitude. But a near
view at once discloses the difference. While the spangle of the fern con-
sists of a heap of minute boxes of a rich gold-colour, every one of them
bursting when mature, and discharging innumerable atoms of "fern-

Oak- Spangles. Ivy.

seed," the spangle of the oak-leaf is a crowd of little greenish or reddish
hairs, and seems as if cut out of a piece of velvet such as might have
been worn by Titania. It consists, in fact, of the same kind of sub-
stance as the oak-apple, but disposed in a different form, the insect
that gave the impulse being a different one. Not the least extra-
ordinary fact in this strange history is, that out of the same material,
the simple sap of the tree, should arise things so unlike as the oalr-
apple and the oak- spangle, and that the difference should be referable
to the diverse influence of a couple of flies !

But it is in the plants that take up their residence on the oak that we
see its most beautiful occupants. First there is that glorious old evergreen

THE OAK. 13

the ivy, which, beginning its career like a little centipede, creeps slowly
and tenderly up the surface, making sure of its wiry footing at every
step, and decks the massive trunk with sweet wandering and zig-zag
sprays of green, variegated, if they get light enough, with pretty and
unaccustomed hues. While young, and until quite among the branches,
the leaves are angular. There are no flowers, and perhaps none ever
appear, for the ivy is peculiar in this respect, unconcerned to bloom so
long as it has anything to cling to, and producing its flowers only at
the very extremities of its growth, where they roll out from the sup-
porting boughs of the tree, and the leaves become oval and pointed.
This is more remarkable when ivy clambers up some ancient building,
a castle, or the relics of some roofless abbey ; but it shows enough in
the case of trees, if the plant be of sufficient age. There is something
peculiarly fine in the spectacle of a venerable tree with its encircling
ivy. At every season of the year ivy gives an air of richness ; the gloss
of the leaves, the easy and graceful swing of the masses of foliage, the
chiar* oscuro caused by the long petioles, and above all, the pleasing
sense of the stay and security which it affords, — at every season of the
year these are present to the eye and mind, and render a pilgrimage
into the forest one of those animating poems which nature is ever ready
to recite to us. Bracing up the old tree with its friendly clamps, so
far from being, as many suppose, an enemy, it is in reality a protection ;
and when we see leafless and withered boughs rising above its verdure,
like gigantic antlers, it is not because of the ivy, but from inanition.
Still less is the ivy a parasite, as often imagined. It is not even an
epiphyte. To be a parasite, a plant must send sucker-like roots into
the very substance of its victim, and draw from it all that portion of its
sustenance which other plants are accustomed to derive from the soil by
means of genuine roots. Ivy does not do this. Although attaching itself
to the bark of the tree by ten thousand little holdfasts, it has its roots
in the earth below, and from the earth it derives its nourishment ; and
if the stem be severed, it will die like any other plant, unless, as has
happened in some rare instances, it can manage to sustain life by
absorption from the atmosphere. For this reason also, ivy is not, as
we say, even an epiphyte, an epiphyte being a plant that simply rests
upon the branch of another, as a bird builds its nest, and that lives
upon the decaying matter that accumulates around, and upon the water
and carbon of the aerial sea.

The oak is tenanted, not only by the ivy, but by epiphytes and a
parasite as well. The parasite is the famous mistletoe, — the plant

14 THE OAK.

sacred in the legends of the North, and the berries of which have been
supposed to be the "forbidden fruit"! A good deal of uncertainty
exists with regard to the mistletoe of the Druids. If so plentiful upon
the oak as to allow of the tree being regularly visited for the sake of
lopping branches, with all those pretty and sacred ceremonials that are
reported of it — the white robes, the golden knife, the hymns, and the
procession, — then it would almost appear that some other plant, and
not what we to-day call mistletoe, was the one in request. For there
"are scarcely more than two or three extant examples of mistletoe grow-
ing upon the oak in this country, and unless it were abundant, at all
events in some parts, it is difficult to see how the ritual could be carried
out, unless at long intervals, and almost privately. There is no reason
why mistletoe should not grow upon oak trees to-day just as well and
as luxuriantly as it is said to have done in the days of the ancient
Britons. Perhaps the great sanctity ascribed to it came of the very
fact of its being so rare. At the present day mistletoe is found chiefly
upon apple-trees and hawthorns. Some twenty or thirty other kinds
of tree have been noticed as bearing it, — the lime, for example, the
poplar, and the acacia ; but the two former are evidently its favourites.
Because of the difficulty referred to as regards the Druids' mistletoe,
some authors have supposed that another species, not now found in
England, though plentiful in some parts of the Continent, may at the
time of the Druids' worship have existed in our own country, and
that it was extirpated either by themselves, or by those who sought to
help forward Christianity by effacing every particular connected with
paganism. The plant referred to is called by botanists Loranthus
Europteus.

The epiphytes that give beauty to the oak, chiefly belong to that
wonderful section of plants termed the Flowerless. Not that they are
absolutely without flowers, but that the parts are too small to be viewed
without the aid of a microscope or of a magnifying glass ; and thus that
they are "flowerless" when compared with a rose or a lily, or even
with a grass from the meadow.

Those of their race that seek the kindly service of the forest-monarch
are principally mosses and ferns. How sweet on a summer's day to
rest awhile, when wandering in the woodland, on the green mantle that
overspreads some prostrate trunk, — noting the fairy forest of its elastic
foliage, and the pretty little sprays that dart out upon every side, shoot-
ing hither and thither like the frost-flowers upon the window-panes in
mid-winter ! The mosses of the living oak are of precisely the same

THE OAK. 15

kind. In their tender and elegant sympathies they make no distinction
between the overthrown tree and the tree that stands in its pride. One
of their most exquisite specialities is that, like ivy and the faithful wall-
flower, they are companions alike of life and death, — oftentimes adorn-
ing the one with bright hues foreign to its nature, and never failing to
render the other beautiful. In the wild and desolate region called
Dartmoor, strangely situated in a county that otherwise is the "garden
of England," there is a truly wonderful spectacle of this nature. On
the left bank of the river, about a mile above Two Bridges, the hillside
is heaped with blocks of granite, in the spaces between which are nearly
five hundred trees of the wavy-leaved oak, but singularly distorted.
They are gnarled, knotted, and twisted, seldom more than ten to four-
teen feet in height, and with a circumference not exceeding five feet,
and generally much less. The belt is ragged and interrupted, and
extends for the distance of about half-a-mile. Such a group of trees
would not be very remarkable in itself: what renders the scene so
extraordinary is that the branches, except at the extremities, and this
not always, are completely matted over with a moss, called by botanists
Anomodon curtipendulum. In most cases the green covering is from
ten to twelve inches in thickness, though the branch that supports it is
not of greater diameter than a child's wrist. The weight is so con-
siderable as to bend the branches downwards, just as we may see the
branches of likes and other supple trees weighed down at Christmas
by the gentle deposit on them of abundant snow ; and all over the
surface of this beautiful coating of vegetable velvet may be discovered,
in their season, the lovely little seed-capsules, by the produce of which
the plant is multiplied. The name given to this singular spot, which
seems as if it had been touched by the wand of some botanical enchanter,
is Wistman's Wood. It is easy of access, and should be visited by every
one who may happen to pass through that part of Devonshire.

Every old wood and forest shows us oaks bearing ferns. The latter
are chiefly of the kind called polypody, or the "many-footed," on
account of the numerous lateral leaflets giving the idea of feet, as in a
centipede. On those grand old rugged bosses which the oak is so apt
to form, some ten or twelve feet above our heads, there may often be
seen a tuft of this elegant plant, perched completely out of reach,
and decked with those gay spangles of bright gold which render the
fern in question so easy of recognition, and attract the eye of the most
incurious. All lovers of nature have been attracted in the first instance
to the specialities, by some particular plant or flower, which, holding

16 THE OAK.

up its finger, as it were, and beckoning, has allured them into one of
those sweet side-chapels of the great cathedral, which, when a man has
once entered, he never desires to leave. There wrfs a famous fable in
olden time of a country in which grew lotus-trees. When travellers
entered that country, and tasted of the fruit, they were overpowered
with an indefinable and delicious longing to remain there always, not
necessarily to be always eating lotus, but to enjoy the heavenly climate
and atmosphere that produced it. That country, with its lotus-trees,
has not been blotted out. The fable, like every other true one, is for
all time. Living nature, everywhere round about us, is the country of
the lotus, and the fruit is the serene and innocent delight, with innu-
merable sweet teachings for our intelligence, that comes of our looking
at it reverently and lovingly. The beckoning thus given is always
remembered with pleasure. Fries, the great German writer upon fungi,
tells us how he was attracted to the study of that class of plants, by
the lustre of the crimson Dryads' cup, by botanists called Peziza coccinea,
which in the earliest days of spring appears on dead branches in damp
woods and groves, and resembles an immense acorn-chamber of the
loveliest coral-red. No slight pleasure is it to another botanist, albeit
a mere stripling by the side of Fries, to view, over again and yet once
more, year by year, in forest-glades, where the trees are companions,
that pretty and simple fern that captured his imagination in early
youth. The oak seems to take pride in holding the fern in its giant
arms ; the fern shows us beautifully how the grandest thing in nature
may still be enriched by the simplest, just as great men, gifted with
the might of wisdom, and able to pour forth in unbroken streams,
music that makes our very soul come up and sit listening in our ears,
still delight to be clasped by the sweet tendrils of simple hearts, to
watch and help their little strivings after the amiable and the true, to
listen to their innocent songs, and to bless them with their bountiful
protection.

The fern upon the oak must not be confounded with that one speci-
fically termed "oak-fern," and technically called Dryopteris ; nor yet
must it be confounded with another which gives a quaint resemblance
to the oak in the section of its stem. "Oak-fern" has no peculiar
connection with oak-trees, and is as often found far away from them as
near. It is so called because the general outline or profile, when a leaf
is laid flat, gives a pleasing idea of that of an oak standing alone in its
pride, and viewed from a distance. This fact of resemblance in outline
between things in other respects totally unconnected, is one of the most

THE OAK. 17

striking in nature. We should expect it in some degree from the inti-
mate affinities everywhere displayed to the man of science. But it is
independent of these, lying outside, just as the exquisite resemblance
of the shake in music to the play of moonlight upon rippled water lies
outside of any actual connection, yet is as much a part of the method
and order of nature as the ripple of the water itself. So with the
charming similitude of the painted leaves of autumn to the variegated
western sky of evening. The close of the year and the close of the
day both acquire a tinted loveliness peculiarly their own, marked and
soul-inspiring in the highest degree, yet in no measure connected or
comparable one with another, as to their physical causes. The two
things lie outside, yet are alike, plainly because God says, death, depar-
ture, decay, need not necessarily be ugly and disagreeable to look at :
they may be made lovely as life, yea, lovelier ; and if there be wretched-
ness in their aspect, probably it is our own eyes that look obliquely.
Whether it be a soul about to cross the river that has no bridge, or
trees that are about to cast their vestures, and be for awhile, as it were,
dead, or the day that is to be exchanged for starlight, it is still compa-
tible with its passing away that the light of beauty shall be diffused
there.

The other fern referred to as being often very naturally associated with
the oak is, in truth, like the Dryopteris, the image of an oak-profile in
little, but it is not from that circumstance that the connection has been
supposed to exist. When the stem of the plant in question, commonly
called Bracken or Brake, and by botanists Pteris Aquilina, is cut slant-
wise a short distance above the root, the section of the sap-vessels
gives a kind of rude drawing of an ancient and massive oak, loaded
with exuberant foliage that bends the branches towards the ground.
A thousand strange resemblances of this nature might be described,
showing that our world is positively one of echoes — not necessarily for
the ear, but rather, mainly for the eye, which in its powers and privi-
leges is the synthesis and compend of all the other organs of sense.

Lastly, concerning the oak, should be mentioned the great age which
it attains —

The monarch oak, the patriarch of trees,
Shoots rising tip, and spreads by slow degrees ;
Three centuries he grows, and three he stays
Supreme in state, and in three more decays.

Nine hundred years, that is to say, constitute the ordinary term of oak-
life. But there are in Great Britain many examples of oak-trees of

8

18 THE OAK,

ages far exceeding this. The Salcey-forest oak in Northamptonshire,
described by Sir Thomas Dick Lander as " one of the most picturesque
sylvan ruins that can be met with anywhere," is calculated, on good
grounds, to be more than fifteen hundred years old ; while in Clipstone
Park, Nottinghamshire, stands a venerable tree called the Parliament
oak, from a tradition that under its branches a Parliament was held by
Edward I. in the year 1290, at which time it is probable that it was
an old and large example of its species. We count it a grand thing if
a man lives to be a hundred years old. How trifling is such an
age compared with that of an oak, which in its ruins reminds us of
Palmyra !

19

THE PINE.

AMONG the many fine tribes of plants which constitute the Vegetable
Kingdom, not one presents aspects of greater grandeur than the family
named after the Pine-tree. No trees attain greater stature than these.
In very few instances do we find an equal longevity, or a corresponding
massiveness of trunk ; and although the number of different species is
comparatively small, no trees form forests of such immense extent, or
of composition so exclusive. Linnaeus gave to the palm-trees of the
tropics the happy name of the "princes of vegetable nature" : he might,
with still greater propriety, have termed the palms the vegetable princes
of hot countries ; the pines and firs and their allies, the princes of cold
ones. For while exogenous or branching trees are diffused over the
whole world, and are found under every possible variety of climate —
except the extreme frigid, where no life can endure, — palm-trees, on the
one hand, are restricted within certain parallels of latitude, decreasing
the further we depart from the equinoctial ; and pine and fir trees, on
the other hand, belong emphatically to cold and temperate countries.
Not that either of these great races is without example where the other
prevails. Far from it. There are palms even in the south of Europe,
where they form a striking and attractive novelty to the English visitor,
especially to any one seeking those portions of the Mediterranean coast
of France which are the winter resort of invalids ; and another kind,
indigenous to the cooler parts of China, appears to be hardy enough to
bear English Christmas weather without protection, being already an
ornament of many a lawn containing select collections . of plants.
Similarly, there are trees of the pine and fir kind in the tropics ; but it
is generally at a considerable elevation above the level of the sea, or
where the mountain- side provides a habitat and temperature not unlike
that of the lowlands of the temperate zones.

One of the most remarkable facts in botanical geography is the
concordance between the vegetable productions of the plains in given
latitudes, whether north of the equator or south of it, and those of the
mountain- sides in latitudes not so far removed. To ascend a mountain
in the tropical and sub-tropical zones, is like setting out from the foot

20 THE PINE.

of that mountain and going due north in a direct line ; or if the moun-
tain in question be upon the Australian side of the equator, then it is
like starting from the base and going in a direct line southwards. In
a less degree, this curious parallelism is observable even in the moun-
tains of Europe, which present successively, as we ascend them, the
plants of countries more and more northerly. It may be remarked
indeed in the mountains of our own country. Very different is the
vegetation of Borrowdale from that of the tremendous summits that
rise upon its flanks. In the green meadow by the river are the purple
columbine and the lotus ; as we ascend the slopes, their place is taken
by the delicate parsley-fern ; and by-and-bye we enter the region of
the club-mosses, and of that lovely plant the alpine lady's -mantle, with
leaves that are plaited like a fan, and lined as it were with satin. Here
too are little saxifrages and mosses, that, like the chamois tribe, are
never seen upon the plains.

Just of this nature, only on a far grander scale, is the succession of
plants upon a mountain-side in countries near the line. Ararat,
Teneriffe, and the Himalayas, show it in perfection ; and thus are we
prepared for the existence of pine and fir-trees at a very little distance
from palms, but higher up. Some of the noblest of the race are found
upon the high grounds of Mexico and northern India ; and coming
nearer home, everyone will remember the frequent allusions in Holy
Writ to the firs upon the mountains of Palestine, and to the cedars
that made Lebanon glorious, as contrasted with the palms which
flourished by the water- side. The world may be compared to two
great snow-capped mountains of the tropics, sliced off and placed base
to base, so that the tops shall be the poles, the midway portions
the temperate zones, the conjoined bases the equatorial zone. The
practical value of this great fact is immense, since the exact ratio that
a given elevation bears to a certain distance north or south of the
equator, is now pretty well known, and skilful men can calculate what
plants are likely to allow of culture in remote countries, where instead
of plains there are mountains, or vice versa.

In the structure of their stems and branches, pine and fir trees
resemble the oak. They have distinct bark, wood, and pith, and the
annual rings by which then: ages may be reckoned, are ordinarily very
distinct. Viewed with the microscope, the delicate fibres of the wood
are found however to present a very singular and pretty appearance.
They are marked from end to end, as it were, with little spangles, so
differently dispersed as to serve as capital distinctive characters for the

THE PINE.

21

various kinds. Such marks rarely occur elsewhere, and are specially
interesting in the case of the pine and fir tribe, from the circumstance
of their being retained even when the wood is fossilised. This won-
derful instrument, the microscope, not only illuminates the present,
and by opening our eyes and hearts to a thousand new experiences of

wonder and delight, lengthens life ; since life, truly so called, consists
in agreeable impressions ; it not only does this — it casts light into
the graves of Time, and informs us of the nature of the trees that
swayed in the wind of the infinite past, long before there were men and

22 THE PIKE.

women to listen to their sound. The leaves, on the other hand, so far
from resembling those of oaks, are narrow, and usually needle-shaped.
Their veins, instead of meandering in all directions, run in lines that
converge towards the point, and not seldom the entire leaf is little more
than a stiff green bristle. So with the flowers. Though distinct
apparatus is present for the production of seed, and the distinction of
sex is as plainly marked as in the oak, here everything is of the most
simple kind. The sweet brightness of rose and lily is entirely wanting ;
even the plain green floral coverings of a grass-blossom are not to be
found ; Nature seems to have taken pleasure in showing how, with the
utmost stateliness of figure, could be associated the last extreme of
incompleteness as to flowers. The stamens make their appearance
either in pretty little sheaves along the branches, as in the larch-tree,
or in clusters that seem mountains of such sheaves ; the pistils are
developed iu connection with the rudiments of those elegant and
familiar productions known as fir-cones ; — not, however, as in other
plants, in the form of a closed ovary, but as flat scales, with the ovules
lying at the base ; and when the time arrives for the pollen to be
conveyed to the ovules, it is transmitted, not through a stigma and
style, but immediately. The pollen gone, the stamens wither away
and fall to the ground ; the clusters of ovules, with their protecting
scales, undergo changes similar to those of ripening fruits, and in due
time we get the cone, now a hard and solid body, and oftentimes more
like the work of the wood- carver or sculptor than the produce of a tree.
The variety in these cones is most wonderful. We see in it once more
how amazing is the ingenuity that, dealing with a simple idea, appa-
rently susceptible of no modification, shall nevertheless play upon it as
a musician upon his lute, and strike us the more by displaying resources
where and when least expected. The pieces of which the cone is com-
posed are not, as would at first appear, altered remains of a perianth ;
they are the scales by which the female flowers were sheltered, now
greatly enlarged and indurated, and forming a kind of capsule for the
seeds. While young, they remain closed ; when mature, especially if
exposed to warmth, they separate., and the seeds fall to the ground.
But in many cases the seeds are provided with a wing, which enables
the wind to carry them to a distance.

What a beautiful phenomenon is this of the wings of seeds ! " Give
us wings " is the universal cry of nature ; and though we commonly
associate such wings with plants like thistles and dandelions, in truth
there are as fine examples, yea finer ones, among trees. One of the most

THE PINE. 28

exquisite productions of nature is the winged seed of the Brazilian tree
called by botanists Bignonia echinata. Though in no way related to the
pines and firs, it has a wing to every seed, spreading on each side like
a film of iridescent glass, thinner than the thinnest tissue-paper, and in
width and general appearance reminding us of a white butterfly. When
cast into the air, the seed slowly circles downwards, like a falling leaf
in October, unless caught by a current of air, when it sails away into
the aerial sea. The very curious and peculiar fruit of the pines and
firs — familiarly known, as above said, by the name of the "cone" —
was early taken advantage of in order to give an appropriate name to
the family. Whether pines or firs, cedars or larches, botanists call this
magnificent race by the name of "Conifers," or "Cone-bearers," and
under this name we shall henceforth always speak of them.

One species only is a native of Britain — that one commonly known
as the Scotch fir, though technically a pine. The difference between a
pine and a fir is very easily made out. Firs have their leaves irregu-
larly distributed over the surface of the branch or twig, and every leaf
grows quite distinct and apart from its neighbours. In pines, on the
contrary, the long leaves grow in couples, or in threes, or in fives,
and every set is enclosed in a little cup-like sheath, formed of brown
scales. Moreover, in the cone of a fir-tree, the scales are always thin
at the edge; whereas, in the cone of a pine-tree, they are much
thickened, forming protuberances upon the general surface, and
giving the cone that richly-tesselated appearance which is so greatly
admired. The " Scotch fir," accordingly, is properly the Scotch
pine — Pinus sylvestris. It grows wild throughout the Highlands of
Scotland, and, not improbably, is wild also in some parts of England ;
but so many thousands of trees have been planted for use and orna-
ment, that now it is next to impossible to discriminate the aborigines,
if any really survive. The place to look for wild ones is the remote
mountain-side. So thoroughly is this grand old tree a mountaineer, —
so truly, indeed, are all conifers children of the heights, that it is
supposed by some that the very name of Pinus is but an altered form
of the ancient Celtic word for a mountain, as preserved to this day in
Ben Lomond, Ben Nevis, Ben Cruachan, and in the name of the
Apennines. Were this the place, a very entertaining chapter might
be written on geographical names taken from plants and trees, and,
contrariwise, on names of trees, &c., taken from those of countries and
localities; it must suffice, however, to indicate that such a subject
awaits the scrutiny of the curious, and to mention the Morea, as so

24 TTTE PINE.

called on account of that peninsula resembling in its outline the leaf of
the mulberry-tree, Morns nigra; and "Buckinghamshire," as signifying
the home of the beech-trees, "beech" being only another spelling of
the older Teutonic name, buck, or buch.

As we are made best acquainted with it, the Scotch pine is generally
found in great platoons, or used almost alone for large plantations.
Sometimes it is mingled with others of its race ; frequently it is the only
tree over an area of miles in extent. Whether formed of this tree alone,
or of conifers in variety, a pine-wood is one of the most imposing scenes
in nature. It is totally different from a forest of trees such as oaks.
The latter kinds of trees are deciduous. Not so the conifers. These,
excepting the larch, preserve their foliage all the year round, changing
the leaves season by season, after the manner of plants in general, but
still, for ever and always, dressed in perennial green. At two seasons
of the year, the conifers, like other trees, show a difference in their
complexion ; namely, in spring, when the new shoots start forwards,
oftentimes in elegant horizontal sprays, like the hands of a strong
swimmer put forth for the new stroke ; or lifted on high, like plumes of
green hair ; — they are remarkable again in late autumn, especially in
the case of the Scotch pine, when other trees are fast becoming dis-
mantled. For at this season, in the gloom of November, often indeed
in October, when the ground is strewed with the earliest-fallen leaves of
the ash and the sycamore, the Scotch pine also casts its older leaves ;
and the new ones, developed during the summer that is now a memory,
no longer clouded by the dark and brownish hue of the departing ones,
shine with a beautiful lustre we do not observe except at this moment.
In a word, Scotch firs usually look best at the close of autumn. With
the evergreen character of the tree is to be associated, if we would
rightly understand the pine-forest, the remarkable uprightness and
straightness of the trunks, and generally speaking, the symmetry and
mathematical precision of the branches. The Scotch pine is less
remarkable in this respect than many others ; they are; nevertheless,
features in which it shares. A coniferous tree is never found
accommodating itself to the surface of broken ground. The branches
never hang themselves over a waterfall or a ravine. They refuse to
receive impressions from surrounding conditions, maintaining their
own peculiar and inflexible direction. On a mountain-side, we may
notice, even as we rush past in a railway-carriage, the stiff and erect
green pyramids, every tree the exact counterpart of every other, and
the stems as straight as the columns of an ancient temple. Go into

THE PINE. 25

the deepest and shadiest ravine, and it is still the same. Not a bough
deviates from the angle prescribed by the great Architect ; we seem to
be in a kind of vegetable cathedral, so regular are the proportions, so
tall and so graceful are the pillars.

In a pine-forest this straightness is made so much the more noticeable
from the circumstance of the trunks of the trees being ordinarily desti-
tute of branches for a considerable distance above tie ground, so that
we seem to be thrown into a labyrinth of brown poles. On these
branchless trunks is seen neither mistletoe nor ivy. A peculiar inde-
pendence and royalty of nature in the conifers generally, seems to keep
all such visitors aloof. True, there are examples of both parasites and
epiphytes occurring upon them ; but in England this is very rarely the
case, — so rarely, that the exception is merely the proof of the rule.
No woodbine ever twines round the stem of a pine or fir. The wild
clematis, that loves to deck other trees with its beautiful flossy tufts, at
the season when red berries abound, is to the conifers an utter stranger.
Even brambles and wild roses, that often contrive to find a lodgment for
their upper trailers amid the boughs of the forest, are denied entrance
by the conifer. To all comers there is still the same old dignified
refusal of admission.

Partly owing to the dead leaves upon the soil, and partly to that of
the dense and unbroken shade given by the conifers, — and by none
more remarkably than by our indigenous species, — in the pine-wood
again there is an almost painful dearth of herbaceous vegetation, and
consequently of flowers. No one ever gathers primroses in a pine-wood.
The ground is never lighted up with a sea of anemones ; nor do
blue-bells or forget-me-nots spread carpets of azure upon it. A few
procumbent brambles, serving only as traps for the feet ; a few of the
larger kinds of sylvan shield-fern, and a few mosses of the kinds that
grow in cushion-form tufts, constitute nearly the whole of the vegetation.
Scattered among their alien-looking foliage are the withered brown
needles and the emptied cones that have fallen from overhead, perhaps
even years ago, for they are slow to decay ; and except that quaint
fungi spring up in autumn, there is nothing else to attract the mere
collector into these solemn recesses.

But for the contemplative and the poetic mind, there is no more-
powerful influence than is found in the pine-wood, and this at any
season of the year. In truth, the pine-wood is not a place wherein to
iiote seasons. It is independent of them ; presenting none of that
sweet succession that makes ever-changing picture-galleries of the

4

2G THE PINE.

meadows ; and except when the trees sustain their share of the white
wonder of winter, the aspect is perennially the same. The pine-wood
is always stilL Therefore we note in it more intensely than anywhere
else, that grand sound of the wind among the tops that is so like the
distant song of the sea. This circumstance has attracted the notice of
observers of nature in all ages. Theocritus, who wrote pastorals more
than 2,000 years ago, commences one of his beautiful poems with —
" Sweet is the murmur of the wind among the pine-trees ! " The
poets of our own age might be quoted a hundred times, in echo.
Probably the great peculiarity of the sound in question 'comes of the
needle-like form of the leaves, and of their infinite number,' the wind
playing among them in a way that the broad flat leaves of such trees
as the oak cannot possibly admit of. Then there are the associations ;
for a true poet never rests in the sentiment of simple beauty, or the sense
of awe, or of grandeur, or of duration. His sympathies run imme-
diately to things that concern the welfare and the happiness of his
race. The test of uncommon sense is that it can throw light upon the
things that belong to common sense; and the test of the true poet is
that he can enter into the practical, illustrate it, make it more delightful
in our eyes and to our daily experience ; that he can many, in a word,
the ideal to the familiar and prosaic. If he do not do this, he is only
a sentimentalist, and the world does not require him, nor profit by his
presence in it. Take "for instance, the grand thoughts that arrest the
mind as to the utilities of these wonderful trees. The profusion of
their growth, and their stateliness, as set forth in the pine-wood ; their
duration also, and the serenity of their lives, all seem fitting counter-
parts of their inexpressible value to man. Timber, of the most
admirable description, as deal and cedar ; resins in a score of kinds,
translucent and inflammable ; with many other useful articles of human
need, are supplied by their different species, and in some cases, are the
last that we should expect from conifers. Creosote, that assuages the
pain of an aching tooth, is derived from a conifer ; so is that exquisite
balsam in which the microscopist preserves his most delicate curiosities,
giving them a shrine more beautiful than monarch ever possessed.
Canada-balsam, the substance used by microscopists, represents in
their hands the resin of those ancient conifers which we now know
under the name of amber. For amber was once the liquid secretion of
a kind of pine or fir, and the insects that we find embedded in it were
preserved by the elegant operations of nature, just after the same
manner as those of the microscopist's cabinet.

THE PINE. 27

So true is it over again that man, with all bis ingenuities and
discoveries, when he opens his eyes and walks into the archives of
nature, invariably finds that he is only a copyist, — an unintentional
and unconscious one, it may be, but still only a copyist. Nature
is beforehand with him in all his devices and designs.

Even food is supplied by conifers, namely, in the seeds contained
in their cones, which are often of great size, and full of nutritious
matter. This is the case with those of the stone-pine, which are com-
monly eaten in Italy. The Swiss and Siberian pines, and mo,ny others,
also yield eatable seeds. Wood, as supplied by the couifevs, has
its most celebrated representative in that of the cedar-tree. But
the true cedar, native of the mountains of Lebanon, must not be
confounded with the red cedar used for lead pencils. The latter
is the produce of an entirely different tree, and is brought from
the West Indies. Lebanon cedar is pale and yellowish; and although
it exhales an agreeable odour, the scent is by no means so strong
as that of the pencil-cedar. There is an impression with some people
that the Ark was built of cedar-wood, since the consonants in the name
gopher bear some resemblance. But this is the boldest hypothesis.
Probably no one will ever know what wood was really intended by
"gopher." The discovery seems past finding out. The cedars of
Lebanon, it may be added, are not, as has often been thought, nearly
extinct. There is a pathetic account, in certain books, of only 28 being
found in the middle of the 16th century; only 22 a hundred years later;
in 1737, only 15; in 1810, only 12; and in 1818, only seven! The
writer admits, however, that there were always "plenty of young ones,"
the above figures referring only to the patriarchs ; and now it appears,
from recent explorations, that the tree is still plentiful, though not
exactly upon Lebanon.

There is something very grand, again, in the contemplation of the
great age attained by conifers, the ordinary minimum being two or
three centuries. That is to say, two or three centuries constitute their
potential lease of life, which they will exhaust, if not prematurely
destroyed either by accident or for the purposes of human enterprise
and need. Many kinds live to be seven or eight hundred years old,
and the colossal Wellingtonias of California are certainly as much as
2,000, 3,000, and even 4,000 years old ! In the Crystal Palace at
Sydenhatn, stands the bark of the lower portion of the trunk of one of
these vegetable Anakim, — for they are giants as well as primaevals, — and
no one who glances at it can doubt for a moment that the tree must

28 THE PINE.

have been alive in the days of the Caesars of old Rome. We have nothing
like such longevity exhibited in any conifers in England, though there
are examples of yews in this country computed to be more than 2,000
years old ; but it is quite enough for the reflective man to stand in a
forest of such trees as the Scotch fir, and consider what a dynasty he
confronts. The venerable in nature is always commanding ; but when
age stretches back to the days of the Coliseum and of the Parthenon,
it becomes almost above believing. Never, perhaps, does the brevity
of human existence affect us so powerfully as when contrasted with
these seemingly immortal trees. Generations come and go, but they
continue unchanged. Schleiden, the great German botanist, and some
disciples of his in England, compare these vegetable Nestors to the
planet on which we dwell, — teaching that the trunk of the tree is the
analogue of the surface of the earth, while the foliage represents the
successive tides of population. Nor is there anything in the com-
parison that philosophy would object to. The individual contents of
the world are in every instance miniatures, after their own fashion and
in their own way, of the magnificent total of nature. Every one of
them is imperium in imperio, — a kingdom within a kingdom, presenting
all the parts, principles, and phenomena of the collective, only in a
subdued and more attenuated manner, appropriate to the sphere of its
own utility.

29

THE BEECH.

THE Beech is one of the grandest of our forest-trees. It rises to the
height of eighty or a hundred feet, and in dimensions, when full grown,
surpasses all except the oak. No tree forms woods so dry and pleasant
to walk'in, though grasses do not flourish beneath the shade ; and at
every season of the year it presents some remarkable and pleasing
peculiarity. In the depth of winter it is told by the smooth grey bark
and the arrangement of the branches ; in spring by the buds ; in summer
by the leaves ; while in autumn, if close by, we have the very curious
seed-pods, and at a distance, those auburn and coppery- golden dyes
which place the beech in the front rank of painted-foliage trees.

The general character of the trunk and branches gives the idea, more
than is done by any other tree, of that glorious style of architecture
termed the Gothic. The columned temples of ancient Greece, and the
still older ones of ancient Egypt, lead the imagination away to palm-
trees, and in all probability are mementos of the use of those trees by
the earliest designers of high-class buildings ; — in the beech, on the
other hand, though there is no reason to suppose that there is any
actual artistic and historical connection between the two things, we are
powerfully reminded of the clustered pillars of a Gothic cathedral,' — and
especially of such as are formed of many independent and slender
shafts, as in Westminster Abbey, and ordinarily in the style called
" Early English." A grand old cathedral, with its innumerable har-
monies of splendour, its "long-drawn aisles and fretted vaults," its
dimness and arcaded scenery, its calm, and repose, and coolness, its
broken sunbeams, and imitative leaf and climbing plant on every
vantage, — and not these only, but with its quiet and sculptured tombs,
with mitred abbot and belted warrior, sleeping so softly,

While the sound of those they fought for,
And the steps of those they wrought for,
Echo round their bones for evermore, —

SO THE BEECH.

a grand old cathedral, we say, with these, and the thousand other
solacing and inspiring charms, is always the counterpart, among men's
works, of the ancient forest, where, in some mode or arfother, every one
of its imposing qualities is reverberated ; — it is pleasing, accordingly, to
find that here and there, amid the trees of the wood, the exact forms
and ideas worked out by the builder seem anticipated. In this one,
the beech, we have not merely the tall and erect pillar, smooth, except
for odd cavities, depressions, and knobs ; but in well-developed indi-
viduals, those singular groupings of erect branches which wear the
semblance of clustered columns, and by and bye give out from their
summits, gracefully sweeping arches that seem the ribs of a roof of air.
The smoothness of the bark fits the beech, more than any other tree,
for the carving of letters and inscriptions, which, though distorted in
the course of a few years, and eventually quite lost, by the gradual
expansion and decay of the outer portion, are for a while as clear and
sharp as if cut in stone. How beautiful and how ancient are the
associations of this practice ! " There is a man," exclaims one of
Shakspere's immortal characters, "There is a man haunts the forest,
that abuses our young trees, carving Rosalind on their barks." Twenty-
five centuries before then lived Paris and CEnone, — the former that
famous youth who, bred among old Priam's shepherds, and tending his
flocks upon mount Ida, was suddenly called to adjudge the prize of
beauty among the goddesses. Venus persuaded him with the promise
of the finest woman in the world to wife, and for the sake of Helen,
poor (Enone was forsaken. Till that ill-fated hour, from which dated
the overthrow of Troy, and all the incidents and fables that are
embosomed in the greatest poems of antiquity, CEnone and Paris had
been playmates and lovers. Gone from her for ever, now she writes
him one of those tender and moving epistles which Ovid has preserved
for us as the "Letters of the Heroines," reminding him of the happy
days when they were partakers in the same amusements, and when he
had been used to carve her name on the bark of trees.

Incisoa servant a te mea nomina fagi ;

Et legor CEnone falce notata tua.
Et quantum trunci, tantum mea nornina crescnnt ;

Crescite, et in titulbs surgite recta rneos !

"The beeches still preserve my name, carved by your hand, and
' (Enone, ' the work of your pruning- knife, is read upon their bark.
As the trunks increase, the letters still dilate ; they grow and rise as
testimonies of my just claim npon your love ! " If the remembrance of

THE BEECH. 31

these soft moments could not recall to her his wandering affection, how
little, she expresses in this simple and pathetic allusion, can she hope
to recover it in any other way. The poplar was used for the same
purpose in ancient times, as we may gather from the lines that follow :
" There grows a poplar," she continues, " by the river-side (ah, I well
remember it ! ) on which is carved the motto of our love. Flourish,
thou poplar ! — fed by the bordering stream, — whose furrowed bark bears
this inscription — ' Sooner shall Xanthus return to his source, than
Paris be able to live without CEnone.' " By comparison, these things
are trifles : to some they may seem silly, and not worth the citation,
But to a heart that loves to contemplate the sweet simplicities of
nature, and how little change the lapse of time promotes in all that
concerns human affections and human sympathies, such records are
dear. In these tender lines, as much as in any of the simple narratives
of the Old Testament, we see that the passions and the events of
to-day, the fidelities and the inconstancies, the lettered beech and the
poplar by the river, are the same old and long-past ones over again.
Human life and nature are everywhere like the waterfalls among the
Alps, sparkle, and teardrops, and rainbows whenever we look, though
the stream is never the same for a single instant.

Early in the spring the beech seems everywhere armed with little
brown spikes. These are the buds, which in tke peculiarity of their
shape differ from those of every other British forest-tree. They are
formed at the close of the previous autumn, and though during the
winter the increase in size is scarcely perceptible, there appears to be
still a slow progression. One of the most beautiful and suggestive
phenomena in connection with tree-life is this early commencement
of Spring. For while the almanac states March or April to be the
beginning, and while our own first impressions seem to confirm it, in
truth the beginning of Spring is many months before. Just as on a
sweet summer's night, before the last glow of the sunset has quite
departed, Aurora peeps from the east, so at the close of summer, if we
look sharp, we may find indications on every hand, that a new season
of life and energy is in reserve, and beginning even now. The buds
of the hedgerow willows are swollen, and often shining and silvery with
the soft white silk that wraps their contents ; the alder-trees and the
hazels are hung with the green rudiments of their intended catkins ;
every musician has his instrument ready, and waits only to see the
lifted hand that shall give the signal. All things begin farther back
than we are apt to suppose ; nature's cradles, like those of wicker,

82 THE BEECH.

have not more of beginning in them than of ending. Presently these
little brown spikes begin to open at their sharp extremities. The cover-
ings roll away, and in due time fall to the ground, strewing the surface
till it looks like a threshing-floor. At the same time are disclosed the
young green leaves and the inner coverings, which are of a delicate pink
colour, dry, soft and shining, wavy and half- curled, and so thin that the
light goes through them. They hang about the opening leaves, and in
the contrast of their exquisite tint, produce one of the loveliest
spectacles of the vernal season. Botanists call these pretty and transitory
vestments of the buds the "perules." Every tree possesses analogous
ones, larger or smaller, according to the species, but in none are they
more delicately fashioned or tinted. The leaves themselves are doubled
up precisely after the manner of a lady's fan, whence it is that on a fine
warm day, in the beech (as happens in the sycamore and several other
trees), there seems an almost miraculous start into life. The mode in
which leaves are folded while in the bud, varies most wonderfully. Some-
times the leaf is rolled up like a scroll of paper. Sometimes it is doubly
rolled, or from each edge towards the central line, and not infrequently
this condition is reversed by the roll being directed backwards. There
are trees, and herbaceous plants also, in which the rolling is like that of
a coil of ribbon ; and here in the beech, as we have said, the folding is
like that of a fan. The rapidity with which leaves expand is of course
greatly influenced by their primitive condition, and thus it is more to
the arrangement of the parts than to any casual or external circumstance
that we are to look for the explanation -of their very various rate of
opening. So true is it, once over again, that when we desire to dis-
cover truth, we must go inside. The differences of the arrangement of
the leaves in the bud are often accompanied by considerable differences
in other particulars. The plum-tree, for instance, and the cherry-tree,
are not more distinct in their produce than in this curious particular of
the early leaf-folding, for while in the plum-tree the "vernation" is
" convolute," in the cherry-tree it is <( conduplicate."

While young, the leaves of the beech are most beautifully ornamented
with lines of silky hairs, which at the same moment constitute a defence
for them. With the expansion of the blade, these lines of hairs are
discovered to coincide with the veins ; while along the edge of the leaf,
projecting from it like the eyelashes from the margin of the eyelid, are
similar hairs, which give it the most delicate fringe conceivable. No
other British forest-tree has its young leaves thus fringed, so that in
this one single particular we possess a certain guide. A young beech-

THE BEECH,

83

grove, about the middle of May, when the foliage is tolerably well
expanded, presents one of the greenest and airiest sights that trees
afford. The leaves are singularly thin and translucent, and these
innumerable silvery fringes seem to aid in detaining the light. Embo-
soming ourselves in a little thicket of young beech, we learn for the
first time in its fulness, what is the meaning of green, and the force of
that charming line in Coleridge, —

" The level sunshine glimmers with green light."

Fully expanded, the striking and characteristic feature of the beech-
leaf is at once obvious. To recognise this, it is useful to remember
that tree-leaves are of five principal forms, viz. : —

1. Needle-shaped, as in pines and firs.

2. Simple and with a midrib, as in the beech, oak, elm, lime, alder,

hornbeam, hazel-nut, birch, poplar, willow, Spanish chesnut.

3. Simple and palmate, as in the maple, sycamore, and plane.

4. Digitate, as in the horse-chesnut.

5. Pinnate, as in the walnut and ash.

Two or three .of those in the second class have the blade rather larger
upon one side of the midrib than upon the other. This is the case
with the beech, the margin of which is at the same time quite free

Leaf of Beech-tree.

from notches or incisions, and by these two simple characters it may
thus, under any circumstances, be identified. In general figure the
leaf is oval ; the stalk is very short ; the primary veins proceed towards
the margin in parallel and nearly equidistant lines ; and the surface is
quite smooth.

84 THE BEECH.

Convinced, as are all thinking men, of the absolute unity of nature,
and with ten thousand familiar illustrations of it lying at our feet, ifr is
agreeable to note those more recondite ones which "crop out," as
geologists say, where least expected, and under conditions and circum-
stances the most dissimilar. Who, for example, at the first glance,
recognises in the great class of leaves to which that of the beech is
referable, and which is the predominant one in nature, the meanest
herb and weed being possessed of it as well as the stateliest of trees, —
who, at the first glance, recognises in it the idea which is wfought out
perfectly and consummately in the human body ! The midrib of the
leaf corresponds to and prefigures the spinal column ; the great ribs
which strike out therefrom prefigure the bones of the human skeleton
which are called by the same name ; the interior is traversed by a
multitude of delicate sap -vessels that answer to the veins and their
crimson blood ; and over the entire surface is spread an exquisitely-
organised skin, through pores in which the leaf absorbs moisture, and
perspires, and performs other functions so similar to those of the skin
of the human body, that if clogged with dirt or soot, the plant suffers
no less severely than a human being who ignores the bath. Nor is
this all. Every portion of the blossom of a plant is a leaf curiously
modified, so as to perform the various and special functions that
pertain to flower-life. Sepals and corolla, stamens and pistil, all these
parts are leaves metamorphosed, while in the seed-pod we often find
the leaf scarcely altered, as happens in the legume of the pea. Just
as the ribs in the human skeleton are so curved and disposed as to
form the great pectoral cavity in which lie the most vital organs of the
animal fabric, so in the pod of the pea we find the edges of the leaf
so brought together as to convert it into a casket for the seeds, — the
most important part of the plant, and round the history of which are
concentrated all the most admirable phenomena of its existence.
Leaves scarcely altered, except in texture, similarly constitute the
seed-pods of the larkspur, the aconite, and that gay golden blossom
of spring, called the marsh-marigold ; and exactly conforming with all
these are the great seed-follicles of the South American trees called
Sterculias.

The great glory of the beech is disclosed however in the month of
October. The leaves then assume many shades of yellow and amber,
and the surface being peculiarly adapted to reflect the light of the
setting sun, the spectacle, when the weather is fine and mild, is most
effective. Amid the immensely varied hues supplied by oak, and

THE BEECH. 85

chesnut, and elm, the beech still lifts its magnificence distinct and
unrivalled, and even the crown of its concluding moments has a rich-
ness superior to that of any other. Leaves, it may be well to say,
assume these beautiful tints in autumn, through failure of their power
to appropriate only the carbon of the atmosphere during the perform-
ance of the process of respiration. They become, in consequence,
super-oxygenised, and the oxygen, as in other cases, manifests its
presence by giving an unaccustomed brightness of tint. We are apt to
speak of the fading of the leaves in autumn ; it would be more truthful
to speak of it as the autumnal painting. Very prone are we also to
connect the idea of "autumnal foliage" with trees only, overlooking
the fact that multitudes of herbaceous plants, including many of the
most inconsiderable weeds of the wayside, are gifted with an equal
beauty in the decline of life. No tint in nature is lovelier than the
roseate amber of the October foliage of the little silver-weed, Potentilla
Anserina ; while docks and sorrels glow with vivid crimson, and the
hedge -parsley turns its fern-like leaves to the colour of a king's mantle.
Nature delights here, as everywhere else, to echo her greatest things in
her least ones. No blind heart was that which in old time said that
Pan, the god of material nature, took for his wife the nymph Echo,
he playing on his sevenfold pipe, wrought from the reeds by the river,
while she gave response to every harmony.

Lastly should we note the singular fruit of the beech. In May,
soon after the young leaves are open, the tree is ornamented with ten
thousand globular clusters, downy, and containing all the essentials of
a flower ; by tha time that the lilac stars of the michaelmas-daisy begin
to shine in the garden, these are followed by prickly pods the size of
an acorn, and very curiously corresponding with acorns in structure.
That part which in the fruit of the oak is a smooth-edged and hemi-
spherical cup, in the beech is four-valved, the valves recurving like
those of a chesnut ; the acorn itself is represented by a triangular brown
nut, with margins almost as sharp as the blade of a knife. In Spring
these three-cornered seeds are prone to sprout, and among the mosses
on the hedge-bank, beeches, like children at play, are found beginning
the world anew.

Beeches are not like oaks, the resort of many living creatures ; the
number of insects frequenting them is comparatively few, nor are
they much sought after by the nest-builders. A pleasing association
clings to the tree nevertheless, such as we have with scarcely another,
for as long as children's voices are lovely to human souls, will be their

86 THE BEECH.

trill of "the woodpecker tapping the hollow beech-tree." Naturalists
find in connection with the beech quite another class of objects,
namely, fungi of uncommon kinds, one in particular, that in autumn
appears upon the trunks, and from its resemblance to sprays of white
coral, has been classically named Hydnum coralloides. So beautiful
are the plans and marshallings of nature ! If to one tree be given good
fruit, another excels in foliage ; if one be tall and soaring, another
gives sweet amplitude of shade, touching the earth with the tips of its
great arms ; and like the cities of a great empire, every one is noted
for a merit and Suite of qualities peculiarly its own.

T H.E ELM.

WHETHER the elm be'truly an ancient Briton, or> tree originally from
South-eastern Europe, is an open question. Like the chesnut and
several others, it has been a resident in our island from time im-
memorial ; there is reason to believe, nevertheless, that it is not one of
those trees which, with the oak and the pine, can assert their claim to
be absolutely indigenous, that is to say, growing upon British soil as
one of the original gifts of nature, instead of owing its importation to
the hand of man. The subject to which this question forms an opening
is one of the most curious and interesting that botanists and physical
geographers have to consider. It involves not only the natural laws
and the accidental processes by which plants have been diffused over
the face of the earth, but the problem of the primitive seats of particular
species. Looking at the ancient forests and the immortal meadows, at
the lilies that brighten the quiet pools and river-inlets, far away in the
most secret solitudes of the country; or at the saxifrages that sprinkle
the mountain -slopes with their beautiful stars of gold or delicately-
speckled white, — we think most naturallyfethat these things, or at all
events that the plants which were their ancestors and progenitors, have
occupied these self-same.spots ever since the beginning.. And doubtless
this is true of very many of the forms of life that surround us. But
very many others have as certainly been derived from localities more or
less distant. Migration has been no less steady on the part of plants,
sometimes as the result of natural causes, sometimes under the influence
of man, and this, upon his part, either knowingly or unconsciously, —
migration, we say, has been no less steady on the part of plants, than
emigration has been with our own species. The colonizing of new lands
in ancient times and in modern ones, has in every age had its silent
but energetic parallel among plants. Such migration is still in progress,
and perhaps more vigorously than ever before ; it would seem that
whatever man does, the unconscious portion of living nature does
likewise — that whichever of the two takes the initiative, the other
cannot choose but follow suit.

6

88 THE ELM.

Numbers of our common English weeds have conveyed themselves of
late years to distant countries, and in several cases have established
disastrous empire ; many pretty flowers, on the other hand, have also
travelled in the wake of civilization, and where once were only brambles
and hedge-nettles, now we see the quaint blossoms of the American
touch-me-not, or the golden quadrangles of the evening- primrose.
Even in our conservatories there are many similar instances of the
wonderful love of travel that pertains to plants. Among the choicest
orchids of the tropics frequently springs up that most sweet and tendei
little trefoil, the sleepy yellow Oxalis of the Mauritius ; and in one hot-
house at least that might be named, comes up every year, unsown and
of its own amiable accord, that beautiful blue-spiked Gymnostachyum
which has been dedicated, in its second name, to Mr. Cuming. A grand
book might be written upon the subject exclusively of these curious
wanderings ; another, still more delightful, upon the confraternity that
has been instituted among the different countries of the earth by the
deliberate transfer of their productions from one to the other. How
much does Europe owe to Asia ! How much to America ! How
largely in turn does the new world stand indebted to the old ! The
walnut and the lilac tree came first from Persia ; the Camellia is from
Japan ; the vine from the shores of the Caspian Sea. Wheat and
barley are from the same opulent part of South-western Asia which
tradition declares to have been the birth-place of the human family ;
cucumbers and melons ripened their first fruits beneath the sun of India ;
rosemary seems aboriginal to the northern shores of the Mediterranean.
Extending our survey to America, we find that for the inestimable
potato we must 4thank Brazil ; the same great region has enriched our
gardens with countless flowers of the rarest beauty ; the ancient world
has sent thither, in beautiful recompense, two of the most valuable of
plants, those, namely, which produce coffee and rice. These are but
two or three instances out of a thousand that might be cited ; the
narration of all would run abreast of the history of human enterprise,
and, at the same moment, of nature's fair docility, a quality we should
never forget or overlook. For what would the world have been had
trees and plants and flowers sullenly refused to grow except in the very
spots where they were first deposited ! Everywhere the soil gives
willing nutriment ; and though the inclemencies and the asperities of
certain climates do certainly prevent the universal extension of plants,
the capacity of self- adaptation to an immense variety of latitudes and
longitudes, remains one of the most striking facts in physiology, and

THE ELM. 89

one of the finest illustrations of the Divine munificence. England,
owing to this sublime power of self-accommodation on the part of
plants, is now the permanent Flower-show of the whole world. True,
it is through the ingenuity of the florist that very many are alone
persuaded to dwell with us and to enjoy life ; his success in reconciling
them to their new abode comes, however, of their primitive flexibility
under kind treatment, Plants, like women and chamaeleons, wax
bright or become dim according to the light that is cast upon them :—
yet not alone by reason of the light, but because of the sweet reflecting
mystery within.

In the questioned native country of the elm -tree is involved,
accordingly, no new or solitary idea ; it is simply one of those which
constitute the history of the interchange of hospitalities. In any case,
the tree is so thoroughly rooted in old England that now it matters
little whether it be an alien or otherwise. For centuries it has been
linked with many of the happiest thoughts that are the privilege of
Englishmen ; and as long as the glory of old family mansions and
of ancestral avenues shall endure, so long will the stately elm be a
household word. The great height which it attains ; the peculiar and
gradually expanding form of the head ; the grand super-columniation of
the pillared branches ; and the massiveness and circularity of the main
stem, are qualities which adapt it more than any other for an ornament
of the park and of the grounds that immediately adjoin, and more
particularly still, for planting in those duplicate lines which by-and-bye
develop into the Avenue, — say rather, into the living Cathedral nave ;
of which, let it be noted, there are no finer examples possible than in
the avenues in Kensington Gardens, and that majestic one which
sweeps down the slope in front of Redland Court, near Bristol, then
rises again, graceful as some light boat upon the waters, every tree a
tower of verdure, illustrious at every season, and when in the pride of
its green summer, and slaking its mighty thirst in the drowsy sunshine,
lifting up our hearts with delight and admiration. For grand old trees,
such as these elms, like the stars, seem'to look down into our hearts,
and resting there, make them partakers of their own greatness.

Listen, too, to the inhabitants ! Not always a city, but how often
are these beautiful trees, the elms, the seat of a thousand birds of the
dark wing ! The two things seem so naturally to go together, that
rooks' feathers upon the ground, so black, so clean, so smooth, so
glossy, with their beautiful white and slender quills, seem almost a
produce of the tree itself. To watch these birds sailing in their calm

40

THE ELM.

squadrons ; to note them, too, when busy in the fields ; yea, even to
pick up those fragments of cast plumage, is to me a peculiar pleasure.
And yet it is not because of the elms ; I suppose there is no human
being of civilized race to whom some such simple thing of nature is not
a talisman,

" Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound ! "

Botanically, the elm is distinguished by its curious leaves, simple
flowers, and very remarkable fruit, or, as it would be popularly called,
remarkable seed. Botanists, however, give the name of " fruit " to the
ripened seed and seed-vessel of every plant without distinction. No
matter whether fit to eat or not, whether hard and dry, or juicy and
tempting, this portion of the plant's produce is still the "fruit," and
made thus comprehensive, the term becomes an exceedingly convenient
one. The peculiarity of the leaves is that the two sides, or the portions

Leaves of Elm -tree.

separated by the midrib or spine, are not only of two different sizes, as
happens also in the beech, but that the bases of the two sides spring
from different points. A few examples of similar structure occur in
other families of plants, but it is nowhere so conspicuous as in the elm.
The lateral veins proceed in straight and parallel lines (sometimes fork-
ing a little), right away to the margin, as in trees of the oak-tribe ; the
margins are deeply and sharply serrated, and the apex runs out to a
fine point. Sometimes there is a second projection, which is thrown to
one side, making it appear as if we had a leaf and a half combined into
a single blade. Ordinarily, the surface is rough, though in some
varieties quite smooth ; in autumn the whole substance changes to a
uniform though rather subdued yellow, and for some time, dui'ing the

THE ELM. 41

year's tranquil evening, bathed in the beautiful light of the declining
sun, the tree presents a cheerful though never a gorgeous spectacle.

It is early in spring, perhaps, when the elm is in flower, that the eye ^
is most attracted to its botanical traits. Often as early as Lent, and
certainly by April, the twigs seern covered with hard black knots, some-
thing like ill-strung beads. Presently, in calm forenoons, when the
daffodils open their golden cups, and the almond and the mezereon
cover their bare branches with sweet pink bloom, reminding us of those
happy little children of genius who before they have been to school, and Y
become leafy with book-knowledge, play forth verses, and song, and
Art, — producing, like the birds in spring, not from instruction, but
because they cannot help ; — presently, while these livelier sweet sights
invite our hearts, the dark elm-knots ako expand, and then we have
dense round clusters of tender vases, tinted brown, and purple, and
green, in delicate intermixture, while in the midst are lifted up stamens
and a ruddy pistil that seems clipped out of fairy velvet. So abundant
are these pretty flowers, and so deep and vinous is the hue, that when
the sunbeams fall on the tree, it seems almost to purple the surround-
ing air. Not a leaf, not an opening leaf-bud, is to be discerned while
the tree is in bloom, so that between our eyes and the pale sky there is
nothing but twig and bloom. Talk not of flowers as born only of the
summer. In the dreariest and coldest seasons that precede there are
always plenty. It is not that flowers are wanting, but that we have
not yet quite learned that seeing, like conversation, is one of the Fine
Arts, the principles of which come by nature, but which requires culture
quite as *much as our capacity for writing or working out a sum in
arithmetic.

By the time that the leaves are completing their green promise,
mingled with them in countless numbers, are the fruits into which the
pistils have ripened. Now the ruddy fur is entirely gone, and we have
flat green circular plates with a notch at the summit,' and a seed em-
bedded in the centre, the whole seeming an image in little of those
ancient shields that had a boss in the middle. Hanging upon the tree
they seem green hop-clusters gone astray; when they fall to the ground,
they lie thick as the chaff on a threshing-floor. Showiness in the detail
of its parts, the elm is thus not gifted with : yet the aggregate makes
iiuicuds, and is it not by the aggregate of our nature that we ourselves
desire to be judged ? Partly, perhaps, because of this little pretension
on the part of the elm to floral beauty, the ancient Italian gardeners
selected it as a living prop for their vines, giving to the tree which

42 THE ELM.

nature had left with so little glow of ornament the most exquisite beauty
that art could superadd. For nothing can be more charming than a
tree twined over and festooned with the many-tendrilled vine, every leaf
a model of elegance in form, and every bunch the beau-ideal of a
glorious fruit. Mid all the varied and graceful uses to which the foliage
of trees has been applied in Art, — the palm-leaf to form the capital of
the Egyptian pillar, ivy to help in the stone foliage of the Gothic
cathedral, none perhaps have been more constant, as none have been
more popular, than the use of the vine- trail. "Vignettes" are so called
because all such little pictures were at one time surrounded by an
engraved vine-wreath, in classical language called viticula. The selec-
tion of the elm for the purpose above-mentioned gives occasion to very

Fruit of Elm-tree.

frequent allusion to the practice by the ancient poets, as by Virgil over
and over again in the Georgics and the Pastorals. It would seem that
in those days, as in the present, lovers forgot their occupations while
thinking of the beloved, for thus does Corydon chide himself when he
wakes to the consciousness that his appeals are vain : —

Ah, Corydon ! Corydon, qua te dementia cepit ?
Semiputata tibi frondos& vitis in ulmo est.

"Ah, Corydon! Corydon, what love-fever hath enslaved thee ? Half-
pruned is thy vine that mantles in the leafy elm ! " Like a wise man,
he decides to resume his legitimate occupations*, "to weave, of osiers
and pliant rushes, such implements as his work requires : if this Alexis
disdains thee, thou shalt yet find another."

All the preceding remarks apply to the noble tree* popularly known
as the elm, and by botanists called the Small-leaved elm and the London
elm, and classically Ulmus campestris. It is this one also which, in the
south of England, has given its name to one or two " Elmtons" or

THE ELM. 48

"Elm-towns," another circumstance indicating its probably exotic
origin, since names of places founded upon that of the elm are very
rare, while names of towns and villages founded on that of the oak and
other undoubted natives are quite frequent. There is one kind of elm
which is acknowledged to be indigenous — that one called by botanists
Ulmus montana, and popularly distinguished as the wych-elm. In all
characters except the technical ones found in the shape of the leaf, and
in the structure of the flowers and fruit, this is a perfectly dissimilar
tree. Instead of being lofty, erect, and with many tiers of columns
that alternately lose and disclose themselves among the foliage, this one
is comparatively low in stature, and the tree is disposed more to the
spreading or horizontal mode of growth : consequently it never attains
the handsome figure of the campestris ; it is unsuited for avenues and
colonnades, and takes its place better among the middle-class forest-
inhabitants. Planted singly, well-grown individuals have, nevertheless,
a beauty which is not to be ignored. The leaves are many times larger
than those of its loftier relative, and are disposed in so elegant a
manner along the twigs as to give the branches the appearance of
enormous "pinnate leaves," or such as are formed after the manner of
those of the Robinia. The long and curving lines produced by these,
and the amplitude of surface, constitute attributes such as few other
trees present, and redeem the wych-elm from any charge of absolute
inferiority. The name, which is a singular one, and is often misspelled
"witch," from some confusion of ideas as to the wych-elm and the
mountain-ash, — a tree from time immemorial associated with witch-
craft,— signifies a box or chest, and refers to the ancient use of the
wood for the purposes of the rough cabinet-maker. Chaucer spells it
"wiche," and by Sir John Mandeville the name is applied to the Ark
of the Covenant, which, as he says " Titus ledde with him to Rome."
It was also used in the sense of coffin: and coffins, to this day, it may
be well to add, are largely made of the wood of the elm. The wych
elm is the species that predominates in the north of England, as in the
south the prevailing species is the campestris. The two forms abound
equally in flowers, but the wych-elm is much more ready to ripen its
fruit, and the description above given of the latter product pertains
perhaps more emphatically to it. Herein again we have a curious bit
of collateral evidence as to the campestris not being aboriginal to Eng-
land. For it is inconsistent with the beautiful harmony of nature that
a tree or plant should be located in a spot where the climate would be
opposed to its free multiplication by seed cast from its own boughs.

44 THK ELM.

Such multiplication occurs in the case of the wych-elm ; but very
sparingly or not at all, in England, in that of the stately small-leaved
one. With all their willingness to accommodate themselves to new
soils and to new countries and latitudes, there is of course a limit to
the endurance of a plant, and we must not be surprised if, when a tree
is brought from a far southern country, as the campestris probably was,
either by the Romans or the Crusaders, it should be unable so to
harden its nature as to ripen fruit with regularity, and so easily and
steadfastly as to propagate itself without the aid of man, who trans
ported it from its birthplace.

After all, it is by no means certain that the wych-elm is a distinct
species. No less than seven different varieties of elm are distinguished
by the analytical school of botanists. Two species, the campestris and
the montana, seem sufficient, and to include all the others that have
been proposed ; and even these, as we say, are perhaps resolvable into
a single one. The great question of the present day with naturalists,
" What is a species?" seems further from solution than ever. Perhaps
the wisest course is to take things as we find them, and be content
with their beauty and their grace, their strength and their utilities.

45

THE LIME.

No tree indigenous to Great Britain presents so large a variety of
pleasing features as the Lime. Less robust than the oak and chesnut ;
inferior in stature to the "elm and fir, and in umbrageousness surpassed
by the beech, in its own intrinsic and peculiar qualities this beautiful
production of nature is nevertheless on a par with all, and among trees
is the analogue of that happy condition of body which the Greeks
denominated eva-apKoy, — neither fat nor lean, but gracefully intermediate.
In the Lime, too, we are reminded of that other elegant intellectual habit
of the ancient dwellers by the blue JSgean, which led them to apply to
massive and vigorous plants the epithet of "male," and to delicate and
tender ones of similar profile and physiognomy, the corresponding and
very expressive one of "female," The Greeks had but the faintest idea
of the existence in plants of sex ; the clear knowledge of this most
wonderful truth belongs indeed to the last two centuries. They had
sufficient appreciation, nevertheless, of the universal dualism of nature,
to speak of things in a certain vague and general manner as masculine
and feminine ; and hence to this day, and every day, we have in use
the pretty names "Filix-mas" and "Filix-foernina," or shield-fern and
lady-fern. Whatever learned nomenclators may choose to call them,
Aspidium or Lastraa, Asplenium or Athyrium, these beloved old names
will never die, but live for ever, like the green plumes to which they
are bound. Filix-mas in the sweet recesses of the woodland, making
great circles of curving leaves that remind us of the war-feathers upon
the head of an Indian chief; Filix-temina by the side of the waterfall,
and where streams bubble and gurgle, and the forget-me-nots put on
their turquoises, — what thousands of pleasing moments have these two
admirable plants supplied to man and woman, after whom they were
baptised ; — what thousands, too, of happy moments will they yet provide ;
and though mostly through their own original and immortal spell — •
that harpooning power which such excellent beauty as theirs always
possesses — not alone will it be through this, but mediately through
their names, which attract and give life where "brake" and "spleen-
wort" are feeble and voiceless.

7

46 THE LIME.

In the Lime, we say, the thought of this fine old habit of the classical
ages is awakened, and not less forcibly than that of the felicitous Greek
adjective ; for the lime is one especially of the feminine class of trees.
The oak, the elm, the chesnut, the beech, are masculine in contour
and quality ; the lime, the birch, the ash, are, like the acacia, no less
emphatically of feminine look and attributes. Wanting the light tresses
of the acacia, the most feminine of all trees ; wanting the white limbs
of the " lady-of-the-woods," the lime is still fashioned after the sweet
ideal which the others disclose in leaf and stem ; and if we cannot single
out, in a mechanical and prosaic manner, a speciality which shall at
once decide its claim to be placed in the feminine section, that comes
of the perfect manner in which the qualities of this beautiful tree are
intermingled and adjusted.* Is it not just so with a true woman, —
the ultimate and crowning perfection of all those amiable features and
qualities which in plants and flowers have a sweet foreshining ? For
here the heart is appealed to and satisfied, not alone by red and white,
such as an artist can apply ; not alone by gentle demeanour, which may
be practised for the stage ; not alone either by kindly words and fair
courtesies and generosities, but by that matchless combination of all
these, and many more things, for which there is only one name, — a
true woman.

Botanically considered, the Lime-tree is less known as a tree of the
woods and forests than of parks, pleasure-grounds, and gardens. It is
very frequent also as an ornament of squares and open spaces in towns
and cities, as witness those delightful avenues past which the visitor makes
his way towards Bristol Cathedral. In the woods, however, occurs,
and in some parts of England very abundantly, a form of this tree with
much smaller and thicker leaves, the green of which is at the same time
considerably darker, and which is usually distinguished by authors as
the Tilia parvifolia, the lime of the park and garden bearing the
name of Tilia Europaa. In gardens and arboretums is likewise met
with a third form, technically distinguished as the Tilia yrandifolin,
the leaves being very considerably larger, 'and remarkably pale and
downy upon the under-surface. Whether these three forms be distinct
" species," let those pronounce who can define what a species is. It is
sufficient for all ordinary and useful purposes to regard them as strongly -

* In speakiiig of the Lime as a " feminine '' tree, of course we do not mean that,
like the female plants of willows and poplars, it is female in sex. Every blossom,
and consequently every individual tree, is in the most perfect sense bisexual, every
blossoai having its own pistil and many stamens.

THE LIJIE.

accentuated utterances of a single idea, and with this understanding
alone is it correct perhaps to speak of the Europaa as a native of our
own island. In any case, the Eurojjaca has been in England so long as
now to have become perfectly naturalised ; and the grandifolia, though
far less abundant, and at present still possessing the aspect of a guest,
will no doubt become so likewise in the course of another century.
Centuries, though they express a great deal in the history of human
life, simply mark spacious periods in the chronology of trees. All three
forms correspond pretty nearly in general figure. The tree is symme-
trical, with a solid but rather short trunk ; the general outline, viewing
it from a distance, is roundish or ovoid, and in aged individuals, the
lower branches, which are then often very massive, are prone to bend to
the earth, the extremities resting upon the grass, so as to form a green
canopy or natural tent, after the manner of certain varieties of other
trees that are styled "weeping." A lime of this description stands
upon the lawn at Oulton Park, Cheshire, and is justly esteemed one of
the most striking and beautiful trees in the whole county. When
favoured by soil and situation, the dimensions that the lime can attain
are prodigious. At Moor Park, there are, or were a few years ago,
some individuals of remarkable magnificence, the head of one being
more than 120 feet in diameter, and the stature more than 100 feet.
The trunk of this tree is in circumference no less than eight yards ! As
regards the possible longevity of the lime, what this is may be judged
from the fact that at Trous, in the Grisons, there existed, in 1798, a
lime which was celebrated as far back as A.D. 1424, and the age of
which, in 1798, could not have been less than 580 years.

The particular features of the Lime are found in the crowding of the
heart of the tree with brushwood when somewhat advanced in life ; in
the buds, in the shape of the leaves, in the flowers, the honey, and the
fruit. Lest in referring to the " fruit" there should arise any miscon-
ception, and the sour-juiced " lime" of the West Indies be thought of,
let it be understood, before we go further, that that invaluable little
lemon is the produce of -an entirely different tree, a first cousin of the
orange and the citron. Let it also be mentioned here, that the genuine
and original name of the tree we are considering is not Lime, but Line,
or more properly, Linden, — a name referring to the use of the tough
bark for making mats and cordage. Under the name of " bass," or
"bast," gardeners use vast quantities of this material for tying up plants.
Were the tree always called by its much more elegant and poetical name
of Linden, — Chaucer's own name for it on two occasions at least, —

48 THE LIME.

confusion would never arise. Even "teil," the name under which it
is mentioned in the Old Testament (if the Hebrew be rightly translated),
and which is a modification of Tilia, would be better than the barbarism,
unfortunately now too deeply established for eradication, which requires
us to write m instead of n. What may be the origin and signification
of the name Tilia itself, is obscure. The word occurs in Virgil and
other authors of old Rome ; but by the Greeks this tree was called
<pi\vpa. Virgil's allusions are to the honey yielded so abundantly by
the flowers, and to the value of the timber for purposes where lightness
is a great merit. Hence his expression " tilia} lenes," the smooth-
grained lindens. In our own times the wood of the lime-tree is
valued chiefly for its use to the carver. Grinling Gibbons, the most
celebrated wood-carver this country has produced, usually employed it
for his more delicate and elaborate work, specimens of which, nearly
two hundred years old, are preserved at Windsor Castle, at Chatsworth,
and in St. Paul's Cathedral, the lines sharp as when they came from
his dextrous fingers. Architects find it serviceable for models of
intended buildings ; the makers of piano-fortes also use it for sounding-
boards, since this wood does not warp with the changes of the
atmosphere.

The peculiarity referred to in respect of the twiggy thicket in the
centre of limes that have attained maturity, is one not observable in
any other British tree. So dense is the mass, that to climb a full-grown
lime is nearly impossible. That which renders the tree inaccessible to
boys and men converts it, however, into an asylum for little birds, and
beautiful is it to observe how, when chased by a hawk or other enemy,
the fugitives take refuge in the tangle. No doubt a similar asylum is
provided in many other ways by the kindness of nature, which means,
of course, the goodness of Him who takes care even of the sparrows ;
but it is in the lime that, as a large tree, we are made most powerfully
sensible of the precaution for their safety. I do not know anything in
nature that can give more delight to a kindly and loving heart than
the contemplation of its safeguards. Food, drink, warmth, sunshine,
fresh air, seem to come almost as a matter of course. Except under
occasional and exceptional conditions and circumstances, of these things
there is always plenty ; but asylums, places of security and retreat,
have to be specially considered and prepared. Rarely, however, do we
see the preparation set forth conspicuously. As a rule, that beautiful
primitive law of the world and all its contents, that nothing shall exist
for itself alone, but always for the sake, at the same time, of some other

THE LIME. 49

thing, which shall be the happier and the richer for it, — as a rule, I say,
that beautiful law is here again exemplified and declared, and even the
weed and unconsidered wild-flower, things that seem useless, become
houses of refuge. See how the little fishes hide their silver coats
among the water-flags ! See how the lizards of the seaside sandhills,
emerald-green and tawny-grey, agile as thought, quick-eyed and docile
as love, dart to the speary grass that grows like a mimic wheat-field in
those wild and trackless deserts! "Deserts" did we say ? When a
thousand forms of life, brilliant beetles, cased in armour of bronze and
crimson ; fairy-like butterflies, whose wings are azure above, and beneath
dotted with jewels ; birds that lift up cheering voices, and lay down
pretty feathers ; — when the golden -flowered and fragrant galiurn, and
the milk-white cups of the grass-of-Parnassus, make a desert, then let
the haunt of the lizards receive this name — in England always thought-
less, and usually unjust.

By its Buds the lime-tree may be told in earliest spring. While
those of the oak are ovoid and amber-tinted, and those of the beech
like little brown spikes, those of the lime are short and thick, and of a
decided reddish-colour. They nicely illustrate the facility with which
accurate botanical knowledge may be secured at seasons when many
people think that botany is impossible, because there are "no flowers."
True, it is by the flowers and fruit that the last and most intimate
knowledge is gained; but to neglect the buds and other early and
anticipative parts, is to behave as if the study of man consisted only in
the contemplation of his maturity, and the golden preparations that
make childhood were unworthy of note. Nothing can be known, even
approximately, unless it be watched during development. The best part
of the history of life is that of its changes, for wherever life is normal
and progressive, as all life was intended to be, every change must needs
be marked by something new, and relatively more beautiful than any
event or state that has yet been registered. Life that is not so
characterized, is miscalled ; it is decay, and not vitality, — the grave that
is ahead, and not the fruitage life was always intended to receive.
Think back only the last seven years of your existence ! Can he who
during the lapse of those seven years has not gained alike in faith in
the Infinite Wisdom and Goodness, in love of the beautiful in God's
works and the human heart, in the estimation of his friends, and in his
own self-respect, be said to have lived ? I trow not. Changes he must
needs have experienced, but -changes that do not elevate must needs
degrade.

50

THE LIME.

The Leaves of the linden form one of its prime characteristics.
They are simple and undivided, in general outline roundish, but with
the extremity long drawn-out, and at the base remarkably unsymmetrical.
While in the elm (the leaf of which is also remarkable for its want of
symmetry at the base), the two halves spring from different points, here,
on the contrary, in the lime, they spring from the same point, but one
of them is much larger than the other, and a curve is produced back-
wards, or in the direction of the petiole. Hence we get in the lime-tree
the first example of that most elegant configuration which culminates in
the leaves of the Begonias, and in the leaflets of the exquisite plants
called Epimedium : so constantly does nature always announce before-
hand that which by-and-bye she intends to show forth illustriously.
Everything below the highest form is a prelude and a proem ; the melody
tried first in a minor key. The stalks which sustain the leaves are
longer than in most other trees, and to this is no doubt owing much of
that ease and lightness of aspect which places the lime among the
feminine trees. The leaves are smooth also, and glabrous or nearly so,

Leaf and Flowers of Lime-tree.

except in the grandifolia, but in the angles of the veins, upon the under-
surface, may be observed curious little tufts of light-brown velvet.
Spring is not long without them, though they are by no means among
the earliest, and like several others which delay their advent, they are
ancareful to remain to the end. The end, in truth, they never see, for,
though exceptional individuals may retain their foliage till November,
as a rule, the lime leads the way in surrender to the cold ; the track
of the yellow-sandalled autumn is found first amid its boughs.

Those virgin leaves, of purest vivid green,

Which charm'd ere yet they trembled on the trees,

Now cheer the sober landscape in decay,

The lime first fading .

THE LIME. 51

Next, as to the Flowers. These, in the linden, differ materially
from those of trees that bear catkins, and correspond closely with such
blossoms as those of the apple and pear, wanting only in gaiety of tint.
A glorious spectacle is it to go beneath a linden in full flower, and
look up. This is the only way in which its amazing wealth of bloom
can be discovered and understood, for such is the disposition of the
foliage and of the flower-peduncles, that at a little distance, the tree
seems to be no more than prettily dappled or variegated ; viewed, on
the other hand, from below, it is a very heaven of fragrant honey-cups.
That favoured characteristic of the violet which has made this flower,
with the poets, the emblem of modesty, is not more marked in the little
hedge-row blossom than in the deep-hearted and lady-like linden, which
surpasses, too, all trees that grow in England, in benevolence to the
bees. Who, in regard to this, does not remember the good old (Ebalian
in Virgil ? — "Here planting among the shrubs, white lilies, vervain,
and esculent poppies, he equalled, in his contented mind, the wealth of
kings. The first was he to pluck the rose of spring, and the first to
gather the fruits of autumn ; and even when sad winter split the rocks
with frost, and bridled the current of the streams with ice, yes, in that
very season was he cropping the locks of the soft acanthus.-- Lindens
had he, and pines, in great abundance ; he, therefore, was the first to
abound with prolific bees, and to strain the frothy honey from the well-
pressed combs, "f

Our English poets freely refer to the honey of the lime, especially
the class of writers represented in Mrs. Hemans and L.E.L. Cowper
adverts to it —

The lime at dewy eve
Diffusing odours.

And though not in relation to this particular circumstance, we have the
tree mentioned also by Lord Byron, in " Lara." Prose writers like-
wise not unfrequently introduce the lime, as much for this reason, no
doubt, as for any other, when they would suggest ideas of graceful
form and of a delicately- scented atmosphere ; Fenelon, for example, in
his description of the enchanted island of Calypso. To a mind of

* Several plants, with the ancients, bore the name of Acanthus. That one to
which the name is here applied, appears to have heen that beautiful and curious
variety of the common holly which, instead of bearing bracelets of scarlet berries,
produces yellow ones. That it was certainly a berried and evergreen shrub, appears
from the allusions in Eclogue, iv. J20 ; and in Georgic ii. 119.

+ Georgic iv. 131 — 141. See also iv. 183, where the bees "feed on the glowing
crocus and the luscious lime."

S2 THE LIMfi.

pure aud elegant tastes, the lime always appeals powerfully, and
perhaps it would be no error of judgment to deem preference for it
One of the instincts of an amiable and tender disposition, such as
admires the grand and stately, but still best loves the little and the
pretty. When the bees have access to large numbers of limes, so that
the storage in their waxen cities has been derived principally from this
source, the flavour and quality of the honey are particularly good, and
quite as marked as when these creatures feed extensively upon the
heather, or upon the aromatic plants of the Labiate kind, to which
latter is owing the peculiar and exquisite flavour of the honey of
Narbonne. In some parts of Lithuania there are forests composed
almost exclusively of lime-trees. The bees gather their harvest with
rapidity, and the combs being almost immediately removed from the
hives, the flavour is preserved pure, and the inhabitants realise large
sums by the sale of what the insects have so assiduously collected.

The whole subject of the production of honey by flowers is very
pleasing. There are few probably by which a less or greater quantity
is not yielded, since the presence of this substance appears to serve as
an attraction to many little creatures of tender wing, who, rifling the
blossom, and rambling about in it, help to convey the pollen from the
stamens to the pistil, and thus unconsciously help forward the great
function 'of reproduction. How beautiful are these various steps in
the exquisitely- adjusted economies of nature ! The earth, while shone
on to-day by the self-same stars which delighted the eyes of the first
members of mankind, is enriched also with the descendants of the
identical trees and flowers which excited their curiosity and delighted
their affections ; and descendants of the now existing individuals will no
doubt carry on for ever, in one unbroken stream, the loveliness that every
summer renews. How is this effected ? Solely and absolutely through
the instrumentality of the' apparatus we call the " flower." The flower,
in turn, needs that its parts shall be lightly touched, as when the
musician runs his hand over the harp-strings ; they who touch so
tenderly are the unconsidered little visitors and dwellers whose presence
is often thought an intrusion ; and they, it would appear, are invited
and sustained by the nectar that lies in the inmost heart of the flower.
Usually the honey is not placed in any special receptacle, but lies in the
base of the blossom, round about the feet of the stamens and pistil,
just as we see green mosses forming a pretty encircling bank round the
base of the trunk of an old tree in the wood. There are plenty of
examples, however, of such special cups or vases for it, and these are

THE LLUE. 53

of the most beautiful and curious diversity. In the crown -imperial the
vases are like round white eyes, six in every flower, or one to every petal ;
in the grass-of-Parnassus they constitute the palms of most elegant little
hand-like bodies, every one of which is provided with an uneven number
of fingers, usually either eleven or thirteen, so that the central one shall
stand higher than the others, which gradually diminish in height as
they are further and further from the middle. In the aconite, again, the
honey-cups resemble two little birds, and in the hellebore they remind
us of certain bivalve sea-shells. The lime-tree is one of those plants
in which no special provision is made for the care of the honey: in
botanical language, although brimming with nectar, the flowers are
unprovided with "nectaries." Keen was the appreciation of the old
naturalist who adopted this classic term into the language of phytology.
The pleasant beverage feigned in the most ancient times to be the
drink of the gods, might well have its appellation transferred to that
which gives new charm to the loveliness of the flower. Virgil's
immortal description of the bees must furnish us yet once again with an
illustration : — " Some address themselves to the gathering of food, and
by fixed agreement have their occupation in the fields ; some deposit
within the inclosure of the hive Narcissus' tears,* and clammy gum
from the bark of trees, for the foundation of the combs ; then build
into arches the viscid wax. These, on the other hand, bring up and
tend the younger ones, the hope of the nation ; others again, distend
the cells with liquid nectar, "f

One other circumstance connected with the lime deserves mention :
it is one of the trees upon which the mistletoe occasionally grows. The
limes in the Home Park, Windsor, are, or were a few years ago, richly
adorned with it ; there are other examples in Bushy Park, and in the
avenue at Hampton Court ; and at Penshurst Park, in Kent, with
doubtless very many more, in different parts of the country. History
connecting the mistletoe so especially "with the oak, it is well to know

* The flowers of the daffodil and other species of the genus Narcissns are pro-
vided, as all who know these plants will recollect, with a peculiar cup in the centre.
These cups, mythology tells us, contain the tears of the fabled youth whose name
they bear, —

Narcissus pining o'er the untainted spring,

and are beautifully alluded to by Milton, in Lycidas, —
Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffodillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureat hearse where Lycid lies.
+ Georgic, iv. 158 — 164.

8

54 I Hh. LIME.

that this famous parasite grows upon nearly a score of other kinds of
tree, including the maple, the ash, the poplar, the apple and pear, the
hawthorn, the white-beam, the service, the willow, the hazel-nut, the
Bobinia, the holly, and the walnut. In summer we seldom notice the
mistletoe. Concealed by the foliage of the tree it inhabits, not until
autumn has stripped all away, and winter has rendered the woods trans-
parent, and the splendours of the ivy and holly are disclosed, do we
discover its presence. Then how beautiful the contrast of its innumer-
able green quills and glistening pearls, with the dark-brown armour
around and below, — all of those stalwart foresters that lies open to view.
Then, too, how beautifully is suggested to us the value and excellence
of deciduous things, for were all mantles to remain for ever, how much
should we remain unconscious of! Light and summer, that reveal so
much, hide even more. Darkness, that we think so dreadful, takes us
away from earth to the heavenly lamps, and that which till now was
silent, begins to speak.

55

THE POPLAR AND THE WILLOW.

INNUMERABLE phenomena in nature testify to its harmony with man
and all that pertains to him. Every circumstance of his animal life,
from the cradle to the edge of the grave, is in one way or another
mirrored and duplicated ; no matter of surprise is it, then, that at every
turn we are met by examples of close relationships among Trees such as
are calculated to remind us of the ties which constitute families among
ourselves. One of the special occupations of the botanist is to deter-
mine the affinities that plants bear to one another ; to notice, that is to
say, the resemblances which subsist among them, and to bring together,
as far as pen and paper, and the hortus siccus and the Botanic Garden
will allow, those which most nearly resemble in essentials. This is the
"delightful task" for which, after rearing "the tender shoot," he finds
a long life-time give opportunity for only a very partial fulfilment. It
is pure and enduring enjoyment nevertheless, since every day and hour
he learns more and more the significance of that beautiful word Unity.

By reason of these concordances and agreements it is well that in our
present survey the Poplar- tree and the Willow should be taken together.
Members of a great family distinguished from all others by producing
a portion, if not the whole, of their flowers, in those pretty pendulous
clusters called " catkins," these two are still isolated and characterised
by a peculiarity of their own. While all other species of " Amentiferse"
have their stamens and pistils produced from different buds upon the
same tree, these two races, the poplars and the willows, have their two
kinds of flowers not only developed from different buds, but the two
sets of buds are confined to different trees ! In a word, to adopt the
technical language of the schools, poplars and willows are " dioecious,"
while all other trees that bear catkins, or those at least which belong
to the Amentiferae, are " monoecious." These terms were contrived by
Linnaeus in that happy spirit of poetry which gives force and feeling
to all true science, the idea conveyed in them being that trees are
houses, the inhabitants of which, like human beings, are male and

56

THE POPLAR AND THE WILLOW.

female, the monoecious kinds answering to households such as contain
representatives of both sexes, while the dioecious kinds are noted for
their inhabitants being of only one sex. There are plenty of herbaceous
plants which illustrate the same economy, especially in the class
denominated " sedges," and of these also there are examples both of
the monoecious and of the dioecious structure. Some botanists are

Willow.— ^Female flowers.

Willow. — Male flowers.

inclined to consider these plants, poplars, willows, sedges, and the like,
of higher position in the scale of nature than such as are bisexual, or
formed like the apple or rose. If resemblance to the animal economy
in this respect be paramount, of course there can be no demur ; but
resemblance to animal powers and functions exists in plants under so
many different aspects, and is often so rich and startling, and in a
different way every time, that no particular plant can be selected without
ignoring equally just claims by many others. What, for instance,
becomes of the sensitive-plant, with its marvellous susceptibility to
touch; what of those strange vegetable carnivora, the Dionasa and the
sundew, the Nepenthes and the Sarracenia, — plants which are so
organized as to capture insects, and remind us of predatory birds and
quadrupeds ? No one plant, no race of plants, is in all particulars
preeminent, nor is any one kind nearest to man, or even to animal life.
Nature is everywhere the echo and solution of its lord and master,
therefore touches him, in its phenomena, at every point.

THE POPLAR AND THE WILLOW. 57

Not only do the poplar and the willow agree, among the Amentiferae,
in being dioecious, and thus differ from all their congeners; their fruit
or seed is also perfectly distinct from that of any other species of the
family, and by this alone, in the time of its ripeness, may they be
identified. While the oak, the beech, and the hazel, yield some kind
of acorn or nut, round as an egg, or curiously angled ; and while the
birch and the alder supply, as it were, a mimic cone, imitating, afar
off, the sculptured produce of the pine-tree ; these two, the willow and
the poplar, prepare elegant clusters of little capsules, from which, as
soon as they burst, is discharged an immense quantity of the whitest

Poplar flowers.

vegetable silk. Unfortunately, the fibre is so short as to render it
unavailable for manufacturing into thread, or yarn such as would be
adapted to the requirements of the weaver ; in its usefulness to give
softness to cushions and pillows it is nevertheless unequalled and
unapproached. The clusters of poplar seed-capsules are exactly of the
figure and general appearance of bunches of currants, though usually
much longer, attaining ordinarily four or five inches. While green,
every capsule is perfectly spherical, bursting in due time, by a vertical
and even crack, into two little halves. The capsules of the willows, on the
other hand, are densely packed ; individually they are conical, and, when
they burst, the two canoe-shaped and sharply- pointed halves are grace-
fully recurved. There is a further distinction found in the clusters of
stamen-flowers. The little scales by which the stamens are shielded
are in the willows smooth-edged, but in the poplars torn and ragged ;
and while in willows the stamens seldom exceed two in number, in
poplars they are at least eight, and sometimes many more.

These delicate distinctions are rendered necessary in Botany by the
frequently strong resemblances which subsist in the architecture and in
the profile of plants, and judging by which alone, we are liable to be
led into error. Moreover, by carefully observing them, we find that
many things which apparently have little connection, prove in the end
to be most intimately related, and a capital hint is offered as to pre-

68 THE POPLAR AND THE WILLOW.

cipitancy in decision, with regard to matters far more noble and vital
than trees. How common, for instance, the belief that the name of
"poplar" applies legitimately only to that tall and spire-like and most
unsociable tree which is everywhere seen lifting itself in suburban
gardens, or forming a kind of colonnade in the hedgerow. Yet this is
only one out of many kinds of poplars, and neither the most important
kind nor, strange to say ! of the same antiquity as the others. The
" Lombardy poplar," by which name this spire-shaped one should
always be called, is only a variety of the good old-fashioned "Black."
Like the spire- shaped variety of the common yew, and the similar
variety of the furze-bush, it is a sport of nature in comparatively recent
times, showing over again, how full alike of play and flexibility is that
beautiful old "spirit of the woods" which the ancient poets half-deified,
converting the trees into a sisterhood of dryads. Though by no means
a pleasing object when standing alone, the Lombardy poplar, judiciously
intermingled with other trees, gives an air that no other so well supplies,
conferring upon the grove that same beautiful addition which is given
to the view of a distant city by its towers and spires. Contrasts lie at
the heart of all our enjoyments, and it is only by such intermixtures of
umbrageousness and slender loftiness that the beau ideal of sylvan charm
is originated in wood and forest.

The poplars botanically so called, comprise not only this common
spire-like tree and its widely-branching parent, the "Old English
black," but also the abele and the aspen. Besides these European,
or at all events Asiatic forms, there are several species indigenous to
North America. All, except the latter, agree in the very curious
peculiarity of having their petioles or leaf- stalks laterally compressed at
the extremity next to the blade. Hence arises that pretty and incessant
fluttering which has made a proverb of the aspen, and which finds
mention even in the sacred records, though apparently connected,
through a mistranslation, with an entirely different tree. " When
thou hearest a sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry-trees,"
should by rights be "in the tops of the poplar-irees." Placed along-
side of the leaves of their near relations, the willows, poplar leaves are
found to be, as a rule, scarcely longer than broad, where widest ; the
leaves of willow-trees, on the other hand, as a rule, excel considerably
in length. It is worthy of notice too that while the leaves of poplar
trees are exceedingly prone to become vegetable skeletons, lying as they
do, in this condition, often by hundreds where poplar trees abound,
those of the willow decay in every part at once, and yield none of the

THE POPLAR AND THE WILLOW. 59

delicate tracery so remarkable in the others. Lastly, there is a curious
contrast in the aspiring tendency of the poplar and in the "weeping"
inclination, not only of the famous willow of Babylon, but in several
other representatives of the genus. The last-named feature has obtained
for the willow a place in the "Language of Flowers." When the poet
would picture sadness, he needs only to cite this drooping and sorrow-
ful tree ; the very name is a synonyme for grief beyond assuaging. How
deep the meaning, for instance, in the description of poor, forsaken,
desolated Dido, —

In such a night,

Stood Dido with a willow in her hand,
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love
To come again to Carthage.

In pictures such as these we have the sign of the true and immortal
Poet, who, without wordy delineation of the varied passions that may
fill the heart, presents to us, in a single phrase, a perfect idea of its
condition. Even the erect kinds of willow have none of that pretty
cheerfulness about them which belongs to most other trees. Although
the springing of the willows "by the water-courses" is used as an
illustration of gladness and prosperity, still they seem by nature
intended for association rather with times of mournfulness than of joy.
Possibly this may arise from their being so very generally located by
the water-side, on the banks of slow streams and rivers, where the
mind becomes attuned to melancholy, and the very reeds convey
utterances of dejection. Hence, it would appear, the very frequent
connection, both of the willow and the poplar, with events that have a
hue of trouble, in the legends that have been bequeathed to us by the
ancient fabulists. When the sisters of Phaeton, inconsolable for the
untimely end of their brother, were by the pitying deity transformed
into trees, poplars were made the memorial, and to this day, every
spring, the tears of those unhappy ladies reappear upon the opening
leaf-buds. It was upon a poplar that poor (Enone found the inscrip-
tion left by her faithless lover ; it is with a poplar that Virgil connects
his exquisite image of the nightingale robbed of her nest : —
Qualis populea mcerens Philomela suh umbra
Amissos queritur fetus, quos durus arator
Observaus nido implumes detraxit : at ilia
Flet noctem , ratnoque sedens miserabile carmen
Integrat, et mcestis late loca questibus implet.

"As the mourning nightingale within a poplar shade grieves for her
lost young, which the ruthless ploughman, espying in her nest, has

60 THE POPLAR AND THE WILLOW.

stolpn away unfledged. But she weeps throughout the night, and
seated on a bough, still renews her sorrowful song, and fills all the air
with piteous wailings."

Similarly, with the willow we find connected, among others, the
beautiful fable of Arethusa, whose bathing in a stream overhung with
these trees, mingled with poplars, led to the events that caused her
transformation into the spring which retains her name to the present
moment. Transferring our interest from the remote past to the
days of Hamlet, how beautifully again is the willow introduced in the
account of the death of Ophelia : —

" There is a willow grows ascant the brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream ;

*****

There on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds,

Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke ;

When down her weedy trophies, and herself,

Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,

And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up,

Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,

As one incapable of her own distress ;

Or like a creature native and indued

Within that element. But long it could not be,

Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay,

To muddy death."

The great botanical distinction between the willow and poplar,
compared with all other trees of ordinary occurrence, has been men-
tioned above. The discrimination of the particular kinds of willow is
not so easy, the species being numerous. The larger kinds, natives of
Great Britain, may be told by their very long and narrow leaves, taper-
ing to each extremity. In the common willow, Salixfragilis, so named
from the readiness with which the young branches break away from the
main bough, the leaves are green, without admixture of grey : in the
white willow, Salix alba, on the other hand, every leaf is clothed on
both surfaces with white and silky hairs, which give it the hoary
appearance alluded to it by the poets.

Besides these, there is the shining bay-leaved willow, Salir pentandra,
which has all the gloss and lustre of some fine evergreen, and exudes a
delightful aromatic odour, from glands along the edges of the leaves.
The large and yellow catkins contribute also to render this tree very
ornamental in early summer. The poplars are few in number, and at
once told by the shape and colour of their leaves. Those of the abele,

THE POPLAR AND THE WILLOW.

61

or white poplar, are angularly toothed or lobed, and covered upon the
under- surf ace with a grey and felty substance ; in the black poplar they
are perfectly glabrous, and nearly triangular, without angular lobes ; ia
the aspen they are likewise glabrous, but circular, or nearly so, and

White Poplar. Black Poplar. Aspen.

with coarse indentations. The epithet "black," it may be useful to
observe, is applied to the kind of poplar so designated not because of
actual nigritude in any part or portion, but as an antithesis to "white,"
the well-deserved epithet of the abele. A similar antithesis gives the

9

62

THE POPLAK AND THE WILLOW.

name of "white" to certain varieties of grapes; and of "black-thorn"
to the snowy-flowered sloe, the epithet in this latter case signifying
leafless, as opposed to leafy. Whether all three of the European
poplars be aboriginally and veritably British is, after all, not quite
decided. These trees extend so far to the East, and so early attracted
the attention of travellers and transplanters, that it is quite possible
they may have been introduced in the first place from Asia. Support
is furnished to this idea by the etymology of the name, which would
seem to be radically identical with "peepul," the name given in India

to the sacred fig, Ficus religwsa, and which latter would be extended to
the poplar because of the resemblance, as to general figure, in the leaf,
though the trees are not in any degree related in regard to structure.
The willows, that is to say, the "crack" willow, Salixfragilis, and
the white willow, Salix alba, are probably, in the full sense of the word,
indigenous. Our English climate suits these trees well, together with
the smaller kinds familiarly known as osiers and withies, which useful
contributions to the necessities of the basket-maker are chiefly furnished
by the Salix viminalis. How long basket-making from osiers has been
practised in our island, may be judged of from the fact that the very
word "basket," is, with a trifling difference in the spelling, the very

THE POPLAR AND THE WILLOW. 68

same that was used here two thousand years ago. No one after this
will demur to the osier, at all events, being native. The word in
question is one of the very few ancient British terms that have lived
into our own modern English. It is preserved, in its Celtic form, by
the Roman poet, Martial, one of whose epigrams, freely rendered, runs
as follows : —

From Britain's painted sons I came,
And "basket" is my barbarous name ;
But now I am so modish grown,
That Rome would claim me for her own !

The shields and coracles of the ancient Britons were also made of
wicker, osier-work having apparently been with this rude and simple
people just what papyrus-work was with the ancient Egyptians. It is
this self-same plant which, with the Salix Caprcea, and one or two
other species, has now for ages borne the name of "palm," or more
properly, " palm-willow," being usually in full bloom on Palm-Sunday,
and thus available for use where the ancient emblematic practice of
carrying or "strowing" palm- branches cannot be carried out with the
leaves of the genuine tree. The veritable palm is used upon the shores
of the Mediterranean ; as we recede northwards, other plants must
needs be substituted, and at last, in England, the palm-willow proves

efficient.

In Rome, upon Palm- Sunday,

They bear true palms ;
The cardinals bow reverently,

And sing old psalms.
Elsewhere those psalms are sung

'ilicl the olive branches ;
The holly-bough supplies their place

Among the avalanches !

So it continues, every different climate and country supplying for the
occasion some cheerful stalk of green or yellow, England in its turn
contributing the willow. Rosalind knew this tree when she entered
the house exclaiming — " See, what I have found upon a palm ! "

64

THE YEW.

IN strong contrast with all other trees indigenous to the British islands,
stands, by reason of its poisonous foliage, the sombre yew. Were not
a single example of deleterious properties to exist among our trees, it
would at least be in exception to the remarkable and significant rule
that everything in nature shall have its dreary side. Thank God, it is
left to OUT own option to turn from the darkness to the light, and to
shelter below branches that are not only innocent but liberal. Who
would expect that among grasses, the sweet pasture of innumerable
kine, and in their larger forms, the source of corn, there is yet one to
be found with the taint of poison in it ; and that abreast of the lilies
there is a flower freighted with death ? Such, however, is the fact, and
darnel and colchicum are but illustrations and prefigurements, in their
respective provinces, of the mournful truth that comes out so strongly
in the consideration of the yew. Not that the berries are poisonous,
for these, though viscid, and with no peculiarly fine flavour to recom-
mend them, may be eaten with impunity ; it is in the leaves that the
hurtful juices are contained, after the same manner as in the laurel, the
little plums produced by which are innocuous, though extract prepared
from the leaves is speedily fatal. Probably it is in some measure from
this poisonous quality that the yew has been so often associated with
death and churchyards ; —

Cheerless, unsocial plant, that loves to dwell
Midst skulls and coffins, epitaphs and tombs.

Remember, however, that it is man who has placed it in such localities.
Nature gives the yew a very different abiding-place from the cemetery,
and rightly viewed and understood, perhaps the yew may prove after
all, notwithstanding its possession of deadly sap, to be a tree that should
contribute ideas rather of cheerfulness than of mourning. Upon rugged
limestone scars and cliffs, where nothing else, save a little ivy, can
establish anchorage, the yew is often seen clinging, as if bound to the
^rock with clamps of iron. Well-nigh flattened against the perpendicular
face of the stone, and with the merest ledge or crevice for its feet, it

THE YEW. 65

holds itself unchanged for centuries, and is the most imposing picture
nature affords of imperturbable endurance. So, too, upon many a
remote hill-side, beaten and ravaged by tempests ; exposure to the wrath
of the elements seems congenial, and to live in the midst of perils, joy
and strength. Being an evergreen too, it contrasts finely with the
deciduous trees that ordinarily are not far off, or that circle it as com-
panions ; even with other evergreens it has a contrast such as no other
developes, since the young growth which makes its onward push in the
spring, is of the same unyielding tint as the oldest foliage.

Once a year, at least, we see all other evergreens decked with light
and pretty shades of verdure, indicating the flow of their annual tide of
life ; the yew, inexorable to the last, gives no register of the seasons,
and makes no comment on their lapse. Only for a brief period, when
the fruit, looking as if wrought of chalcedony, crimsons before the last
sunshine of the autumn, does the yew seem affected by nature's kind-
nesses and genialities. Instead of an emblem of death and sorrow, it
should stand, therefore, as the representative of intrepidity and the
impregnable, and I cannot but think that some such view of its true
significance must have actuated those who either laid the foundations of
their churches and abbeys close to existing yews, or who having raised
such buildings, then planted yew-trees close alongside. For what more
sublime picture of the endurance of God's kingdom could be selected,
or what emblem more exact of the immortality of man ? To this day
stand the three old yews beneath which the founders of Fountains
Abbey sat themselves down in rural council. Ages have passed away
since the sound of vespers fell from those beautiful aisles upon the ear
of the wayfarer who lingered to gather cowslips in the meads around,
or to note the tender blue of the innumerable forget-me-not, or to mark
the flow of the tranquil river, and its darting fishes ; — everything is
gone except the sweet and solemn requiem pronounced by ruin, —
everything except those grand old trees, which seem capable of witness-
ing the rise and fall of just such another fabric, were some architect to
tempt them with renewal of the old magnificence.

It may be useful and practically good to deem the yew an emblem of
death. We are taught here, as in a thousand other places, that it is
better to deem it an emblem of the changeless, that is to say, of Life.
Nothing is lost, and everything is gained, by letting nature speak to us,
whenever she will, of immortality. The lesson of death and decay is
too plainly and too constantly recited to make it needful that we should
go out of our way for illustrations ; much more should we refrain from

THE YEW.

converting symbols that are inherently suggestive of good into emblems
of what is only too familiar in its reality.

Botanically considered, the yew holds a place in nature shared by
only a small company. Plain and palpable as are the great classes and
families into which plants are resolvable by men of science, every one
of them a solar system as it were, in miniature, certain grand ideas of
structure constituting centres round which minor ones are disposed
planet-wise, — plain and palpable as are these great classes in regard to
their centres, and the mass of their elements, there are located upon
the frontiers of all, without exception, certain curious forms which give
a hand, so to speak, to either side. Just as whales link mammals to
fishes, — living in the ocean, like sharks and dolphins, yet suckling their
offspring after the manner of female quadrupeds ; just as bats connect
mammals again with birds; and just as those comical little creatures,
the armadillos, connect, still once more, the mammalia with the reptilian
races; — so among plants do certain strange organisms stand midway
between the especially great and obvious classes, and constitute the
bridges whereby all things are maintained as a unity. The Conifers, to
which the members of the yew-tree family stand as a kind of appendix,
have for one of their own ennobling functions this very duty of associating
forms otherwise unconnected. The stems, the branches, the style of
growth, the longevity, the succulent fruit, the beautiful timber of the
yew, link it at once, and with applause, to the foresters over which the
cedar presides, and which are to oaks and benches just what opulent
islands are to the continents they lie adjacent to; the flowers, on the
other hand, point a different way, and when we take that curious
Japanese member of the yew-tree group called the Sattsbteria, the leaves
are, on a great scale, the leaflets of the maiden-hair fern ! No one
examining the leaves of this remarkable tree could suppose otherwise
than that they belonged to a fern ; no one, looking at the substantial
woody boughs, could have a moment's doubt that the tree conformed,
so far, with the oak and walnut! The flowers of the yew itself are
inconspicuous in the extreme. They come out early in spring, usually
about March, and are so much hidden by the foliage as to be overlooked
by any except the curious interrogator. They are difficult, moreover,
of dissection, and the two sexes, male and female, are produced upon
different trees. Hence it is only upon certain individuals, or those
which develope female flowers, that the characteristic red berries are to
be discovered. In structure these pretty fruits are not very unlike the
acorn of the oak, only that instead of a hard and woody cup, the

THE YEW. 67

receptacle is succulent and bright red. That famous fruit of Australia
which is described by lovers of the marvellous and by the ignorant as
"a cherry with its stone upon the outside," is very nearly the same
thing as the yew-tree berry, only produced by a different tree. Botanists
call it Exocarpus.

The slow growth of the yew, being a part of its life-history, belongs,
like the flowers, to the botanical idea of the plant. To this is chiefly
owing the hardness and the smoothness of the wood, which for delicacy
and beauty of colouring is also excelled by few, the box alone, perhaps,
presenting a surface of greater evenness and polish. Yew is the most
esteemed of all our native woods for high-class turnery-work and for
inlaying. It has the recommendation also of being rarely or never
attacked by insects, guarded, as it were, like sandal-wood, by some
native objectionableness. Sections, both horizontal and vertical, con-
stitute truly beautiful objects for the parlour-museum, and form an
excellent nucleus for a collection of such things. When so much time
is devoted to " scrap-book" making and to stamp-collecting, useful up
to a certain point as such pastimes may be, it seems a pity that as
much leisure and activity should not be given to collections of wood-
sections, which endure for ever, are beautiful and varied as seashells,
and cost little more than the trouble of polishing. In bygone times
the wood of the yew-tree was famous among archers, and it is curious
to note that no less than three kings of this country have lost their lives
through its instrumentality. First, the ill-fated Harold, at the battle
of Hastings ; then, William Rufus, in the New Forest ; thirdly, Richard
Coaur de Lion, at Limoges. The battles of Cregy, Poictiers, and Agin-
court, were won through the energy of the yew-tree bowmen, and per-
haps the milder archery of the present day would be more successful
were the competitors to fall back upon the ancient material of their
thrice-ancient instrument. The rings indicating age are in general
very plainly seen in the yew, and form a striking illustration of the
marvellous antiquity the tree is witness to. We often hear of " railway -
time" and of " sidereal time;" the yew-tree helps to enforce upon us
the grandeur of the idea of "tree-time." The vast age attained by
individuals is accompanied, as would be looked for, by commensurate
bulk and girth. In the graveyard attached to Bucklaw church, about a
mile from Dover, there is, or was until recently, a yew with a trunk of
no less than 24 feet in circumference. In Tisbury churchyard, Dorset-
shire, there is another, now quite hollow, with an entrance gate on one
side, and measuring 37 feet in circumference ; while in the churchyard

68 THE YEW.

of Fortingal, Perthshire, stand the remains of one which before the
trunk fell in, and it became reduced to its present condition of little
more than shell, measured round about the incredible number of 56
feet. One of the most picturesque of our ancient yews ornaments the
churchyard of Darley Dale, Derbyshire.

No mention of the yew is made in Scripture, though there is reason
to believe that it anciently grew upon the mountains of Lebanon, if not
there still, since the tree extends far into central Asia. The Hebrew
word eres, translated "cedar" in the authorised version, would seem to
have been, like many other botanical terms occurring in holy writ, of a
wide and general sense, including not only the genuine cedar, Cedrus
Libani, but other species of the conifers suitable for building purposes,
and likewise the yew. Among the relics discovered at Nineveh it is
said that there are fragments of yew-tree wood, declared to be such by
the peculiar structure of the fibre, as seen under the microscope.
Truly does this marvellous instrument " cast light into the graves of
Time." Virgil uses the name pinus, in one place at least, to signify
timber-trees in general ; and the frugality practised by the ancients in
regard to the names of flowers and fruits would seem to give additional
weight to the opinion. Scarcely a dozen flowers are mentioned by the
ancient poets, including those of the Holy Land. The rose, the lily,
the violet, are spoken of ; but in all these, and in all the rest, the same
kind of collective idea seems to be held. When we read of the yew in
the classical poets, it is in the same spirit of dread and disrelish that
belongs to modern ones. Ovid, for example, selects this tree to mark
the place of descent into Tartarus — "Dismal yew shades the deep
declining way that, through labyrinths of shade and horror, leads to
Tartarus ; languid Styx exhaling continual clouds."

69

THE MAPLE AND THE SYCAMORE.

JUST as men have their periods of worldly success, or of public honour,
or of fame in art or in literature, at very various ages (showing that
there is no necessai'y connection between the number of birthdays and
the hour of triumph), so is it with the special glory or beauty of trees,
considered in relation to their annual history : some, that is to say,
are most charming at the time of their earliest leaf, the beech to wit ;
others look best when the foliage is mature ; others when they are in
blossom ; others, again* when the fruit is ripe. The maple and the
sycamore belong to a section which appeals to us most powerfully
when the flowering is over, and the seed-vessels, fully formed, but still
only incipient, begin to display themselves among the green. For
though pretty in their way, and conspicuous from their abundance, at
all events in the sycamore, the flowers of these two trees make a very
trifling show; while in the figure of the leaves, in the ripened fruit, and
even in the autumnal tinting of the former, there is nothing by which
they would at once be singled out from the mass. Look at them,
however, about the time that the laburnums have ceased their rain of
gold, when the ferns are fast unrolling, and " the first rose of summer,
sweet blooming alone," steps forth in the hedgerow like a planet in
the evening sky, and whatever they were before, now they seem decked
in every part with lively bloom. The colour and the gaiety are given
by the clusters of rudimentary fruit, which in the maple is brownish-
red, and in the sycamore pinky-yellow. Sometimes the display is
delayed a little, but the fact remains the same that these two trees
make more show during the period of gestation than during any other
portion of their active life. By the peculiar form of the fruit they are
at once distinguished also from every other kind of tree which grows,
either wild or as a colonist, in Great Britain. Instead of some sort of
nut or acorn, like that of the oak ; instead of a cone, or a catkin, or a

10

70 THE MAPLE AND THE SYCAMOBE.

berry, or anything of the apple form, these two produce a curious fruit,
technically termed a double samara. Originally, so far as can be
gathered from the use of the word by Columella, this term was applied
to the fruit of the elm-tree. The application is now extended, all fruits
of structure similar to that of the elm (the little seed-like fruits, for
example, contained in the quasi-cone of the birch-tree) being classed as
samaras. The main distinction in the maple and sycamore is the grow-
ing of the samaras in couples, instead of singly.

The samara is a one-celled and one-seeded, dry, and indehiscent fruit,
provided with a long or broad membranous wing, whkh enables the wind
to waft it far away. Hence the frequency with which trees producing
fruits of this nature are found perched aloft upon old church towers and
castle walls, where they compete for the monarchy with trees that have
had their seeds conveyed thither by birds. While young, these wing-like
parts are semi-translucent, and on being held between the eye and the
light, show a beautiful net-work of veins. In old age, when beginning
to .dry up, they become elegantly reticulated, and in the depth of
winter it is not uncommon to find them reduced to the condition of

Double Samara of Sycamore.

skeletons. Capital toys are they, too, for children. A properly-
ripened samara of the common sycamore (easily known to be so by the
roundness and solidity of the seed at the end), thrown up into the air,
spins and gyrates during its descent to the ground with a rapidity that
baffles the attempt to follow. It seems some queer insect in circular
and downward flight ; and when many are thrown up at once, the busy
wheeling becomes quite an entertainment. The seeds of the conifers,
when provided with the usual wing, similarly circle downwards. A
beautiful and familiar natural law is, of course, the explanation of this
curious spinning. At present we care to notice it only as an illustra-
tion of the pretty charities with which nature abounds, the child having
its simple plaything provided, just as the philosopher has noble ideas
suggested, and the pious man happy reflections. Few would suppose,
until they come to be reckoned up, how many of these little playthings
our boys and girls manage to find. The round, white head of the

THE MAPLE AND THE SYCAMORE. 71

dandelion, from which we blew the little ships into the aerial sea,
reckoning, as they sailed away, what the sun-dial was never asked, —
this is but one of a thousand toys that at the same moment are
miracles of beauty, inside as well as outside. Well may we say
"inside," in respect of the sycamore seeds, for these, if carefully cut
open when quite or nearly ripe, present one of the prettiest spectacles
in the world. Lined with the softest and whitest silk, in the centre
lies, doubled up, the rudiment of the future tree ; not a simple mass of
albuminous kernel, as in the nut, but a couple of perfectly-formed
green leaves, resembling little strips of green ribbon, so folded and
involved that to separate them without fracture is a matter of some
difficulty. The hinge-like point of union is the actual embryo ; these
two delicate green thongs are the cotyledons or " seed-leaves," which
parts, in the seed of a plant, occupy the place and fulfil the purpose
of the mother's bosom with regard to her infant. Charged with
exquisitely tender food, as soon as the embryo awakes to active life,
these pretty cotyledons become the main source of its nourishment,
and upon these it depends until the growth of the root and ascending
plumule enables it to forage in the earth and atmosphere.

The celebrated Genevese naturalist, Charles Bonnet, was the first to
point out this beautiful and expressive analogy; to-day, it is recognised
universally that the cotyledons of the seed are the vegetable mammae.
So close and striking at every point is the agreement of the idea of
the plant with that of human nature ! The question, in truth, is not
so much what may be the likeness between man and the trees, but what
is the difference between them ! How hard even to speak of a tree
except in terms first framed to denote the members of our own bodies !
The main pillar is the " trunk ;" the branches are the " arms ;" in the
foliage we have, poetically, the "tresses;" the sap-vessels are the
" veins ;" and in the end, when a name is wanted for the organs of the
kindliest office of all, because in charity so sweet, see how soon and
accurately by transference from woman ! Unable, from the nature of
its organisation, to feed its offspring immediately from its own body, as
animals do, the plant bestows on every one of its progeny a couple of
these pretty prefigurements of the mother's bosom ; and however far
the wind may carry them away, whatever geographical accident may
befall them, nevertheless, within the shell, as soon the latent life begins
to stir, here are these delicate cotyledons ready to give suck. When,
as happens in certain races of plants, the cotyledons are exceedingly
minute, the deficiency is compensated by an abundant storage within

72 THE MAPLE AND THE SYCAMORE.

the shell of the seed, of the self-same kind of nutriment. The likeness
of the foliage of a tree, especially when pendulous and waving, to hair,
and particularly to ringlets, is the ground of many a beautiful phrase
in the classic poets ;-— Ovid, for instance, in his "arboreas mulceat aura
comas." Similar lines occur in many places in high-class English
poetry, and will occur on the instant to every accomplished mind.
These sycamore seeds vegetate with remarkable facility, and, from some
circumstance not yet determined, a larger proportion than of any other
tree grow up into the first stage of life that follows lactation. In the
spring, for one of any other self-sown seedling tree, there may generally
be observed a score of sycamores, illustrating in the most beautiful
manner, as growth proceeds, the gradual development of the handsome
leaf so characteristic of the species,

By this last-named organ, the leaf, the sycamore and the maple may
alike be distinguished from almost every other British tree. While the

Leaf of Acer,

^prevailing form is oval, and the ash and some others are pinnate, here,
in the maple and sycamore, we have the shape termed fan-lobed or
palmate, familiar in the leaf of the grape-vine. The leaf, that is
to say, has about five great promontory-like projections, up to the point
of every one of which runs an independent vein. The sycamore has the
lobes acute, in the maple they are obtuse. In both trees, moreover, the
leaves grow in pairs, whereby the sycamore is at once distinguished
from that majestic exotic, the plane, in which they are disposed singly
attd alternately. There is no sort of relationship between the sycamore

THE MAPLE AND THE SYCAMORE. 73

and the plane. Hence is it so much the more regretful that a tree
of such ancient fame, consecrated alike by tradition, poetry, and
philosophy, — for they were planes which constituted the sacred groves
and colonnades of the Academia, — should have had confounded with it
one of pretensions so inferior. Not that the sycamore is an unworthy
tree. The dimensions it attains are often truly grand, and standing
alone upon the sward of a park, where its imposing oval outline can be
well realized, it has qualities, in regard to the picturesque, excelled by
none. We must never judge of trees from the deformed and stunted
examples that occur in hedgerows and in suburban gardens, or even
from those which occur in plantations, nor always even from foresters.
Trees, to develope their princely or queenly nature, as the case may be,
require space, the free circling around and through them of admiring
and nourishing winds, plenty of sunlight, to be clean, and to be refreshed

English Maple, leaf and fruit.

by unsullied rain. Good timber may be yielded, likely enough, by trees:
unhappily placed as regards free growth, but the dignity of their figure,
the repose of the outline, the sumptuous massing of the foliage of the
masculine kinds, the graceful trail of those of feminine habit, these, and,
all other such qualities, are possible only to a life of freedom. Precisely*
the difference between a ship laid up in a dock-yard, and, glorious in her
white sails, afar off upon the sea, "walking the waters, like a thing of
life," is that of a tree as ordinarily seen, and the same species when
robed in its grand privileges, and fulfilling the destiny assigned to it in,
the beginning.

The maple, ordinarily seen only as a bushy mass in the hedgerow,
attains, under congenial circumstances, the height of at least thirty feet ;

74 THE MAPLE AND THE SYCAMORE.

the sycamore grows to be seventy or eighty feet high, and many examples
are known with trunks of five or six feet in diameter. The age it is
capable of attaining appears to be fully 200 years. While contrasting
it with the exotic plane, it is right to say here that, although perfectly
at home in this country, and often possessing all the semblance of an
ancient Briton, the sycamore is also an exotic, having been introduced
in the time of the later crusades, from some part of eastern Europe or
western Asia, in which regions alone it is truly indigenous. The
maple, on the other hand, is one of our veritable aborigines. Let it be
added, as regards the samaras, that the two trees are distinguishable by
a certain difference between these quite as readily as by the outline of
their leaves. The samaras of the sycamore are so placed as to make a
letter U, and resemble a pair of sword-blades, while in the maple they
spread horizontally. Those of the former hang in racemes ; those of
the latter in little bunches of three or four.

Connected with the leaves of these two trees, there are one or two
other circumstances deserving notice. In both, they are remarkably
red when first developed, giving a faint idea of what Sir Emerson
Tennent states to be the customary condition of things in the island of
Ceylon. In that beautiful tropic island, he says, it is not autumn which
is marked, as in England, by the assumption of rich colours by the trees,
but spring ; that which in our northern latitudes accompanies decline
and decay, being there associated with the energy of youth and growth.
We may readily understand it from contemplating, not alone the lively
tints of the trees in question, but the brilliant tints of the young leaves
of many Indian plants cultivated in our conservatories, the Dracaenas,
for example, which begin life in the most vivid and luxurious crimson.
Another interesting fact is the peculiarly rapid expansion of the leaves,
at all events in the sycamore. This comes of their being folded up,
while in the bud, after the manner of a lady's fan when closed, and
similarly, therefore, to those of the "lady's mantle," — that pretty little
occupant of our meadows and pastures, which holds dew in its^ plaits
and angles. A few hours will often suffice to cover a sycamore tree
with an apparently miraculous outburst of foliage ; — buds in the early
morning, in the evening a green vesture in every portion. The horse-
chesnut, which has the leaves plaited while young, in a manner very
similar, is the only tree of common occurrence which so soon changes
winter into spring. Then there is the curious ornamenting of the leaves
of the maple with little red pimples, which gives them often a very
pretty appearance. Turn the leaf upside down, and you will discover

THE MAPLE AND THE SYCAMORE. 75

that every one of these pimples is in reality a little cell, the habitation
of some creature still more minute, and having the entrance barricaded
with tufts of delicate white hairs, very interesting to examine with the
microscope. We admire the architectural grandeurs of a great city.
How many millions of quiet little abodes are here, exquisitely beautiful
in design and finish, which we never even see, or seeing, pass by
with indifference and incuriousness ! The sycamore, in its turn, is
extremely liable, towards autumn, to have its leaves patched with
great round spots of black. These have their origin in a curious
parasitic plant of fungoid nature, and which has been named by the
learned, Rhytisma acerina.

The October tinting varies considerably. While the sycamore pre-
sents no colour of interest, the maple turns to a deep, clear yellow,
the more remarkable since in the sugar-maple of Canada and New
Brunswick, the colour assumed before decay is an inexpressibly-brilliant

Sugar Maple.

ted. The last-named tree is celebrated also for its copious supply of
that delicious saccharine sap which, when subjected to certain pro-
cesses, becomes "maple-sugar." A similarly- constituted sap exists
more or less abundantly in all the species of Acer, but it is ordinarily
too thin and watery to be used like that of the true sugar-maple.
Another excellent product of these trees is the wood. Many species
have been esteemed for this from time immemorial. The Romans
were particularly fond of it, and in Virgil we have Evander represented
sitting on a maple throne. A corky bark forms another curious feature
of the common English maple ; and as if this were not sufficient to
give botanical mark to the tree, the flowers are of the curious nature
called "polygamous;" some, that is to say, are bisexual, others are
only male, others are only female. The pistil, when present, is very

76 THE MAPLE AND THE SYCAMOKE.

elegantly formed, having the figure of a column, with two volutes at
the summit, disposed after the manner of those in the Ionic style of
architecture.

It may be useful to add that the sycamore -tree, above described, and
which by botanists is named Acer Pseudo-platanus, is totally different
from the sycomore of Scripture. How the name came to be extended
to one so unlike is not known, or at least no explanation of it occurs in
books. The sycomore of Scripture was a species of fig-tree, Ficus
sycomorus. It grew abundantly in the valleys of Palestine ; also in
Egypt, and hence obtained the name of Pharaoh's fig. To this day it
is cultivated about Cairo and elsewhere for the sake of its shade ; but
it is a tree of little value either for timber or fruit. In ancient Egypt,
where there were few native timber-trees, inferior as it is to many
others, a certain importance necessarily attached to it, and the wood
was used, it is said, in the manufacture of mummy-cases. The fruit
is insipid, but sweetish, and still used for food, but only by the poorer
classes of the people. The sycamine-tree is different again. By this
name is intended the common black or purple mulberry, which, as well
as the white mulberry, on the leaves of which silkworms are fed, is
said now to abound in Palestine, though it is doubtful if the trees were
common there in the days of the prophets.

77

THE BIRCH AND THE ALDER.

IT is curious that two trees of physiognomy so entirely different as
the birch and the alder should nevertheless correspond closely in the
minutias of botanical structure. Not that the instance is a solitary one,
or without many parallels. What more unlike," for example, than the
Pyrola and the heather — the former a delicate little herbaceous plant,
the lily-of-the-valley of the seaside sand-hills ; the heather a tough and
wiry undershrub of wastes and mountain solitudes. At the close of an
autumn evening the Pyrola (which often mingles with the grass-of-
Parnassus) exhales an odour so powerful that by this alone may be
found the beautiful white forests which come of its plenty, even did
they not gleam in the distance like drifts of summer snow ; and in this
particular we get the first suggestion of a possible affinity with the
heather-tribe, one of which, called Clethra arborea, seems surely to
have been scented from the same fountain. Examined in the light,
the individual blossoms show likeness again to those of the Clethra ;
the Clethra in turn discloses points of affinity with the heather ; and at
last we find that all these plants are but varied utterances of a single
idea. The same may be said of the Parnassia and the golden -saxifrage ;
of clover and the sweet-pea ; of the cinquefoil, the strawberry, and the
rose. Where externals seem to betoken widest unlikeness, if not abso-
lute isolation, presently, on asking of the innermost heart, there dawns
upon us the sense of a most exquisite consanguinity. It is the old, old
deathless fable of Proteus over again — the "transformation" scene
which no pantomime can ever compete with.

While curious, accordingly, that the birch and alder should be so
unlike in their intimate likeness, it is curious only in the same sense
that a thousand different melodies are all delightful. The variety and
the novelty are not the only charm ; that which enchants is the native
and inalienable sweetness and feeling, and which holds us as deeply
when long familiar as in the beginning. It is a grand secret in the art
of estimating things aright, that the best is not that which fascinates
on the first view, but that which waxes lovelier the longer it abides

11

78 THE BIRCH AXD THE ALDER.

with us, or we with it. The "curious" things in nature are not, as
some weakly imagine, the casualties, the anomalies, or the extremes,
but those dear old ways which God has daily manifested ever since
the morning-stars sang together, and which constitute a large portion
of the alphabet through which, by reverent watching, we may gather
insights into the Divine order and munificence. To the earnest seeker
after truth, a cowslip is more precious than a twin-apple or a triple
hazel-nut, strange vagaries as they are ; the " common things" of the
world will for ever keep the firmest hold upon human interest and
human affections, just as domestic love, new and fragrant every
morning, is better, and better esteemed, than the largess of a prince.

The character by which the birch and alder are brought together,
is found in the fruit. While they correspond with the rest of the
amentiferous class of forest-trees in producing their male flowers in
catkins, they differ from all (except the feathery-seeded willows and
poplars) and agree between themselves, in having the female flowers
developed in catkins likewise. Generically, the alders are distinguished
by their hard and woody fruit-catkins, the scales of which are per-
sistent ; while in the birches the scales fall asunder, crumbling, when
ripe, beneath the pressure of the fingers, and liberating myriads of
little flat and seed-like fruits, every one of which is provided with
lateral wings. The fruits of the alders, on the other hand, are wing-
less. Besides this, in the alders many female catkins stand side by
side, or at all events near together, the peduncle being branched ;
while in the birches, the female catkins are always solitary. Altogether,
there are of these interesting trees some sixty or seventy species. They
grow in the woods and upon the mountains of Europe, northern Asia,
and the Himalayahs, extending to Peru and Columbia, and even
into the antarctic regions, where, however, as in the extreme north,
they become reduced to the condition of diminutive shrubs. Three
species are indigenous to Great Britain, the common or silver Birch,
the dwarf birch, and the common Alder. The first and last, like most
of the race, are esteemed for their pictorial effect in landscape ; the
dwarf birch is interesting on account of its littleness, the leaves being
no larger than silver pennies.* Alders prefer wet soil, whence they
are frequent adjuncts of the stream and river- side ; birches prefer
ground that is dry, and hence become a great embellishment of declivi-
ties and hill-sides, as well known to all who have stood face to face

* Under special circumstances, the dwarf birch will reach the height of twenty
feet, but it never becomes a tree in substance.

THE BIRCH AND THE ALDER. 79

with the grandeurs of the Highlands. Here too, like the Osmunda,
they often creep down to the edge of the loch.

The common or silver birch, Betula alba, is known even to the most
incurious observer, being distinguished from every other tree by the
shining and silvery whiteness of the bark ; it is remarkable also for the
extreme tenuity of its twigs, which in the variety called pendula, droop
so elegantly, and give an air of such charming grace and modesty to the
tree, combined with the expression of a tender and high-souled melan-
choly, that it has been well named the "lady of the woods." Certainly
no tree familiar to the eye in northern temperate latitudes presents a
spectacle more consummately soft and delicate. The mimosas and
jacarandas of the tropics may rival it perhaps in lace-like transparency;
and there are many glorious trees of silvered foliage, the Heritiera or
looking-glass tree for example, which stand on a par with it as regards
gloss, when illuminated by the sunshine. But take it all in all, even in the
presence of these illustrious rivals from the tropics, to the birch, wherever
it may be, will probably be awarded the foremost place in admiration.
The marvellous beauty of the tree is, after all, seen better in winter
than in summer. Not until the branches have denuded themselves,
and the various denizens of the woodlands stand like the goddesses
before Paris on Mount Ida, are the matchless symmetry and proportions,
the whiteness and the queenly figure, brought out in their incomparable
perfection. So viewing them, we cannot but feel how great fin auxiliary
in the promotion of human delight is this self-same winter, which, by
thus constraining the woods to disrobe themselves, shows lines and
attitudes of beauty which in summer are totally lost in the maze of
foliage. Clothing, that makes so beautiful, how often is it the veil of
a beauty still more transcending !

Induitur, formosa est : exuilur, ipsa forma !

In the depth of winter, wherever birches have been liberally mingled
with other trees in hillside plantations, the effect from the valley below
is often unique. Far aloft, they lift up their white and shining fabric,
not so much like the bleached skeletons some have compared them to,
as after the manner of the constellations, speaking not of death but of
life ; not of darkness and desolation, but of that welcome lull in the
too-vivid brightness which* by day prevents the beholding, and gives to
night a greater glory than belongs even to bright noon. Very beautiful,
too, is the spectacle of the birches when, by reason of advancing
autumn, they begin to reveal themselves in the recesses of the glen.
Let us look for them. The sun shines bright and kindly, and glows in

80 THE BIRCH AND THE ALDER.

rich red-brown on the bare pillars of the far-away Scotch firs. On
every hand linger pretty relics of the summer, waifs of ivory meadow-
sweet, overworn grasses, reluctant to wither, and foxglove bells in twos
and threes where once were tall spires of nodding purple ; the scabious
and the golden-rod are holding festival ; the ferns have unrolled their
last leaflets of braid and spangle ; the heather is fast uncovering its
bosom to the bees ; ah, see ! there are berries, too, upon the vitis id(ea>
and beautiful round galls, like unripe cherries, upon the oak-leaves; and
here, too, is the nipplewort, covered over with little green seed-baskets,
and that goes on blossoming so cheerfully till Christmas. A fair and
pleasing plant is this ; the blossoms open only to the sunshine, yet it can
sustain the rain and cold, and though the frost may blanch it, the form
remains to the last. Now we wind along the shady pathway by the
river, and list its sweet babble, that never ceases, winter or summer,
marking too, as we go, the great stones that tell of the vehemence of the
flood that so wasted the banks. Are the birches down here ? I think
not ; we are too near the water's edge. Try among those beautiful
green crowds upon the upper ridges, that seem asleep in the amber
sunlight, with above them that glorious inheritance men call the sky,
to-day blue as turquoise or forget-me-not, and islanded with molten
silver. Surely we shall have them now ! Ah, yes. Here spread those
beautiful white arms ; here sweep the leafy tresses ; let the stream
rejoice in its alders ; the birch is for the upland, where it shall receive
the first caresses of the morning, and be a brightness again when the
stars twinkle, and Endymion is bathed in the light of his love.

The preference of the birch for a dry and airy situation, combined
with the matchless delicacy of its figure, and its perfect penetrability by
the light, well adapt it also for the central ornament of a lawn or large
grass plot; and . beautiful is it, in the calm of a summer's evening, to
watch the bright round moon shine through it undimmed. In old trees
the bark is apt to be very much broken up, and there come great
patches of corrugated blackness, which serve, however, by the contrast,
to make the silver that remains still more conspicuous. In other cases,
these tarnished parts become green with the incipient growth of mosses.
When covered up from the corroding influences of the atmosphere, the
sheen of the bark seems indestructible, as shown, very curiously, when
lumps of ancient birch-tree wood are dug out of peat-bogs. In
Cheshire it happens frequently that when the peat-diggers penetrate to
near the bottom, they come upon boughs and branches, with twigs
innumerable, the interior or ligneous portion broken or decayed, but

THE BIRCH AXD THE ALDER. 81

the silvery vesture as white and perfect as when the tree was alive and
thriving. The occurrence of these remains shows the birch to be one
of our genuine aborigines. Where now the peat-bog lies in black and
wet sterility (except for that brief period in high summer when it is
enlivened by the silver tassels of the cotton-grass, or the golden spikes
of the asphodel), once upon a time, and not so very remotely, probably
not much more than 1,500 or 2,000 years ago, there was either
marsh-land or forest, the floor of the latter being what is now the solid
ground underneath the bog. The accumulation of water, and the
gradual decay of the plants, laid the foundation of the bog ; such trees
as grew there would soon fall, and, with the gradual development of
the bog-vegetation above, their remains would become buried where we
now find them. There is another curious feature in the bark of the
birch which deserves notice, namely, its aptitude to split into extremely
thin lamina? or sheets. The highest development of this property
is seen in one of the North American species, thence called Betula
papyracea, or the " paper-birch." The layers of bark are so broad, so
smooth, and so tough withal, that they form an admirable natural
paper, and will allow of being written upon almost as easily as manu-
factured material, the only drawback being that the colour is light
brown. The thicker portions of the bark of this singular tree are
wrought by the native Indians of New Brunswick into various pretty
toys, models of canoes, &c., as well as useful boxes, the former often
ornamented with the quills of the American porcupine, and with the
dyed hair of the moose-deer. One of the Himalayan species of birch,
which men of science have agreed to call by its native name, Betula
Bhojpatra, yields a similarly-laminated bark. The Sanscrit name of
this bark, which is used for corresponding purposes, is bhoorja, and
hence, in all likelihood, comes our word "birch." Such an etymology
is strictly in accordance with that of "poplar," named above, and
with several others, and indicates in a pleasing manner the migration
from Central Asia westwards of the progenitors of the races of modern
Europe. One other circumstance in the physiognomy of the birch is
found very frequently to attract attention. It happens in this tree that
there is often an arrested or impaired development of some portion of
the buds. The consequence is that dense little bushes of short twigs
are produced, concealed when the leaves are open, but in winter very
conspicuous, resembling deserted crows' nests, and often occurring to
the number of twenty or thirty in a single tree. In Scotland these odd
developments are termed "witches' knots."

82

THE BIRCH AND THE ALDEH.

The leaves of the Birch are, as a rule, smaller than those of any
other British tree in which the outline is of the same character. The
" small- leaved elm" is the only other in which the dimensions are so
limited. Yet upon very young trees, and more especially upon those
luxuriant and vigorous side-shoots which start from the stumps of old
trees that have been cut down, they are often of incredible size. The

J

Birch.

Alder.

Birch.

outline varies a good deal, changing from ovate to almost triangular ;
but there is always a sharp point, and the margins are always serrated.
The catkins make their appearance very early in the season, the males
starting from the extremities of the twigs, and growing in pairs, so as
to give the idea of little V's, until fully expanded,' which is simulta-

THE BIRCH AND THE ALDER. 83

neously with the opening of the leaves, when they droop elegantly, and
in vast profusion, a female catkin ordinarily accompanying every male,
but so delicately small as almost to elude observation. The males are
light brown, nearly two inches in length, and pendulous ; the females
are green, beautifully variegated with the crimson stigmas, and gene-
rally erect or nearly so. The age attained by the birch is of course not
BO considerable as that of trees of greater girth arid robustness ; the
maximum stature would seem to be fifty or sixty feet. No mention of
the tree is made in Scripture, nor does it appear to have attracted the
notice of the classical poets, a fact explained perhaps by its compara-
tively rare occurrence in Southern Europe, where moreover it is found
only in mountain fastnesses.

The Alder possesses none of the lady-like charms of the birch ; as an
invaluable ornament of river- scenery, it stands, however, quite on a
level with the willow. No tree is more easily told ; the broken, or torn,
or cut inside of the stem and branches, though whitish when growing,
very soon acquires a peculiar reddish colour, while the leaves are
differently shaped from any other. Ordinarily the leaves of trees
possess' a point, more or less attenuated, owing to the onward push of
the midrib. But in the alder the extremity of the leaf is absolutely
pointless, and there is frequently a little tendency to a sinus or inward
curve, resembling a bay on a coast-line. This gives the leaf an exceed-
ingly broad and almost circular character. While young, the twigs and
leaves are excessively clammy, whence the appropriate name Alnus
glutinosa. The darkness of the green is another feature by which they
may be recognised. That which is most noticeable in the tree is
perhaps the beautiful aspect it holds when in flower. The catkins
are very numerous, large, and of a deep rich brownish-red colour ;
— coming out long befoi-e the leaf-buds expand, they are displayed, like
those of poplars, to the highest perfection, and gently moving to the
breeze, seem like legions of caterpillars, a circumstance even more
striking in some of the American kinds. Then in autumn we have
a condition more pleasing yet. At this season, upon most individuals
that have reached maturity, may be seen standing side by side, the
representatives of three distinct and successive seasons of growth.
Many of the black and emptied seed-catkins of the preceding year still
cling to the twigs ; abundance of the fat green seed-catkins of the
current year, resembling clusters of little fir-cones, are within reach ;
and upon every branch there is promise of the season to come, that is
to say, of the following spring, in the shape of rudimentary stamen-

84 THE BIBCH AND THE ALDER.

catkins. Many trees give notice thus long beforehand of the activity
contemplated for the year to follow, but it is in the alder alone that we
have all these seasons, the past, the present, and the future, so beauti-
fully associated. The phenomenon is one of so much the more
interest from its reminding us once again how far back lie the begin-
nings of things ! In April we say, behold the spring ! But the alder
was on the alert in March, in February, at Christmas ! yea, long back
in the old year, while the farewell -summer was in blossom, and the nuts
were barely ripe ! It forms a beautiful picture of the incessant recur-
rence of life upon death ; before the aged have departed, the young
are rising up to take their places.

The uses of the alder are not confined to its landscape effects and its
significance. The leaves afford a brown dye, indicated by" their rapidly
changing to this colour when laid between papers to dry for the herb-
arium ; and if we are tp believe Virgil, it was of the wood that mankind
constructed the first ships ; at all events the first record of ship-building,
after the time of Noah's ark, is that well-known line —

Tune alnos primum fluvii sensere cavatas.

The alder is mentioned also by Homer, under the name of clethra (now
applied to the fragrant flowering-shrub mentioned above), but apparently
not elsewhere. The wood has the valuable property of resisting the
action of water, whence it is of great commercial value for the construc-
tion of piles for bridges, &c., as in the celebrated arch of the Rialto at
Venice, which is said to owe its stability to the use of this alone. In
France, great numbers of the wooden shoes there called "sabots" are
also manufactured from the wood of the alder. In stature this tree
rises to the height of fifty or sixty feet ; in profile, when well grown,
it is broad-headed, and somewhat oak-like.

85

THE ASH-TREE.

THE fame of the Ash-tree reaches back to the remotest antiquity, the
•wood having been used from time immemorial for spear-shafts and in
the construction of other weapons of war, whence its well-known
epithet — the " martial." Strange that such a purpose should be
served by a tree the young branches of which are so brittle that they
snap like sealing-wax. The delicate and feminine beauty of the ash-
tree has also contributed to render it an object of frequent mention in
literature, as when Virgil commends it as the most graceful of trees, in
the often- quo ted line —

" In fraxhras pulcherrima sylvis."

To English landscape the ash gives something of the character which
in warm countries is supplied by the Acacia. This comes of its
feathered leaves. The sunbeams filter perfectly through the foliage,
and thus we receive at all times that agreeable sense of lightness and
transparency which results from the sky being seen through a network
of twig and verdure. In its stature too, the ash commends itself, well-
grown individuals rising to the height of from eighty to a hundred feet.
It has been said, that while we instinctively most love that which v
is little, admiration fastens chiefly upon the great : I think it will
prove that we find our highest pleasure, after all, in contemplating that
which strikes us more particularly as lofty, of course with the idea of
symmetry combined. We give this meed of approval, as the sponta-
neous act of the soul, to the lily, to the aspiring palm, to the woman
who rises higher than her companions. Not that in so doing we
depreciate and disesteem the less, but that the tall takes the firmest
and deepest hold. It is a great point to be always invited, by the
stature of what surrounds us, to look upwards ; or at all events, not to
have our eyes habitually below the line of straight seeing. Our
physical nature and organization are the better for -such upward-
looking ; and a certain quiet satisfaction of spirit, felt, though inde-

12

86 THE ASH-TREE.

finable, flows therefrom as a beautiful corollary. I have often thought
that it may have pleased God to furnish and decorate the earth with
tall trees in no slight measure for this identical and especial purpose.
Timber, or something equivalent to it, might have been caused to
exist after the manner of granite and marble : — fruits are produced, as
it is, mainly by plants of inconsiderable height, so designed, no doubt,
in order that their juicy largess shall be reached readily and pleasantly ;
all other gifts of vegetation it is quite easy to conceive as producible by
herbaceous plants, and how copiously, let the gums, the resins, the
dyes, the medicines which the latter yield so profusely, declare on their
behalf. All this luxury and munificence is quite conceivable ; yet no
such provision would compensate the want of the green stateliness of
the Trees. Shade, dignity, the poetry of the past, the delight of the
present, the hope and inspiration of ,the future ; all these things come
of their glorious tallness ; contemplating which, we are constrained
to peer into the heavens. The two most admirable things in living
nature, are mankind and the perennial trees ; and the most perfect
expression of the beautiful lies in that section of each respectively which
we term the feminine, the latter always gaining from graceful stature.
It is interesting to observe, at the same moment, that the ash, while
so stately in its upright growth, is one of those trees in which the
branches most readily assume the pendant position, thus becoming what
' are inconsiderately called "weeping," — the true idea being rather that
of long tresses, gracefully let down awhile, and calculated to remind us,
not of mourning and the disconsolate, but rather of such incidents as
when the Lady Godiva —

" Let fall the rippled ringlets to her knee."

Quite enough of calamity and sadness is inevitable to this temporal world
to render it 'unnecessary for man to encourage thoughts and to impose
names that shall make it seem more plentiful. The true idea of wisdom
s and of religion alike, is cheerfulness ; and our pride and pleasure should
be not only to cultivate unbroken gratitude to God for the multitudinous
small mercies which we daily enjoy, and to Cherish thankful sensations
and ideas ; but at the same time to endeavour to reflect these thoughts
and feelings upon the face of nature, seeking and striving to behold
gladness in all things, and to gather, in turn, from the pictures set
forth in nature, new incitements to the pursuit of what is " lovely and
of good report," new impulses to be energetic in right doing, new reason
to forsake selfishness as being a thing Utterly unprofitable. It is just

THE ASH-TREE.

87

these results upon our hearts which constitute the true utility and the
magnificence of the purpose of the world around us. If we ask what
is the use of an immense proportion of the world's contents, meaning
by "use," serviceableness for food, or for drink, or for clothing, there
will come no answer. It was but a small part of the Divine munificence
to provide for the satisfaction of lodily wants. It has pleased God to
make innumerably more things fitted to do good to our souls than He
has prepared of a kind suited to the body, only we think so little of it
and so seldom. See how earnestly we thank Him at meal-times, and
rightly so, for our meat, and peas and beans, for our milk, and sugar,
and bread : do we not sometimes err in forgetting to thank Him for the
Trees ? I see, too, in these beautiful pendulous ones, the weeping-ash
for example — so charming an ornament for a lawn, especially when not
•far from a silver birch — a sweet emblem of filial love. For though fed
and allured in every possible way by the atmosphere and the sunshine
overhead, see how the branches seem to love the spot from which that
glorious canopy of verdure took its rise ! Tall and illustrious as the tree

Ash.

is now, once it was a little seedling that might be crushed beneath the
foot. So true is it that nature contains counterparts of everything that
is delightful in the history of human life and the human affections — one
form or another gives us a picture of everything that goes to make
up home and love, faithfulness, and reverence, and solace.

Botanically, the ash-tree is distinguished from every other arbor-
escent plant of our country (save and except the somewhat similar
mountain-ash) by the peculiar form of the leaves. These, instead of
consisting of a single blade, like those of the oak, the elm, or the
beech, are composed of several pairs of leaflets, with an odd one at the

88

THE ASH-TREE.

extremity. Technically, this form is called "pinnate" or feather-like.
Whether the leaflets be articulated to the main stalk from the first, so
as to constitute a truly compound leaf, is not quite clear. When they
fall in autumn, the pieces certainly come asunder, just like those of the
horse-chesnut and the Virginian-creeper ; it is not unusual, on the
other hand, to find young leaves in September, in which all the mem-
bers are perfectly conjoined. The analogy of the jessamine, to which
the ash-tree is nearly allied, would seem to indicate that they are not
truly compound. The foliage is late in coming out, — with the excep-
tion of the mulberry, perhaps there is no tree in England which is
habitually so much behind-hand ; and late as the leaves appear, they
are among the soonest to fade in the autumn. At the last-named
period the ash assumes none of those brilliant hues which go to make
up the grandeur of the woodland sunset. The leaves simply turn to a

Ash, with ripe fruit.

dull brownish-green, curling up as if scorched, and generally fall from
the tree almost together, so that the branches become denuded in the
course of one or two days. There is a useful bit of practical knowledge
connected with this tardy appearance and early decay. The expansion
of the leaues is a sign that the season is- -sufficiently advanced for
greenhouse-plants to be trusted out of doors, the chance of frost being
now reduced to a minimum ; and by-and-bye, when the leaves begin
to fall, it is a sign that the time is come for the restoration of them to
their wonted shelter. So pleasing are the " signs of the times"
afforded by plants ; very many of which are almost as trustworthy aa
those drawn from astronomy.

THE ASH-TREE. 89

Linnaeus proposed to construct a calendar for the guide of the
gardener and of the agriculturist, which would enable them, by
observing at what periods certain trees come into leaf, or certain plants
into blossom or fruit, to judge of the best times for sowing and planting,
and also for gathering in the crops. It stands to reason that if after a
few years' careful observation, a particular vegetable is found to succeed
best when the seed is sown at the time some particular flower is in
perfection, the recurrence of that period, the renewal of the perfection
of that particular flower, will mark the time when the vegetable in
question Avill again be most likely to be sown to advantage. In this
beautiful concord we should in time secure a certain guide to healthy
and prosperous operations, alike in field and garden, and should be able
to calculate exactly when to look for the results. " If we found," for
instance, says one who laboured hard to establish the fact, "that on
sowing peas or other seed when the gooseberry-bush blossomed, they
were ready for getting when the corn-marigold flowered, we might be
pretty sure that every succeeding year the same uniformity would
prevail, and by a little attention, the suitable times for all other such
operations would be determined." It is not only in reference to garden
and farm produce that such a calendar is at once possible and very
interesting. So exact is the agreement between the period in the leafing
and the flowering of trees and plants, that meeting with one kind, in
some fair and pleasant field, we are assured that in the woodland we
may now look with certainty for some other, each being an intimation
of the arrival of its companion. That such a correspondence exists
between the arrival and departure of migratory birds, and in their songs
and nest-building ; also in the hatching of certain insects, and the
appearance of certain flowers, has long been known to naturalists, and
many plants have been named from this beautiful harmony, the cuckoo-
flower for instance, and probably the wake-robin. By and bye, when men
learn to love nature as dearly as it deserves, these engaging truths will
all be marshalled, and almanacks will deal not only with the changes
of the moon, and the sun's rising and setting, but will become tables of
the sweet harmonies that. subsist between nature's cairn and pleasant
teachings and man's highest practical wisdom. It is impossible to
enter nature at any point, but we come at once upon something
useful to know ; and the knowledge of which increases our happiness.

The particular place held by the ash in the sequence of arrivals
of first leaves was established by the celebrated Benjamin Stillingfleet,
who in Norfolk, in the year 1765, made out the following list of dates.

90 THE ASH-TREE.

Of course they will vary with the season, a late spring driving all a
little forwards, a forward one giving each a little earlier place, but the
relative periods will probably be found to vary but slightly. It is with
the leafing of trees as with the rise and sweet sheen of the constella-
tions. Their places vary with the hour of the night, but they never
alter their positions with regard to one another and to the pole-star.
Omitting some of the less important trees and shrubs, the following
is the list referred to :—

Honeysuckle January 15 Wych-elm April 12

Elder March 11 Mountain-ash and Horn-
Birch April 1 beam " 13

Bramhle " 3 Apple " 14

Plum, Apricot, and Peach, White-poplar and Chesnut. " 16

about " 6 Oak " 18

Filbert, Sallow, and Alder, Lime " 19

about " 7 Maple, Black- poplar, and

Sycamore " 9 Beech " 21

Small-leaved Elm " 10 Ash " 22

Individual trees, of course, may be found anticipating the generality,
just as in late autumn we may often observe individuals still green long
after the great mass of their kind has become denuded. The principle,
nevertheless, remains true, and all that is needed is for various observers
in different places to note down the particulars for a few consecutive
years, and then compare them. The least variation in the periods of
events in nature available for the purpose of a calendar appears to be in
the arrival of the migratory birds, and in the hatching of young rooks ;
the greatest, on the other hand, is in the blossoming of the turnip,
the appearance of the yellow butterfly, and the singing of the loved and
always welcome thrush.

The flowers of the ash-tree are the simplest known to Botany, at
least as regards trees. They make their appearance long before the
leaf-buds open, at first resembling clusters of ripe blackberries, and
closely seated upon the twigs, towards the extremities. This rich and
vinous colour is wholly given by the anthers, which while young are
large and oval, and very densely packed. By degrees the mass
becomes disintegrated, and the innumerable little blossoms compose a
loose and branching panicle, not unlike that of the lilac-tree flowers.
Between every couple of anthers lies, usually, a thin flat ovary, and
this in due course, ripens into the well-known winglike body called
the "ash-key." Some trees never produce fruit; the ash being one

THE ASH-TBEE. 91

of those plants which, without being structurally unisexual, after the
manner of the Amentiferce, such as the oak and the willow, are never-
theless, by non-development of some portion, unisexual very often in
effect. In other words, some individuals produce perfect or bisexual
flowers, while others are deficient in the pistilline or female portion.
Hence it is that in winter, when the "keys" hang upon most indi-
viduals in those dense brown clusters which are so strikingly charac-
teristic of this beautiful tree when leafless, certain other individuals
nre totally without them. They are generally at a considerable
height, few being procurable by the hand lifted from below ; and the
same of course is the condition of the flowers, which, like those of
poplars, often make us envy the birds, to whom no blossom is inacces-
sible. Many marks thus serve to isolate and distinguish the ash-tree,
and if more were needed, we have them in the peculiar curving upwards
of the extremities of the branches, at least when the tree is adult and
growing old ; in the flattened extremities of the twigs, and in the
sooty-black buds, which at all seasons are very remarkable.

It is pleasing to observe for what very different situations the various
figures of trees severally adapt themselves. The ash shows nowhere
better than at the corner of a wood, where, by bringing off the heavi-
ness of other trees, it forms, by reason of its lightness, a sort of
transition from foliage to airy space. Hence, too, the exquisite effect
of ash-trees when they have shot up, from wind-conveyed seeds, among
ruins, such as those of roofless abbeys. The spectacle of a dismantled
abbey is always full of power for the soul. Art seems fast verging into
Nature; the walls arabesqued with ivy; every ledge and " coigne of
vantage" occupied by the sweet azure of the harebell, grasses, or
yellow hawkweeds ; the lines of massive pedestals that mark where
sprang the glorious pillars ; the broken lacework of the spaces where
once were windows ; all these things are touching and impressive ; — •
wonderful is it how all seem made more eloquent, when, disclosed here
and there, through crevice and aperture, we get glimpses of the delicate
foliage of the ash. No tree harmonises so well with dilapidation ; the
very hue seems a reflection of gray antiquity.

THE MOUNTAIN-ASH.

THE mountain-ash must not be associated with the genuine ash.
The name is a very unfortunate one, referring simply to the likeness,
slight as it really is, between the leaves. This likeness consists

92 THE MOUNTAIN-ASH.

however in nothing more than both being pinnate. The mountain-ask
is a near relative of the apple and pear. Hence we find in its blossoms
the rosaceous type of corolla, while the fruit corresponds, in a certain
measure, with that of the orchard, though in dimensions little more
than a berry. The charming spectacle which the flowers present in
May places this tree in the first rank of ornamental ones ; and although
for two or three months afterwards it makes no show, the delay is more
than compensated by September, when the rich vermilion clusters
attract the most incurious.

" The inoun tain-ash

No eye can overlook, when 'mid a grove
Of yet unfaded trees she lifts her head,
Deck'd with autumnal berries, that outshine
Spring's richest blossoms."

These berries, popularly deemed poisonous, are perfectly free from
hurtful properties. In the west and north of Scotland they are com-
monly converted into jelly for the breakfast-table ; in Siberia likewise
they are put to a similar use. When carefully prepared, this jelly has
a beautiful tinge of violet in it.

THE CHESNUT.

CONCERNING the courtly chesnut it is merely necessary to speak of the
differences which keep it distinct from the horse-chesnut, neither of
these noble productions of nature being met with in Britain except as
ornaments of the park or pleasure-ground. For although the sweet
chesnut was introduced as far back as the time of the Romans, and has
now become thoroughly at home (except as to the ripening of its fruit) ;
it has not, like the elm and sycamore, taken its place in the wood and
wilderness. Wherever met with, it is always obviously from the hand
of the planter. As for the horse-chesnut, it appears to have been in
England only some three centuries. Of the sweet chesnut, Castanea
vesca, many magnificent examples occur in different parts, sufficiently
venerable to give the perfect idea of "ancient Britons." They are still
referable, however, to the origin spoken of. The differences in question
are readily enumerated. In the sweet chesnut the leaves are simple
and feather- veined : in the horse-chesnut they are septate. The flowers
of the latter are produced in superb clusters, every corolla having its
whiteness richly broken with patches of gold and crimson : those of the

THE CHESNUT.

93

sweet chesnut, on the other hand, are destitute of the brightness we
connect with the idea of blossom ; they are unisexual also, the males
growing in slender spikes, the females in prickly knobs.

Sweet (or Spanish) Chesnut.

The purpose we had in view at the beginning is now completed;
namely, the giving some account of the forest and other large and com-
manding trees ordinarily met with in Great Britain. There are many
more trees of a smaller description, and all have abundance of interest-

13

04 THE ELDEK, ETC.

ing and curious history and association, so that these chapters, wore it
desirable at the present time, might be trebled. Who, for instance, is
unacquainted with the Elder, the blossoming of which is a sign that
summer is matured, and the fruit of which shows, in its blackness, that
summer is over ? Then there are the wild pear, the wild apple, the
wild medlar, and the wild cherry, — trees mostly loaded in spring with
snowy bloom. After these we find the guelder-rose, the tamarisk, the
box, and the spindle-tree ; the Frangula, the buckthorn, and the dog-
wood. The white-beam is remarkable for the snowy aspect of its foliage
when stirred by the wind; the bag-nut for its chandeliers of pinky
white in May, followed in autumn by round bags containing each a
brilliantly- polished brown bead; the bird-cherry, Prunus Padits, com-
pletely covers itself with racemes of white flowers exhaling the odour of
honey. Then there are the innumerable smaller kinds of willow and
sallow ; the holly, covered in winter with those glorious scarlet bracelets ;
and the hawthorn or "May," so deservedly famed in verse. The sloe,
though rarely of the dimensions of a tree, has likewise many claims
upon our interest. So has the berbery ; so has the sweet-gale ; so have
those very curious trees — the sea-buckthorn and the juniper ; so have
the hazel, the hornbeam, the arbutus, and the wayfaring-tree.

After those which stand independently, there are whole tribes of
roses and brambles, the sweet-briar, the honeysuckle, and the clematis,
and longer-living, and farther reaching, and greener than any, the
incomparable old ivy of the ruin and the aged tree. Another set, of still
smaller dimensions, attracts us injthe wild currants, the privet, and the
whortle -berry ; here, too, we find the broom and prickly furze, with
their myriads of golden butterflies. In truth there is no absolute
stopping-place. Trees are the maximum ; between their majesty and
the minimum there is so beautiful a descending scale of size and
stature, that unless an arbitrary line be drawn, we cannot stop till we
are abreast of the merest herb. Technically, even the wild thyme, that
makes those lovely purple knolls on the grassy common, is a " shrub,"
for the branches, though only of the thickness of a needle, are woody
and permanent, and the leaves endure through the winter.

INDEX.

Abele, 58, 60.

Abbeys, Ruins of, 91.

Acacia, 46.

Acanthus, 51.

Acer, 72, 76.

Aconite nectaries, 53.

Alder-tree, 77.

Alnus glutinosa, 83.

Amber, 26.

Amentiferse, 55.

Anomodon curtipendulum, 15.

"Apple-of- Sodom," 11.

Archery, 67.

Arethusa, Fable of, 60.

Ash-tree, 85.

Aspen, 58, 61.

Australian- cherry, 67.

Autumnal foliage, 35.

Basket, a Celtic word, 62.
Bass or Bast, 47.
Beech-tree, 24, 29—36.
Bees, 52, 53.
Begonia, 50.
Betula alba, 79.
Betula papyracea, 81.
Bignonia echinata, 23.
Birch-tree, 77.
Birds, 9, 10.
Bonnet, Charles, 71.
Borro\vdale, 20.
Botanical Geography, 19, 37.
Botany, True idea of, 8.
Bracken, 17.

Calypso, Island of, 51.
Camellia, 38.
Canada-balsam, 26.
Castonea vesca, 92.
Cathedrals, 29, 39.
Catkins, 55.
Cedar, 27, 68.
Ceylon, 74.
Chatsworth, 6, 48.
Chesnut, 92.
Clematis, 25.
Clethra, 77.
Coleridge, quoted, 33.
Common tilings, 78.
Cones, 21.
Conifers, 23.

Cotyledons, 71.
Cowper, quoted, 51.
Creosote, 26.

Daffodil 53.

Parley Dale, 68.

Dartmoor, 15.

Deserts, 49.

Development, Importance of watching,

49.

Dido, Queen, 59.
Dioecious trees, 55.
Diona?a, 56.
Dracaenas, 74.
Druids, 14.
Dryads' cup, 16.
Dryopteris, 16.

Echoes in nature,r35.
Elder, 94.
Elm-tree, 37.
Endogens, 5.

England the Exhibition of the world, 6.
" the world's Flower-show, 3'J.
Epimedium, 50.
Epiphytes, 13.
Exocarpus, 67.
Exogens, 3.

Feminine trees, 46.

Ficus religiosa, 62.

Filix-fceinina, 45.

Filix-mas, 45.

Fir-cones, 23.

Fir-tree, 19, 23.

Fountains Abbey, 65.

Fries, 16.

Fruit, Botanical use of the word, 4.

Furness Abbey, 91.

Galls, 11.

Godiva, Lady, 86.

Goethe, quoted, 63.

Gopher- wood, 27.

Grass-of-Parnassus, 49, 53.

Gum, 33.

Gymnostachyum Cuiningianum, 38.

Hardcastle Crags, 80.
Heritiera. 79.
Homer, quoted, 6.

96

Honey, 52.
Honey-cups, 52.
Horse-chesnut, 92.
Human frame in plants, 34.
Hydnum coralloides, 36.

Insect-life, 10.
Ivy, 13, 42, 94.

Kensington Gardens, 39.

Lady's-mantle, 20, 74.
Lebanon, 27.
Lime-tree, 45.
Limes, 47.
Linden, 47.
Lofty things, 85.
Lombardy-poplar, 58.
Loranthus Europaeus, 14,
Lotus-tree, 16.

Mandeville, Sir John, 43.
Maple, 69.
Maple- sugar, 75.
Martial, quoted, 63.
Masculine trees, 46.
Microscope, The, 21.
Milton, quoted, 53.
Mistletoe, 14, 25, 53.
Monoecious trees, 55.
Mosses, 14.
Mountain-ash, 91,
Mulberry-tree, 24, 58.

Narcissus, 53.
Naturalists' Calendar, 89. ,
Nectaries, 53.
Nepenthes, 56.
Nineveh, 68.
Nipplewort, 80.

Oak, 6.

" apples, 10.

" fern, 16.

" spangles, 12.
CEnone, 30.
Ophelia, 60.
Osier, 62.
Onlton Park, 47.
Ovid, quoted, 30, 68, 72.
Oxalis, 38.

Palm-trees, 5, 19.
Palm- willow, 63.
Pan, 35.
Paper-birch, 81.
Parasitic plants, 13.

Peat-bogs, 80.
Perules, 82.
Peziza coccinea, 16.
Pine-tree, 19.
Pine-woods, 25.
Phaeton, 59.
Poetry, 9.
Poplar, 55.

Potentilla Anserina, 35.
Prunus Padus, 94.
Pteris Aquilina, 17.
Pyrola, 77.

Quercus pedunculata, 6.
" sessiliflora, 6.

Kedland Court, 39.
Rhytisina Acerina, 75.
Rooks, 39.
Rosalind, 30, 63.

Safeguards of nature, 48.
Salisburia, 66.
Salix, 60—63.
Samara, 70.
Schleiden, quoted, 28.
Scotch pine, 24,
Shakspere, quoted, 59.
Shapes of leaves, 33.
Sycamore, 69.

Teil-tree, 48.
Theocritus, quoted, 26.
Tilia, 46.
Trees, Age of, 17.

Antiquity of, 18, 27.

Grandeur of, 86.

Pictorial qualities of, 2.

Economic uses of, 2.

Associations of, 30, 59, 65.

Masculine and feminine, 46.

Sanitary value of, 1.

Language of, 3.

Influence of, 3.

Growth of, 4,

Vernation of leaves, 82.

Vignettes, 42.

Virgil, quoted, 51, 53, 84.

Willow, 55.
Wistman's Wood, 15.
Woodpecker, 36.
Wood-sections, 67.
Wych-elm, 43.

Yew-tree, 64.

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