Familiar trees

FAMILIAR —

ALBERT R. MANN
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FAMILIAR TREES

OAK.

FAMILIAR TREES

BY

G. S. BOULGER, F.L.S., F.G.S., F.R.HLS.

HON. PROFESSOR OF NATURAL HISTORY IN THE ROYAL AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE
VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE SELBORNE SOCIETY, EDITOR OF ‘‘ NATURE NOTES"!
HON, MEMBER OF THE ROYAL ENGLISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY

WITH

COLOURED PLATES BY
W. H. J. BOOT, RBA. AND A. FAIRFAX MUCKLEY

AND

PLAIN PLATES FROM PHOTOGRAPHS AND
MICRO-PHOTOGRAPHS

ENTIRELY NEW EDITION
REVISED THROUGHOUT AND ENLARGED

SECOND SERIES

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD.
LONDON, NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE. MCMVII

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ele
YB.

376

~ 1906
Sih:

Rass]

PREFACE

May we hope that, with more detailed study of some
species of our familiar trees, the desire to know others
will arise? “If we find ‘our warmest welcome at.
an inn,” writes Oliver Wendell Holmes, “we find
our most soothing companionship in trees among
which we have lived, some of which we may ourselves
have planted. We lean against them and they never
betray our trust; they shield us from. the sun and
from the rain; their spring welcome is a new birth
which never loses its freshness; they lay their
‘beautiful robes at our feet in autumn; in winter
they ‘stand and wait, emblems of patience and of
truth, for they hide nothing, not even the little leaf-
buds which hint to us of. hope, the last element in
their triple symbolism.”

In these pages we have not dealt with the
different kinds of trees in any particular’ order; but
at the close of. the next series, which will complete
the work, we shall give a botanical synopsis of them

all in a scientific arrangement.

vi PREFACE

I must, as in the first series, acknowledge my
indebtedness to many writers whose works I have laid
under contribution, but more especially to the artists
the results of whose labours form the main attraction
of this book, to Messrs. W. H. J. Boot, R.B.A., and
A. Fairfax Muckley, who have painted the originals
of the coloured plates; to Messrs. J. A. Weale and
F. W. Saxby, who have made and photographed the
microscopic sections of woods and pine-needles ; and
to Messrs. F. Masoh Good, H. Irving, and E. J.
Wallis, from whose photographs the uncoloured plates

of trees are taken.
G. S. BOULGER.

Oak

Houby.

CoRSICAN PINE .

BUCKTHORNS

APPLE.

SWEET CHESTNUT

CONTENTS

CoMMON OR CHERRY LAUREL . .

HAZEL.
SERVICE-TREE
MEDLAR
YEW .
LINDEN
DouGLas FIR
BEECH.
CoRNEL
ASPEN .

PEAR

STONE PinE

PLANES

PAGE

FAMILIAR TREES.
THE OAK.

Quercus Ro'bur L.

THE Oak is justly the tree on which England prides
herself with more reason than upon those represen-
tative, but scarcely indigenous, animals, the lion and
the unicorn. Whatever we may think of the other
productions of the poetaster of whom Byron wrote—
“ Let hoarse Fitzgerald bawl
His creaking couplets in a tavern hall ?—

probably everyone will endorse the one line quoted
from him in the parody in “ Rejected Addresses ”—
“The tree of freedom is the British Oak.”

So closely, indeed, is the tree associated in our
minds with the bygone triumphs of those “ wooden
walls of England,” the “ hearts of oak,” that the chief
ideas suggested by the beauty of the tree are apt
to be those of naval warfare, sailors’ pluck, and
England’s weathering many a storm. There are,
nevertheless, suggestions of a less warlike character
which occur. to the contemplative man as he gazes
on the monarch of the forest.

The massive trunk, whose noble proportions
suggested to Smeaton the design of his Eddystone
Lighthouse, is an emblein of majestic and sublime

21 1

2 FAMILIAR TREES

endurance which can hardly be better described than
in the following passage by Oliver Wendell Holmes:

“There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which,
if well marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language.
Take the Oak, for instance, and we find it always standing as a type
of strength and endurance. I wonder if you ever thought of the
single mark of supremacy which distinguishes this tree from all our
other forest trees? All the rest of them shirk the work of resisting
gravity; the Oak alone defies it. It chooses the horizontal direction
for its limbs, so that their whole weight may tell, and then stretches
them out fifty or sixty feet, so that the strain may be mighty enough
to be worth resisting. You will find that, in passing from the
extreme downward droop of the branches of the Weeping Willow to
the extreme upward inclination of those of the Poplar, they sweep
nearly half a circle. At ninety degrees the Oak stops short: to slant
upward another degree would mark infirmity of purpose; to bend
downwards, weakness of organisation.”

The forester may condemn as “ stag-headed ” the
aged tree whose boughs, in Shakespeare’s language, are
“‘mossed with age,
And high top bald with dry antiquity.”

It may even be hollow, the mere shell of bark
supporting a sadly-reduced tale of branches that
struggle gallantly to put forth year by year leaves,
dwindled in size, from their knotty twigs, and acorns
whose very abundance argues an infirmity of general
health. Still it will, perhaps, be found to be diligently
striving to stem the advance of the inner canker
of decrepitude by a slight formation of new wood
beneath the bark; and we may thus witness the
dying efforts of the aged monarch. The hollow shell
may be now supported by the strong clasping arms
of the Ivy, ever young; or the stem, bared of its bark,
may lift its blackened, blasted arms in sad protest
to the heavens whence fell the fatal lightning.

THE OAK - 3

Few of our trees have a wider geographical range
than the Oak. Whilst the great Order of broad-
leaved trees to which it belongs, the Cupulif‘ere.
—those, that is, that have their nut-like fruits en-
closed in a more or less leafy husk, “involucre,”
or “cupule” (the “cup” of the acorn)—is dis-
tributed throughout the temperate regions of both
hemispheres, the Oaks, of which there are nearly
three hundred species, are almost confined to the
northern. Many forms are well known to us in
our plantations, or by their products, such as the
Turkey Oak (Quercus Cer'ris L.), the Evergreen
Oak (Q. Ilex L.), the cork of @. Suber L, the
galls of Q. infector'iu Oliv. and other JLevantine
species, the cups of Q. 'gilops L. imported as
valonia, the quercitron bark of the American
Q. tinctor’ta Bartr., and that of many other species
used in tanning. But as a native of Great Britain
there is but one distinct species, though two, if not
three, well-marked varieties are generally recognised.

The English Oak (Q. Robur) ranges from
the Urals and the Caucasus, from Mount Taurus
and Mount Atlas, almost to the Arctic Circle,
growing at an altitude of 1,350 feet in the High-
lands of Scotland ; its limit nearly coinciding with
that of successful wheat cultivation. Vast forests
of Oak covered the greater part of Central Europe.
in the early ages of history. It was the favourite
timber of the Greeks and Romans; with it the
Northmen built their long ships, and the Anglo-
Saxons such churches as that at Greenstead, in
Essex; and. with it was smelted the Sussex iron

4 FAMILIAR TREES

which supplied the cannon of Elizabeth’s navy.
When in sheltered situations, or massed together
in forests, it may reach a height of from sixty to
one hundred. feet, with a straight stem of from
thirty to forty feet, and a girth which is commonly
eight or ten feet, though many fine old trees are
from three even to seven times that circumference.
In exposed situations it is generally shorter and
less straight in its growth, and then also has the
hardest wood, though this may be rather a
characteristic of one of the three varieties than
the effect of the situation.

Of these varieties, the White Oak, the chéne blane
of the French (Q. Robur pedwneulu'ta Ehrh.), is the
most abundant in the southern and midland coun-
ties. Its leaves have no stalks, and are only
downy on the under-surface when young; while
its flowers, and consequently its acorns also, are
generally two or more together, on long peduncles.
It reaches a less height, but is said to be less
liable to the defects known as “cup-” and “star-
shake” than the sessile-fruited varieties.

These last are commonly united under the
names Durmast Oak and Q. Robur sessiliflor’a
Salisb., which should be applied to distinct
forms. They agree in having stalked leaves and
stalkless acorns; but the true Q. sessiliflora is
more abundant in the north and _ west, its
fine straight stems being seen at the best in the
Forest of Dean; whilst the true Durmast Oak
(Q. interme'dia D. Don) is a dark-fruited variety,
occurring in the New Forest, the under-surfaces of

OAK APPLE AND ACORNS,

THE OAK 5

the leaves of which remain downy, and stay longer
on the tree, hanging in melancholy russet late into
the spring. Its timber is of inferior quality, and
resembles Chestnut wood in appearance and, it is
said, in being distasteful to spiders. Parts of the
roof of Westminster Abbey are said to be of this
cobweb-proof material.

In a growing Oak notice will be taken of the
outward spreading of the stem at its base; of the
rugged bark; of the curiously tortuous branchlets,
twisting in zigzag fashion almost rectangularly
towards every point of the compass, owing to the
central shoots becoming abortive; and of the
uniquely waving outline of the yellowish-green
leaves. The leaves generally make their first
appearance in the south of England towards the
end of April, when the young shoots blush with
a ruddiness almost autumnal; and, if at all
sheltered from the glare of July and August, a
constant succession of the pink and ‘bronze-tinted
glories of the young leafage is kept up in our
moist summers till late in autumn, when the first
formed leaves are beginning to change. Then the
green loses its olive-yellow tints for clear gold,
mottled with clear grass green, fading to the sober
pallid russet which lasts through the winter. This
indescribable hue has none of the coppery rich-
ness of the dead leaves of Beech, nor the warm
umber of the Horse-chestnut: it is the grey ghost
of a brown that has been.

The catkins appear shortly after the leaves: the
male ones pendulous, the female erect. The

6 FAMILIAR TREES

former are two or three inches long, bearing at
intervals stalkless clusters of inconspicuous flowers,
each consisting of a six- or seven-lobed calyx and
ten stamens. The female flowers, on the other
hand, are solitary, each being surrounded by the
numerous overlapping scales, or bracts, which after-
wards form the cup. The flower itself is but the
ovary enclosed by the adherent calyx, divided in-
ternally into three chambers, and surmounted by
a triple style. In each chamber there are two
ovules; and it is a noteworthy fact that from these
six only one is matured into the single seed that
every acorn contains. A _ similar circumstance
occurring in the case of other trees suggests the
explanation that perennial plants, trees more
especially, require to produce fewer seeds in order
to ensure the permanence of the species than do
annuals, whose individual existence is so many
times shorter.

What country boy has not -a love of acorns
equal to that of the squirrel? Possibly he may
not eat them, preferring chestnuts or beech-masts ;
but there is a joy in knocking down the glossy
green fruit, destined perchance to be converted,
with the addition of some cotton-wool, into
reverend seigneurs, with flowing beards and locks
rivalling those of the Druid, who cut in bygone
ages the sacred mistletoe with golden knife
from the Oaks of Avalon. Before English com-
merce had extended the leather trade beyond the
needs of home consumers, and English naval
enterprise had caused a drain upon our Oak forests

PIPYYQUIY, ‘poog wos ‘4 : 02044

TRANSVERSE SECTION OF WOOD OF OAK (X 30 DIAMETERS).

THE OAK 7

for shipbuilding, these same acorns, now despised
by the advanced agriculturist, constituted the chief
value of the Oak. Thus in the Domesday Survey
the woodlands are estimated at the number of
swine for which their acorns and masts afforded
“ pannage,”

Whatever may be the extension of the use of
iron, Oak timber will always be of peculiar value
for many purposes, though that important bye-
product, the bark, is of sufficient consequence con-
siderably to influence the English forester’s treat-
ment of his woods. There is more tannin in the
bark in spring, when the sap is rising, than at
any other season, and it is, therefore, the common
practice to fell the trees at that season instead
of in winter, though for timber only it is admit-
tedly preferable to fell in the latter period.

The most expert judges cannot separate the
woods of the two best varieties. Few woods are so
durable under all circumstances, few so generally
useful. “Oak,” says Professor Marshall Ward, “is
neither the hardest and heaviest, nor the most,
supple and toughest of woods, but it combines in
a useful manner the average of these qualities.”

The broad, lustrous, light-coloured pith-rays, and
the pore-circle of large vessels in the spring wood
are the most striking features of Oak wood when
magnified. Even the crooked branches are valuable
in boat-building; but the familiar inky stains round
the nails of many a park-fence show that the
tannic acid in the wood is detrimental to iron,
converting it, in fact, into ink, as it does in the

8 FAMILIAR TREES

manufacture of that commodity from oak-galls and
green vitriol, or in its union with the bog-iron of
peat-mosses that yield the well-known black bog-
oak.

The Oak is attacked by a great variety of
insects. Of the galls produced by these, the com-
monest are the marble-gall, whose brown spheres,
clustered together especially on the branches of
pollards, form quite a feature among the russet
leaves of autumn; the oak-apple, those soft, rosy-
cheeked excrescences which are popularly associated
with the escape of Charles II.; the oak-spangles
that stud the under surfaces of the leaves, at first
with crimson and then with amber-brown; and
the artichoke-gall, which makes the overlapping
scales of the diseased bud closely simulate the
bracts of the vegetable from which it is named.

Like all our finest trees, the Oak is seen at
its best when standing alone in the park. The
straight stem of a tree not yet aged; its rugged
bark, flecked with many tints; the broken but
rounded outlines of its well-leafed top; the pink
Lammas shoots of summer and the russet leaves of
autumn; all add their various beauty to the
majesty of the forest monarch. There is a solemn
grandeur about such venerable, if somewhat decrepit
veterans as the great Newland Oak, which exceeds
forty-seven feet in girth; but for true beauty
vigorous maturity must always surpass the appeals
of decadent glories to a half-pitying admiration.

HOLLY.

THE HOLLY.
Tlee Aquifo'lium L.

Ty northern regions evergreens are not numerous,
and the short days of winter are better fitted for
festivities round the warm hearth within doors than
for industrial occupations in the chill open air. Thus,
during the comparatively gloomy reign of winter, the
old agricultural festival of the melancholy god Saturn
was kept by the Romans with houses decked with
boughs, and with free licence of speech and jest for
even the slave; whilst our ancient Teuton ancestors
seem to have propitiated those “good people,” “the
lubber fiend” and other woodland sprites, by offer-
ing them warm sheltering boughs around the ingle-
nook when their wonted haunts were bare of leaves.
Among the Kelts the unbroken life of “Madre
Natura” was symbolised by the evergreen branches
of the weird mistletoe, that parasitically decked the
boughs of the sacred monarch Oak of the forest, and
of the surrounding Apple-groves of Arthur’s Avalon
when their leaves had fallen. Ancient canons of the
Church forbade Christians to deck their houses with
evergreens according to these Pagan customs—not,
at least, at the same times as the heathen ; but it was
the wise policy of men like Gregory and Augustine to
Christianise these rites, although the mistletoe seems
to have been too closely associated with the arcana of
Druidism ever to receive the same full ecclesiastical

22 9

10 FAMILIAR TREES

sanction as the Holly and the Yew. The spinous
leaves and blood-red berries of the former might well
be taken by the Christian symbolist as a mystic fore-
shadowing of the Passion at the celebration of the
Nativity, and the name of the tree, which originally
referred mainly to its pointed leaves, may have
suggested something holy.

Our poets naturally abound in allusions to the
bright green of the leaves’ and the crimson of the
berries of the Holly, associating it generally with
Ivy and Yew; but in the following curious carol,
dating from the year 1456, and preserved among

the Harleian manuscripts, the Holly is accorded
the pre-eminence:

“Nay, Ivy! nay, it shall not be I wys;
Let Holy hafe the maystry, as the maner ys.
Holy stond in the halle, fayre to behold ;
Ivy stond without the dore ; she ys full sore a-cold.”

“Holy and hys mery men they dawnsyn and they syng,
Ivy and hur maydenys they wepyn and they wryng.
Ivy hath a kybe*; she laghtit with the cold,

So mot they all hafe that wyth Ivy bold.

“ Holy hath berys, as red as any Rose,
The foster and the hunters kepe hem from the does.
Ivy hath berys as black as any slo;
Ther com the oule and ete hem as she go.

“Holy hath byrdys, a ful fayre flok,
The Nyghtyngale, the Poppyngy, the gayntyl Lavyrok.
Good Ivy! what byrdys ast thou?
Non but the howlet, that cryes ‘How! how!’”

Many popular superstitions still linger round the
use of Holly at Christmas. In Rutland it is deemed
* Kybe, chilblain.

THE HOLLY 11

unlucky to bring it into a house before Christmas
Eve; in Derbyshire it is said that, according as the
Holly brought into the house at this season be
prickly or smooth, the husband or the wife will be
master during the year. In some western counties
the boughs removed from churches are treasured
like the palms at Passion-tide, for luck throughout
the year following; and in Germany, like the tapers
used at Candlemas, they are looked upon as a sure
protection against thunder.

The name Holly is probably derived from the root
hul, or kul, connected with the Latin cul’men, a peak,
and culmus, having reference to the same character
as its modern specific name aquifolium, or “ needle-
leaved.” Though known as Stechpalme in modern
German, it was formerly in that language termed
Hulis, Hulst, or Hiilse. William Turner, in the
“Libellus de re MHerbaria” (1538), his earliest
botanical work, speaking of it under the head of
Ruscus, says, “ Procerum aut galli housum, angli an
holy tre et an Huluar tre nominant, hec etiam arbor,
si Ruellio credimus, ilex aquifolia dicitur, @ cujus
corticibus ipse admodum puer viscum confeci.”
“But the French call the tall kind housum; the
English, an holy tre and an Hulvar tre. This tree
also, if we believe Ruellius, is called Ilex aquifolia,
from the bark of which I have formerly, when a boy,
made birdlime.” The old French houlw still retains
its Teutonic form in the modern hou, and the name
hulver is in use in the Eastern Counties, not to
mention the name knee-hul for the Butcher’s Broom
(Rus‘cus aculea‘tus); whilst many a modern school-

12 FAMILIAR TREES

boy has followed Turner’s example in the manu-
facture of birdlime by chewing holly-bark. Under
the form holm, the name of the Holly enters into
many of our early English place-names, such as
Holmesdale and Holmswood ; and no one has ever
doubted the indigenous character of the species,
which is still represented by ancient trees in the
oldest portions of our English forests.

On the poor, sandy soil of the Millstone Grit, in
the old forest of Kingswood, now better known as the
Bristol coalfield, the Hollies flourished so luxuriantly
that chatty old Aubrey suggests that they derive.
benefit “from the effluvia of that mineral.” The
Speech-house in the centre of the Forest of Dean is
surrounded by ancient Hollies, boughs cut from which
used, down to within the last seventy years, to take
the place of the Testament in every oath sworn in the
Verderer’s court. Evidence has been brought forward
to show that this Speech-house is a most ancient ren-
dezvous, and that the Holly was planted as a sacred
tree round the villages of the Kelts, even on the bleak
downs of Cornwall. Holly forms a great part of the
undergrowth in the older parts of Epping Forest,
where its evergreen foliage excited the admiration
of Peter Kalm, the pupil of Tinneus, who visited
England in 1748, and who expressed his regret at
the absence of this beautiful tree from Sweden. The
New Forest is also noted for its Hollies. One of the
largest individuals in the kingdom is probably that at
Claremont, eighty feet in height, which, considering
the extremely slow growth of the tree, may be a relic
of the primeval forest of North Surrey.

LEAVES, FLOWERS, AND FRUIT OF HOLLY,

THE HOLLY 13

The Holly will grow in any soil in which water is
not absolutely stagnant; but it prefers a rather dry
sandy loam, and, whilst it not only “outdares cold
winter’s ire,’ but seems to flourish in the bleakest
situations, it does not do well under the shade of
other trees. It is generally from ten to forty feet
in height, and not more than two or three in girth;
but Hollies at Bleak Hill, Shropshire, are stated to
attain a circumference of fourteen feet. The slow-
growing, even and hard-grained wood is, except at
the centre, as white as ivory, and is valued for turning
and inlaying. It stains well, and is therefore used in
place of ebony for the black handles of tea-pots, while
for engraving it is perhaps second only to boxwood.

One of the great charms of the Holly is its silvery
bark. Smooth on the old stems as in the Beech, but
without the glossy sheen of the beautiful Birch, it yet
affords a most pleasing contrast to the dark foliage.
The young twigs are light green, and slightly downy.

It is the foliage, however, contrasting alike with
the bright greens of surrounding trees in summer, and
with their leafless branches in winter, that gives the
chief picturesque value to this “ incomparable tree,” as
Evelyn terms this handsomest of our native ever-
greens. The glossy green leaves are associated in
Shakespeare’s lyric with the pleasures of forest life :—

‘*Heigh-ho! the green Holly!
This life is most jolly.”

Southey’s well-known poem has popularised the
fact that. the leaves on the lower boughs are more
spinous than those on the upper, suggesting a reason

14 FAMILIAR TREES

in accordance with that newer teleology which has
been evoked by the teaching of Darwin. The
spines of the lower branches do indeed protect them
from cattle, though not from deer; whilst a sort of
innate tendency to spinousness must account for the
one terminal point for the upper leaves. Another
poetical reason has been given for its general exemp-
tion from attack—namely, that, “ unknown before, the
Holly sprang up in perfection and beauty beneath the
footsteps of Christ when He first trod the earth, and
that, though man has forgotten its attributes, the
beasts all reverence it, and are never known to injure
it.” Nevertheless, the Holly bas other enemies
besides the deer, for a species of aphis (A‘phis 7'licis)
lives on the young shoots, and a fly (Phytomy’za
ilicis) burrows, when in the larval stage, under the
epidermis of the leaves.

From May to August the tree bears clusters of
small, wax-like, white flowers, which seem peculiarly
attractive to bees ; and, as the species is almost dic-
cious—that is, has on one tree flowers in nearly all
of which the ovary is aborted, and on another those
in which the four stamens bear hardly any pollen, it
is by these insects that its fertilisation is mainly
effected. This is also, of course, the reason why
certain trees, being male, never produce berries ;
though an opinion has been expressed that male
Hollies become female with age, a point deserving
further attention. Many of the variegated forms
grown in gardens produce little or no fruit, though
one of these (var. laurifo'lia) bears a profusion of
fragrant flowers. This absence of fruit argues a

H

41

Photo: E. J. Wallis, Kew,
OLLY,

f’

voi

TRANSVERSE SECTION OF HOLLY WOOD (X10 DIAMETERS),

42

THE HOLLY 15

certain want of vigour, which is borne out by the
fact that variegation is apparently produced by a
deficiency of potash in the soil. Whether, as has
been suggested, this ornamental partial chlorosis be
due to some parasitic alga within the cells of the
leaf or not, and whether, as has also been suggested,
it be contagious or not, are points yet to be decided.

The berries are generally red, but sometimes yellow,
white, or, without the aid of Jack Frost, black ; and
though eaten with impunity by birds, may be said
to be poisonous to man, being extremely emetic and
cathartic in their effects. Owing, however, to a bitter
principle that they contain, known as ilicin, the leaves
were formerly used medicinally in cases of fever and
rheumatism. It is probably this or an analogous
principle that gives its flavour to the yerba or maté
tea of South America, which is prepared from the
leaves of an allied species (Ilex paruguayen’sis) ; and
Holly leaves are still used as tea by the charcoal-
burners of the Black Forest.

Though beautiful anywhere, and especially as a
separate specimen standard, it is as a hedge-forming
tree that, since the days of Evelyn, the Holly has been
most valued. His lamentation over the hedge in his
garden at Sayes Court, Deptford, through which Peter
the Great amused himself by trundling a wheelbarrow,
is well known. “Is there under the heavens,” he
asks in his “ Sylva,” “any more glorious and refreshing
object than an impregnable hedge of about four hun-
dred feet in length, nine feet high, and five in diameter,
which I can still show at any time of the year in my
ruined garden at Sayes Court (thanks to the Czar of

16 FAMILIAR TREES

Muscovy), glittering with its armed and varnished
leaves blushing with their natural coral? It mocks
the rudest assaults of the weather, beasts, and
hedge breakers.” For this purpose the variety
known as Hodgen’s Holly, or latifo'lia, is the best
adapted, :s it has fine broad and deep-coloured
leaves and a close compact habit of growth, without
that tendency to become thin below and to run
up into standards that is shown by some common
varieties.

Hollies can be readily raised from cuttings, which
are preferably set in April or May; but, as Evelyn
says, seedlings are better. The berries for seed
should be mixed with sandy loam for a_twelve-
month, as they do not germinate till their second
spring.

Few objects on a lawn are more beautiful than a
clump of Hollies, with red or yellow berries peeping
from among the glossy leaves flecked with ivory-white,
while a Brier-rose clambers among its boughs, or the
autumnal glories of Virginian creeper relieve the more
sombre green.

CORSICAN PINE.

THE CORSICAN PINE.

Pi'nus Lari‘cio Poiret.

Pinus Laricio, considered in a comprehensive sense,
is believed to be the wevkyn idaia (pewke’ idat‘a) of
Theophrastus, which he is at pains to distinguish
from mevxn mapadlas (peu'ke’ para'lias), the Cluster
Pine. It is interesting to note in this connection
that Theophrastus was a native of Lesbos in the
Agean, and that Philip Barker Webb, in 1818, found
this Pine, or probably the variety Pallasia’na, of
which we shall have more to say presently, on
Mount Ida, in Phrygia, from which Theophrastus’s
name was probably taken.

In a wild state Pinus Laricio extends from Asia
Minor, the Caucasus, and the Crimea to Crete, Sicily,
Spain, and the Cevennes, to Lower Austria, Hungary,
the Banat, and Transylvania. The form represented
by this name, in a restricted sense, belongs mainly to
Corsica and the Maritime Alps: the variety tenwi-
folia, of Parlatore, represents the western develop-
ment of the species: his Pallasiana, from Dalmatia,
Servia, and Thessaly, is perhaps not identical with
trees called by that name from farther east; but his
variety nigricans is the form generally known as
austri’aca, the inland, or Central European, type.
These local forms differ widely in habit and in the
elevations at which they grow—from 1,000 to 3,500

93 17

18 FAMILIAR TREES

feet in Spain, 2,500 to 3,000 feet in Albania, and 3,000
to 5,000 feet in Corsica to 4,000 to 6,000 feet on
Mount Taurus and 4,000 to 6,500 feet on Etna.

The Corsican Pine was first introduced into
England in 1759, and was described as a maritime
variety of the Scots Fir (Pinus sylves‘tris n marit’vma)
by Aiton, in the first edition of the Hortus Kewensis,
in 1789. In the second edition he called it P. marit’-
ima, and, though it was named P. Laricio by Poiret
in 1804, that name was not adopted in England until
eighteen years later. The fine specimen near the
principal entrance to Kew Gardens was probably
planted before 1774, the date when the tree in the
Jardin des Plantes at Paris was planted, the species
having, at that time, attracted the attention of
Turgot’s Ministry. The French Government had
great difficulty in obtaining seeds in Corsica, since
the cones were only produced in small numbers near
the summits of the lofty but doubtless thriving trees.
This led the dealers to adulterate the seed with that
of the Cluster Pine. In 1788, however, the Corsican
Pine was adopted for masts for the French navy.
Many trees were felled, and cones were thus pro-
cured in greater numbers. Between 1822 and
1830 this species was grafted on many thousand
stocks of P. sylvestris in the forest of Fontaine-
bleau. Poiret’s specific name, Laricio, which is
sometimes rendered literally in English as “Larch
Pine,” seems to be the Corsican name for the species.

In 1793 or 1794 the great German traveller
Pallas sent seeds from the Crimea to Messrs. Lee
and Kennedy, of the Hammersmith Nursery, of

THE CORSICAN PINE 19

that form of the species which they distributed as
P. tatar’ica, but which is now known, after its intro-
ducer, as Pallasiana.

The variety monspelien’sis, better known as
pyrenaica, which Parlatore considers a mere form
of his tenuifolia, was introduced from the moun-
tains of Southern Spain in 1834 by Captain Samuel
Cook, who afterwards took the name Widdrington ;
and the variety wustriaca, from Austria, by Messrs.
Lawson in 1835.

The typical Corsican Pine is somewhat slender in
the trunk, reaching 80 or 120 feet in height, and
more than three feet in diameter, with a pyramidal
outline, but often becoming umbrella-like in old age.
In Corsica it is said to reach 150 feet in height. The
bark is reddish-grey, not unlike that of the Scots Fir,
and cracks and scales off in large thin plates, much
as it does in that species, exposing a paler reddish-
brown inner cortex. The branches are given off in
whorls of five or six, horizontally or downwards, but
often turning upward at their extremities, much as in
the Cluster Pine, from which it is distinguished, how-
ever, by a general lateral twist of the branches round
the tree, as it were. The twigs are at first pale green,
becoming reddish-brown at the end of the second
year. The buds are incrusted with a copious white
resin, the scales fringed with silvery hairs. Like
those of other Pines, each of these buds is, as Professor
Marshall Ward puts it, “a bud of buds,” each of its
many spirally-arranged scales, with the exception of
a few at the base, having in its axil the bud of a
dwarf shoot. This consists of a few minute brown

20 FAMILIAR TREES.

scales wrapped round the base of two green needle-
leaves, placed face to face, and as yet very short and
slender. At the base of these twin needles there can
be detected between them the arrested apex of the
dwarf shoot that bears them.

The needle-leaves vary much in length, according
to the age of the tree and the soil in which it grows,
the shortest being about four and the longest about
eight inches long. Their dark green colour on both.
surfaces, their length, and their more crowded arrange-.
ment, together with the pyramidal outline of the
whole tree, serve to distinguish it from the Scots
Fir. Semicircular in section, these needles are finely
striated with sixteen rows of stomata down their
convex surfaces and eight rows down the inner flat
surfaces. They have very finely toothed edges and
a blunt apex, and remain on for three or four years.
In section they exhibit a number of resin-ducts all
round the leaf, each surrounded by sclerenchyma, and
two vascular bundles in a wide central band of tissue.

The statninate flowers are densely clustered near
the ends of.the shoots and are of a pale yellow colour.
Each flower is cylindrical and from an inch to an
inch and a half long, surrounded at its base by several
membranous bracts, and having its stamens arranged
spirally and each furnished with a rounded “con-
nective” or “crest.” When the two anther-chambers
have-split longitudinally they discharge an abund-
ance of pollen of a beautiful sulphur-yellow colour,
and the male catkins then drop off, leaving that part
of the young shoot to which they were attached
in a naked state, so that, as in the Cluster Pine and

|

Al KR WALA

Wi

FLOWERS, CONES, AND NEEDLES OF CORSICAN PINE.

THE CORSICAN PINE 21

some other species, the older shoots have their leaf-
bearing dwarf shoots in tufts alternating with bare
regions of stem.

The female catkins or young cones are either
solitary or two or three together at.the ends of the
shoots of the preceding year, springing from the axil
of a scale-leaf, as do the dwarf-shoots or leaf-spurs.
They are reddish in colour, egg-shaped, about half an
inch long, and borne on short stalks surrounded by:
membranous scales. , Their. spirally-arranged bract-
scales are not prominent and, at an -early stage,
coalesce with the “cone-scales,” or “ ovuliferous
scales,” in their axils. Each of these last terminates
in a blunt, triangular point which persists as the
“umbo,” or structural apex, of the mature cone-scale.
The cones become two or three inches long and
usually a little more than an inch in diameter above
the base, reaching their full size in the November of
the second year. When ripe they are of a tawny
colour externally, polished and almost always curved
towards the summit. The “apophysis” is rhomboidal
with a transverse keel and a small central depression
from which rises the very small terminal prickle or
umbo already mentioned. When, in the April of
the third year, the cone-scales spread outwards to
liberate the now ripe seeds, they disclose a purplish
inner surface. The seeds are oval, grey, or mottled
with black, and twice as large as those of the Scots
Fir. They have a reddish-brown wing three or four
times as long as the seed and almost semi-elliptical in
outline, being straight on one side and rounded on
the other, and widening below the middle. This is, in

22 FAMILIAR TREES

contrast to the small wing of the large seed of the
Stone Pine, an effective mechanism for seed-dispersal.

It is most important that the. true Corsican Pine.
should be accurately discriminated from its varieties
or geographical forms: in few cases, indeed, is what
is known as “critical” botany of greater practical
import. Practical experience has shown the typical
form to be one of our valuable forest trees, while
some of the other varieties do not share its useful
characteristics. Thus, J. Nelson, writing as “Johannes
Senilis ” in 1840, says of it :-—

“All things considered, it is one of the most valuable and
generally useful species of the genus Pinus which has yet been
planted in the British Isles, being thoroughly hardy, sound in con-
stitution, of tolerably large dimensions, and of a very rapid and
regular growth; and will not only grow, but will produce both
quantity and quality of timber equal to any and superior to many of
its congeners, when grown under the same conditions. We have it
in almost every description of loam, clay, sand, gravel, peat, and
compound earths—all, of course, made sweet and healthy by efficient
drainage; and in situations the most sheltered and exposed, in mari-
time and inland localities, on high and low altitudes, and everywhere
—unless, indeed, in close, soft peat and spongy marsh—it is doing
well. I know of no Pine less subject to the attacks or ravages of
insects, fungoid enemies, game, or vermin; for frequently have I
seen its congeners, the Austrian and the Scots Pines, cropped by
hares, nipped by conies, and disbudded by black cocks and grey
hens, while the Corsican remained untouched. This; doubtless, is
accounted for by the peculiarly bitter, aromatic flavour with which
its sap is impregnated.”

Mr. John Simpson writes of it that it “ appears to
have all the good qualities of the Scotch Fir, with the
advantage that it beats the latter in bulk of timber
from the first.”

This most valuable form is distinguished by its

Photo: E. J. Wallis, Kew,
CORSICAN PINE.

43

TRANSVERSE SECTION OF CORSICAN PINE WOOD (X10 DIAMETERS)

44

THE CORSICAN PINE 23

somewhat cylindrical, thin habit of growth, its
branches being few and slender; and especially by
its needles, which are from four to six inches long,
slender, and waved. It reaches greater dimensions
than any other form: it is said to attain to an age of
neatly six hundred years, and its wood is described
as better than that of the other varieties. This
wood is creamy-white when freshly cut, but becomes
brownish-yellow when seasoned: it is tough, elastic,
long but rather coarse in grain, very resinous, easily
worked, susceptible of a fair polish, and very durable.
It may be doubted whether this tree can stand sea-
breezes as well as the Cluster Pine, but it will grow
on calcareous soils. Some of the finest plantations of
the species in England are at Wortley Hall, Yorkshire,
and Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire.

The Austrian or Black Pine (P. Laricio, var.
austriaca .Endl.; P. Laricio nigricans Parl; or
P. austriaca Hiss.) is distinguished by its denser
habit, with more, longer, and stouter branches than
the Corsican Pine, and shorter, thicker, and more
rigid leaves. These are seldom much over four inches
in length, quite straight, and of a very dark brownish
shade of green, and have a hard, yellowish tip. In
Austrian forests the tree attains a height equal to the
Corsican Pine; but in the British Isles it is smaller.
It is a fast-growing form, and most accommodat-
ing as to soil. Where it grows wild it shows a
preference for calcareous soils, and especially for mag-
nesian limestone; but, coming from countries with
warm summers, a warm, southern exposure suits it
best. It is coarser grained than the Corsican Pine,

24 FAMILIAR TREES

and its timber is very knotty and rough. The wood
is, however, very resinous, more so than that of the
Corsican Pine or any other species grown in Austria.
This resin renders its wood more durable than that
of the true .P Laricio, and more valuable also as
fuel. It is largely extracted in Austria, and forms
part of the Venice turpentine of commerce.

The Tartarian Pine (P. LZ. Pallasiana Lamb.,
also known as P. taw’rica) approaches the Corsican
Pine in its dimensions, but is a broader tree
with long, thick branches springing from near the
ground. The needles may be six or seven inches in
length, but they are rigid as in the Austrian Pine,
though of a much lighter shade of green. The cones
are commonly produced three or four together, and
each five inches in length; they are ovate and
generally bent at the apex, and the tubercles in the
centre of their ash-coloured apophyses are yellow, and
bear a small spine. The tree grows rapidly, and is
well adapted for thin, chalky soils and for planting
near the sea; but it is not very often seen in

England.

SECTION OF NEEDLE OF
CORSICAN PINE, HIGHLY
MAGNIFIED.

ALDER BUCKTHORN.

THE BUCKTHORNS.

Rham'nus cathar’ticus L. and R. Frangula L.

Tue Family Rham'new, which is nota large one,
belongs mainly to the Warmer Temperate Zone, and
consists chiefly ot shrubs or small trees. Not a
few of its members have their branches, like those
of our common Buckthorn, terminated in spines, to
which, of course, our species owe the second syllable
of their names.

The leaves in all the Family are simple in outline
and stalked, and there are two minute stipules at the
base of each leaf-stalk.

The flowers are invariably small and generally
green or yellow, and would be individually insigni-
ficant; but they are often massed together and
contain honey, so that, unlike those of the true forest
trees, they have their pollen carried by bees and other
insects, and not by the wind. As in the Spindle-tree
and its allies, there is a tendency in these flowers for
the parts in each whorl to be reduced from the
typical five to four, so that there are four sepals, four
petals, four stamens, and often four chambers to the
fruit; and the green sepals are commonly larger than
the petals between them; but one of the main tech-
nical distinctions between the two Orders is that,
whilst the sepals of the Spindle-tree overlap, those of
the Buckthorn Family touch in the bud without
doing so, or are, as it is termed, “valvate.” The

24 25

26 FAMILIAR TREES

sepals are generally united into a distinct cup below,
the fleshy inner surface of which secretes the honey,
whilst the petals and stamens spring from its
margin. Another leading characteristic is that the
stamens each stand in front of one of the petals,
instead of between them, which latter is the case in
the Spindle-tree.

The fruit in most members of the Order is fleshy
externally, whilst internally it consists of three, or less
commonly two or four, hard one-seeded stones. It is
the fleshy portion of the berries of the Buckthorns
that yields the various colouring substances which
constitute one of the chief economic products of the
group; and fruit, bark, and, to some extent, the whole
plant contain bitter, and sometimes astringent,
principles often strongly purgative and employed as
such medicinally. Thus a Mediterranean species,
Rhamnus “infector'ius L, is much grown at
Kaisaryeh in Asia Minor, the ancient Cesara in
Cappadocia, and its unripe fruits are exported from
Smyrna under the name of Persian or Yellow Berries.
Other species, such as #. saxa'tilis L., from South-
Eastern Europe, R. alater’‘nus L. and R. oleoi‘des L.,
from the Western Mediterranean area, and our
British species R. catharticus, yield some of the
berries of commerce, those from France, known as
Avignon Berries, being considered inferior to. the
Asiatic. These fruits are used to give a yellow colour
to morocco leather. The ripe berries of the British
and Asiatic species alike, with the addition of alum
or lime-water and gum arabic, form the sap-green or
bladder-green of painters. Ripe Buckthorn-berries

THE BUCKTHORNS 27

are collected in Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and
Oxfordshire for this purpose, and for the manufacture
of the purgative Syrup of Buckthorn. About fifty
years ago considerable quantities of a beautiful green
dye known as Lo-kao, or Chinese Green. Indigo, were
imported from China to Lyons for dyeing silk.
It proved to be extracted from the bark of
R. tinctorius W.R. and R. dahw’ricus Pall. though
a similar dye has been obtained from our own
species R. catharticus, and both are now alike
superseded by the aniline colours.

Whilst the English name is merely an early mis-
translation of the German Buadorn, the thorn-bearing
Box, the scientific name Rhammnus, or rather its Greek
equivalent Rhamnos, goes back to the very dawn of
the science, to Theophrastus and Dioscorides. It is a
nice question of philology to decide whether, as has
been alleged, this name has anything to do with the
Latin ramus, a branch, in reference to the much-
branched habit of most members of the group.

Both our British species were growing in the garden
of the apothecary John Gerard in Fetter Lane, Holborn,
in 1596. In his“ Herball,” published in the following
year, he speaks of finding the Buckthorn “in Kent in
sundrie places”; and of the Alder Buckthorn he writes,
“T found great plentie of it in a wood a mile from
Islington in the way from thence toward a small
village called Harnsey, at Hampstead, and in most.
woods in the parts about London.” Another London
apothecary, in the next generation, John Parkinson,
in his “Theatrum Botanicum,” published in 1640,
classifies both species among purgative plants; and

28 FAMILIAR TREES

his description is so characteristic as to be worth
transcription at some length.

“1. Rhamnus solutivus vulgaris. The common purging thorne.

“The purging thorne, that is frequent in our owne Land, is for the
most part but alow shrubbe or hedge bush, seldome growing any
thing bigge or like a tree, having many stemmes or branches rising
from the roote, covered with a smooth blackish red barke on the out-
side, and greene on the inside, the innermost being yellow, the wood
whereof is of a whitish yellow, toward the outside, and of a reddish
yellow inward, and at the heart strong, and not easie to bend or to
breake, whereof strong bowes may be made, and hath beenc in times
past: the smaller branches are furnished with many leaves like unto
those of the crab tree, but smaller, with small long straight thornes
in many places set with the leaves, the ends of the branches ending
in a thorne also; among the leaves come forth many flowers, every
one upon a severall foote stalke, consisting of foure leaves a peece,
of awhitish greene colour ; after which come small red round berries,
greene at the first, and blacke when they are ripe, full of pulpe or
juyce that is greene, with one ortwo small graines within them
of an unpleasant taste. . . .

“The Place.

“The first groweth in many places of this land, but especially in
Kent, as at the hither end of Dartford next unto London, Farning-
ham upon the Connie burrowes, and in a narrow Lane neere South
Flcete, and in many other places. . . .

“ The Vertues,

“The berries hereof dryed and a drame of the powder, given in
wine or the broth of flesh, doth purge both flegme and grosse thicke
humors also, yet Pena saith it rather draweth forth thinne flegme,
and that from the joints and Arteries, and therefore is singular good
for dropsies ; some doe make an Electuary and some a Syrupe of the
juyce of the berries clarified, and Sugar or Honey put thereto, but
because it worketh a little troublesomely, some spices are to be
added thereto to aromatise it, as Cinamon, Ginger and Cloves, and
some adde Masticke and roses also, which doth correct the evill
quality therein, and cause it to worke without paine: an ounce or
more of either Electuary or Syrupe may be given at a time, dissolved
either in wine or in the broth of flesh, which will draw forth raw

Crake Weck ae

wee
soca

are

LEAVES, FLOWERS, AND FRUIT OF ALDER BUCKTHORN.

THE BUCKTHORNS 29

whayisl humors, and choller aboundantly, as also thicke clammie
flegme: ... Of these berries are made three severall sorts of col-
ours, as they shall be gathered; that is being gathered while they
are greene and kept dry, are called Sappe-berries, which being
steeped in some Allome water, or fresh bruised into Allome water,
they give a reasonable faire yellow colour, which painters use for
their workes, and Bookebinders to colour the edges of bookes, and
leather dressers to colour leather, as they use also to make a greene
colour called Sappe greene, taken from the berries when they are
blacke, being bruised and put into « brasse or copper kettle, or pan ;
and there suffered to abide three or foure dayes, or a little heated
upon the fire, and some beaten Allome put unto them, and after
pressed forth, the juyce or liquor is usually put up into great bladders,
tyed with strong thred at the head, and hung up untill it be drye,
which is dissolved in water or wine, but sacke is the best to preserve
the colour from starving as they call it, that is from decaying and
to make it hold fresh the longer: the third colour (whereof, none
that I can finde hath made mention, but onely 77agus) is a purplish
colour which is made of the berries suffered to grow upon the
bushes, untill the middle or end of November, that they are ready
to droppe from the trees.”

Our second British species of Buckthorn, R. Frun-
gulu, growing in wet places, side by side with the
Alder, got the name of the Black or Berry-bearing
Alder or Aller tree, though it has but very little in
common with the true Alder and is far removed
from it in true kinship. Once more we will quote
Parkinson’s description :—

“ Frangula sive Alnus nigra baccifera. The blacke Alder tree.

“The blacke Aller or Alder tree, riseth seldome to be of any great
bignesse, but for the most part abideth like a hedge bush or tree,
spreading into branches, the wood of the body being white, and of
a darke red at the core or heart, the outward barke being of a
blackish colour, whereon many white spots are noted to be seene;
but the inner barke next unto the wood is yellow, which being
chewed will turne the spittle yellow, as much or more than Rubarbe,

neare unto a Saffron colour, the leaves are somewhat like unto those
of the ordinary Alder tree, or those of the female Cornell or Doze

30 FAMILIAR TREES

berry tree, but blacker, and not so long but rather rounder, the
flowers are white comming forth at the joynts with the leaves which
turne into small round berries, greene at the first, and red after-
wards, but blackish when they are thorough ripe, divided as it were
into two parts, wherein is contained two small round and flat
seedes: the roote runneth not deepe into the ground, but
spreadeth rather under the upper crust of the earth.”

At the present day, owing to the violence and
uncertainty of its action, medical practitioners have
quite discarded Syrup of Buckthorn, its place having
been taken during the last quarter of a century by
preparations of the so-called Cascara Sagrada, or
“Sacred Bark,” the inner bark of Rhamnus Pur-
shia'nus D.C., a native of the Pacific slope of North
America, more especially Oregon.

To the non-botanical observer it may well at first
be puzzling to understand the association of our two
British Buckthorns in one genus. With the same
general geographical distribution, extending into
Siberia and Northern Africa, and alike rare in Ire-
land and absent in the north of Scotland, they grow
in very different situations. The true Buckthorn,
R. catharticus, that is, occurs chiefly upon chalk and
other limestones, whilst the Alder Buckthorn,
R. Franguia, prefers clay or wet alluvial soils.
Though they are of approximately the same size,
whilst the Buckthorn is a stiff much-branched shrub,
giving off its spine-terminated branches in almost
opposite pairs, the Alder Buckthorn has a far looser
habit of growth, with slender branches, given off
singly and destitute of spines. The dark, pointed
buds of the Common Buckthorn are erect and
pressed against the stem in almost opposite pairs,

Photo: H. Irving, Horley.

ALDER BUCKTHORN.

47

TRANSVERSE SECTIONS OF WOOD OF (1) ALDER BUCKTHORN (X 10 DIAMETERS,
(2) COMMON BUCKTHORN (X 30 DIAMETERS).

THE BUCKTHORNS 31

and are enclosed by seven or eight pairs of over-
lapping scales, which are stipules in origin. The
leaves have their margins rolled inwards in the bud
and are in crowded tufts on the dwarf shoots and in
sub-opposite pairs on the long shoots; they are
elliptical, with sharply-toothed margins and a short
abrupt point, downy on the stalk and under-surface
when young, and of a dark green, which becomes
yellowish towards autumn. Their midribs give off
two or three secondary veins on either side at an
acute angle which sweep towards the apex in an
elliptical curve. On the other hand, the slightly
angular, violet-tinged twigs of the Alder Buckthorn
bear small grey hairy buds without scales; and its
leaves, when unfolded, are reversedly egg-shaped, with
no teeth on their margins and with eight or nine
secondary veins on either side of their midribs. The
two species agree in having small half-moon-shaped
leaf-scars, each marked by the terminations of three
veins; and, as we have seen, the lenticels are suf-
ficiently prominent to have attracted the notice of
Parkinson, who speaks of them as “ white spots.”

The flowers of both species are alike individually
minute, but those of R. catharticus are yellowish-
green, and generally in dense clusters on the dwarf
shoots of the previous year ; they are dicecious, having,
that is, staminate and pistillate blossoms on distinct
bushes ; and their parts are in fours—four sepals, four
petals, four stamens, a style generally four-branched,
and a four-seeded ovary. The few greenish-white
blossoms in the axils of the leaves of the Alder Buck-
thorn, though similar in the cup-shaped base of the

32 FAMILIAR TREES

calyx, have their parts mostly in fives, and have
stamens and pistil in the same flowers. The style in
this species is unbranched, and the ovary contains
only two seeds. The small globular fruits of the two
species are similar externally, but those of R. Fran-
gula reach a larger size. Both are fleshy and berry-
like, and become ultimately black.

It is a somewhat exceptional fact that these many
differences in external anatomy are associated with
quite as wide a divergence in the character of the
wood of the two shrubs, though there is a resemblance
in colour. The soft spongy wood of the Alder Buck-
thorn is largely used, under the name of “ Black Dog-
wood,” for the manufacture of gunpowder charcoal.
It has a yellowish-red heart, with a narrow light
yellow sapwood ; but there is nothing very remarkable
about its appearance under the microscope. The
harder and heavier wood of R. catharticus, however,
is not only more orange at the heart and more greenish
in its sapwood, but shows a distinct zone of pores in
the spring wood of each annual ring, and remarkable
flame-like groups of pores tapering outwards through
the autumn wood in a manner well nigh unique.

If this tree has‘ no great beauty of its own,
it is the source of one of the loveliest sights of
our English summer; for the Brimstone Butterfly
(Gonep'teryz Rhamni) feeds in its larval stage
upon the leaves of the Alder Buckthorn; and we
may apply to this lovely insect the language used
by Burke with reference to Marie Antoinette:
“Surely never lighted on this orb, which she
hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision !”

APPLE.

THE APPLE.

Py'rus Ma'lus L.

Amone fruit-trees, the Apple is perhaps more charac-
teristic of the North Temperate zone than is any other.
The whole. genus Pyrus is confined, in a wild state,
to the temperate and cold parts of the northern
hemisphere, though Apples are now cultivated at the
Cape, in Australia, and in New Zealand. The Apple
cannot be grown within the Tropics or north of the
Arctic Circle; but it rejoices in the dry climate and
warm summers of Canada and the United States, and
thus the white and pink blossoms of this tree and of
its allies, the Pears, Services, and Rowans, brightening
the spring landscape in woodland and hedgerow when
bare of leaves, are a peculiar giory of our latitudes.
The Apple stands alone among British trees as
possessing a coloured corolla ; for the Horse-chestnut
is not truly indigenous, the greater number of our
arboreal flora have inconspicuous flowers without any
corolla at all, and the rest, such as Cherry, Hawthorn,
Thorn, Elder, and Guelder-rose, are of so pure a white
that we often feel in spring as though we had returned
to the sight of winter’s snows. As the fruit par
excellence of the Teutonic area, the Apple has appro-
priated as its popular name what was once a common
Germanic term for fruit of any kind, Ap/el being once
epl, and often apulder, connected with “ Maple” and
“Mapulder,” and being still extended to many totally
25 33

34 FAMILIAR TREES

different fruit-bearing plants, such as Thorn-apples
and Love-apples. The Anglo-Saxon name for the
Blackberry, for instance, was Bramble-apple; and
that rare old traveller, Sir John Mandeville, speaking
of the Cedars of Lebanon, says, “they beren longe
Apples, and als grete as a man’s heved.” Though
both Apples and apples of gold are spoken of in
several parts of the Bible, the tree now so called is
believed not to have been cultivated by the Hebrews,
the Citron or some other fruit being referred to.
Darwin propounds the suggestion that our cul-
tivated varieties are derived from the wild Crab of
the Caucasus; but this origin dates probably from a
remote antiquity, before the time when perhaps the
Druid cut with golden knife the mistletoe bough in
the Ynys yr Avallon, the Island of Apples, afterwards
known as Glastonbury; for its carbonised remains in-
dicate the use of the Apple as food by the prehistoric
inhabitants of the Swiss lake-dwellings. Just as the
Romans used both the words malum and pomum for
the fruit and for the tree, besides extending both
terms to other fruits, so with us in a wild state the
fruit of the Apple, or the tree itself, is known by the
probably Keltic name “ crab” or “ crab-apple,” a name
apparently having the original signification of sour.
The Apple seldom occurs of a large size in a wild
state in England, and is often exposed to the indignity
of being cut down with the hedgerow. In our orchards
the short stems slope in every direction, not being
rooted in the ground with sufficient firmness to resist.
being blown to one side by the gale—an accident to
which they are rendered more liable by the custom

THE APPLE 35

of cutting off the tap-roots to facilitate transplanting.
Where the soil is poor or badly drained, or the trees
are crowded, the bark is often. lichen-covered, and the
gnarled and knotted branches are the chief habitat,
or “host,” as the botanists facetiously term it, of that
unwelcome guest, the Mistletoe. The parasite grows
as freely upon the crab-apple as on the cultivated
varieties, and preying on the life-fluids of the tree, is
able to maintain its own verdure all the year round,
whilst it is not unfrequently absolutely fatal to young
Apple-trees in our western orchard counties.

The Wild Apple has its dwarf shoots irregularly
curved, rough with crescent-shaped leaf-scars, and
sometimes almost thorny, though not distinctly so
as in the Pear. There are generally three princi-
pal branches, which spring from the trunk at an
angle of from ninety to a hundred and twenty
degrees, so as to produce a habit more spreading
than that of the Pear; and the subsequent branches
and twigs spread out from one another at angles
slightly exceeding a right angle, giving the tree an
irregularly rounded head, which is so characteristic
as to be recognisable at a distance.

The leaves make their appearance rather before
the flowers, which do not generally open before May,
by which time the Pear has usually lost its blossoms
and completed the growth of its foliage. “The leaves
of the Apple have at first a brownish tinge, and
though individually pretty, are not effective among
the flowers, whilst they subsequently become a dull
darkish green, which has not much beauty. They
are oblong and rounded, with an abrupt point—

36 FAMILIAR TREES

“acuminate,” as it is technically termed—not egg-
shaped and tapering gradually or “acute,” as are
those of the Pear—and they dry brown, not black,
when dead.

Far beyond the pale white beauty of the Pear-
blossom, however, which seems cold in the yet early
spring, is that of the delicately blushing, rosy and
white-streaked, round buds of the Apple. Even in
May, that time of flowers, when—

“ The meadow by the river seems a sea
Of liquid silver with the cuckoo-flowers ”—

that season of Marsh-marigolds and Cowslips, of wild
Hyacinths and purple Orchids, of the Horse-chest-
nut, the Lilac, and the Guelder-rose, of Pzonies and
Tulips—there is no more beautiful sight than the
far-stretching orchards of Somerset, Hereford, or
Worcester. In the exquisite folding of the petals in
each short-stalked flower over its golden heart of
stamens, we have a bloom far more becoming to an
English bride than the ivory pallor of the exotic
orange-flower. When we look for the deeper meaning
of and reason for all this lavished beauty, we must
confess ourselves as yet to be much ata loss. The
succession of variously-hued flowers as spring ad-
vances into summer, and summer into autumn (so
that blue flowers, as a rule, precede white ones, whilst
these in théir turn open before the purple, yellow, and
red blossoms of the summer), would seem to be due
in some imperfectly explained manner to the increas-
ing intensity of the sun’s light as it travels northward
from the winter to the summer solstice.

In the Apple-blossom the stigmas are, as a rule,

APPLE FLOWERS AND FRUIT.

THE APPLE 37

mature before the pollen is ripe, a condition known
technically as “proterogynous,” so that self-fertilisation
cannot usually take place in this species, .nd by
their beauty and their abundant honey the Howers
attract many kinds of bees and other insects. We
have yet much to learn, however, as to the indi-
vidual tastes in colour of the various insects, and
as to whether we can connect in any way, by
the theory of sexual selection, their own colouring
with that of the flowers they frequent. With regard
to the plant, the advantage to the species of an
occasional cross has been conclusively shown.

The wealth of beauty of the Apple in flower,
whether massed together in our orchards, or happened
upon as a pleasing surprise in a hedgerow, or “ deep
in the thicket of some wood,” is succeeded by another
charm, perhaps not equal, but at least not despicable
—that of the tree in fruit. In the wild state crab-
apples are mostly of a deep red tint, as that accurate
observer the poet Clare describes them :—

“Crabs sun-reddened with a tempting cheek.

There would seem, however, to be more than one
variety in England in this respect, since crabs are
occasionally found of a pure golden yellow, reminding
us of Phillips’s “ Pippin burnish’d o’er with gold.”
Whatever its form in other respects, the Apple is
easily distinguished from the pear by its “umbilicus,”
or depression at the base to receive the stalk. Its
rounded outline, with one side perchance “sun-
reddened,” has often caused it to suggest the plump
and rosy cheeks of an English maiden ; but when we

38 FAMILIAR TREES

ask the raison d’étre of this rosy-cheeked, succulent
and juicy fruit, we are again met by some of the most
interesting problems of modern botany. The act of
fertilisatior. or impregnation seems to have an effect
comparable to that of the puncture of a gall-fly in
determining the flow of nutriment in the direction of
the fertilised seeds and their enclosing ovary: the
petals and stamens wither and fall; and in nearly
every fruit enlargement of the ovary, and often of
some adjacent structures, takes place. A succu-
lent fruit is thus produced, often having some gay
autumn tint, red, gold, or purple, attractive to the
bird-world by its colour, and by its lusciousness
when ripe. In the Apple the five ovaries are not at
first united, but are subsequently overgrown and
completely joined by the development of the so-called
“calyx-tube,” an outgrowth from the flower-stalk,
which shuts in the parchment-like core, and carries
up with it the withered calyx-leaves to form a
crown on the summit of the fruit.

The ripe Apple falling to the ground, reminding us
in its fall of the somewhat apocryphal tale of Newton
and the discovery of gravitation, must often have
become the prey of the wild boars, deer, and cattle of
the primeval forests of Europe. The Crab-tree, in
fact, owes its preservation in our forests to protective
regulations for the sake of the deer. Its firm skin
may for some time keep the decaying pulp together
so as to manure the germinating seed ; and the tough
dark brown skin of the seed itself offers such resist-
ance both to damp and to the digestive process as
to secure to it a fair chance of sprouting in duc

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TRANSVERSE SECTION

moi a oo a ones

THE APPLE 39

time and place—not too early, and away from the
overshadowing of its parent tree, so that it may have
a good start for success in the struggle for existence.
If we have wet weather during the forty days at the
end of July and in August traditionally connected
with the Translation of Swithin, sainted Bishop of
Winchester, whose feast is July 15th, the Apples
will have the means of becoming large and juicy
before they ripen.

Though it is impossible here even to enumer-
ate the chief cultivated kinds of Apple, it may be
noted that botanists distinguish two varieties of
wild English Crabs: Pyrus Malus acerba D.C.,
the commoner, having the young branches, calyx-
tube, and under side of the leaf smooth and the
fruit drooping, and P. M. mitis Wallr., having the
same parts downy and the fruit erect.

The unripe fruits of the wild Apple are used in
the manufacture of verjuice, now chiefly made in
France, which, when fermented and sweetened, makes
a pleasant drink; but in the sixteenth century the
fruit was in more esteem than it now is. Christmas
was then the season

“When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,”

they being served in hot ale; nor was this from any
want of cultivated Apples. Even Pliny speaks of
twenty-two varieties; and Shakespeare mentions,
besides the Crab, the Pippin, the Pomewater, the
Apple-john, the Codling, the Carraway, the Leathercoat,
and the Bitter-sweeting; whilst his contemporary,
Gerard, says that in his time “the stocke or kindred

40 FAMILIAR TREES

of Apples was infinite.” John Parkinson, in his
“ Paradisus Terrestris” (1629), enumerates fifty-seven
sorts ; and though Ray in 1688 only mentions seventy-
eight as grown round London, his friend and contem-
porary, Samuel Hartlib, alludes to the existence of
two hundred kinds. At the present day there are
stated to be five thousand varieties in cultivation.

The sapwood is a dull white, but the heart a dark
brown, heavy, very hard and taking a high polish.
Crab-tree cudgels are proverbial for their hardness
and the wood is also used for mallets and turnery ;
but is brittle and apt to warp.

In many an old manor-house, where a generation
ago there was no lawn, as at present, or at most a
green bowling-alley, shut in by a Yew hedge, the
orchard of cider-apples, in whose long grass grew
Winter-aconite, Snowdrops, and Daffodils, was planted
close to the parlour windows, and the trees may
yet remain to give an old-world charm to the spot.

SWEET CHESTNUT.

THE SWEET CHESTNUT.

Casta'nea sativa Mill.

WirTH but small claims to be considered a native
of the British Isles, the Sweet, or Spanish, Chest-
nut is so generally planted in woods, parks, and
shrubberies that it is as common and as familiar
to us as many of our more truly indigenous
species.

Its name and origin are alike somewhat doubt-
ful. It is most abundant in an apparently wild
state in Southern Europe, extending eastward to
the Caucasus, and occurring in the islands of the
Mediterranean at moderate elevations above the sea.
A similar or identical form occurs in the mountains
of Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas. There are
forests composed of this species in Alsace and
Rhenish Prussia; and it is common, though
possibly planted, in Normandy and around Paris.
Its fruit does not ripen fully every year with us;
but this is by no means an infallible proof - that
a species is not indigenous.

The name occurs twice in the Authorised Ver-
sion of the Bible; but there is little reason to sup-
pose that it is rightly employed, though no doubt
its starchy nuts must have been widely used for:
food from the earliest times. The town of Kastana
in Thessaly is generally referred to as the source
of the Latin, if not of the Greek name; but, as

26 41

42 FAMILIAR TREES

De Candolle has pointed out, considering that
names which are virtually identical are applied to
the tree in all the most ancient languages of
Central Europe, it is more probable that the town
took its name from the trees which surrounded
it. Thus the Breton Kistenen, for the tree, and
Kistin, for its fruit, and the, Welsh Castun-wydden
and Sataen, are closely related to the French
Chdtaigne and to the Latin name which is still the
scientific appellation of the genus.

According to Pliny, the Greeks obtained the
tree from Sardis in Asia Minor, at least five cen-
turies before the Christian era, a statement which
De Candolle doubts, since he considers the tree
undoubtedly wild in Greece, where, as early as the
fourth century B.c., Theophrastus, “the Father of
Botany,” speaks of it as covering the slopes of
Olympus.

Old Chestnut-trees, especially when once lopped
close to the ground, seem often to exhibit a grow-
ing together or fusion of many stems into one,
a circumstance that explains many of the in-
stances of enormous circumference which have
led authors not only to assert the indigenous
character of the species, but also to claim for it
an almost fabulous longevity.

The largest Chestnut-tree in the world is un-
doubtedly the Castagno di cento cavalli (“Chestnut
of a hundred horses”) in the forest of Carpinetto,
on the east side of Mount Etna. It is 160 feet
in circumference, and entirely hollow, a kiln for
drying chestnuts—an article of food of considerable

THE SWEET CHESTNUT 43

local importance—having bcen built inside it.
Supposing each annual ring of wood to be a line
in thickness, a fair estimate for an unsplit tree,
the circumference of this giant of the forest would
indicate from 3,600 to 4,000 years of life. Other
trees in the neighbourhood of Etna, where Chest-
nuts are cultivated with great care, approach the
dimensions of the giant; and, among other his-
torical trees on the Continent, one in the depart-
ment of Cher, in France, is noticeable as having
been celebrated as a large tree for five or six
centuries, though only thirty feet round.

Though the rope-like stems and glossy foliage
of the Chestnut are more familiar objects in the
sunny south, whilst with us the tree is most
commonly seen as mere coppice-wood, we are not
without our giant specimens, which, no doubt,
have had great weight in the minds of those who
have claimed this species as a native of Britain,
such as John Evelyn, the immortal author of
“Sylva.” In Earl Ducie’s park at Tortworth, in
Gloucestershire, is the remnant of a tree spoken
of as old in the time of King Stephen, as, in-
deed, it’ might well be, even if the Chestnut be
of Roman introduction. This Tortworth Chest-
nut is portrayed in Strutt’s magnificent “Sylva
Britannica,” having in 1766 a circumference of
fifty, and in 1830 of fifty-two feet, at a height of
five feet from the ground; but it is now a mere
fragment. At Burgate, near Godalming, in Surrey,
is a grove of some twenty splendid trees, two of
which exceed nineteen feet in girth, their enormous

44 FAMILIAR TREES

twisted trunks recalling bits of Spain, or of Salvator
Rosa’s Calabrian landscape. In-the immediate neigh-
bourhood of the metropolis there are no specimens
to surpass the fine trees in Kensington and Kew
Gardens.

Turner, in his “Names of Herbes” (1548),
writes:—“ Nux castanea is called in Greeke
Castanon, in Englishe a chestnut-tree, in, Duch
Castene, in French Ung Chastagne. Chesnuttes
growe in diverse places of Englande. The maniest
that I have sene was in Kent.” From Shake-
speare’s allusions to it in Macbeth and the Zam-
ing of the Shrew, it would seem to have been
a common article of food in his time. .

Below the rounded, slightly-pointed buds in
spring may be seen the projecting bracket-like
scars which supported the heavy leaves of the
previous year. The bark of the young saplings,
and of the pollard shoots that are grown for Hop-
poles in the South-east of England, is smooth
and of a rich vinous maroon or red-brown tint;
but in older trees it becomes: grey, and. splits
in vertical lines so as to allow of the expansion
of the wood within. These vertical cracks widen,
deepen, and sometimes, as the trees grow, become
twisted, thus often giving to the full-grown Chest-
nut stem a most distinctive rope-cable-like ap-
pearance. The tree attains a height of fifty,
eighty, or even one hundred feet, and single
stems may no doubt exceed twenty feet in
girth, The branches are given off alternately and
nearly horizontally, but, spreading~ outwards, bend

LEAF, FLOWER. AND FRUIT OF SWEET CHESTNUT.

THE SWEET CHESTNUT 45

downwards at their extremities’so as sometimes
to sweep the ground. The whole outline of an
unpollarded tree is remarkably round-topped, even
more than is that of the Oak; but its bright
pendent foliage, reflecting the sunlight, prevents
the general effect from being heavy. William
Gilpin notices how Salvator Rosa makes use of
this, his favourite tree, in all its forms, break-
ing and disposing it in a thousand beautiful
shapes, as the exigencies of his composition re-
quired.

The Chestnut is a valuable avenue tree. Across
an ordinary carriage-drive the opposite trees will,
meet in a few years, and the foliage effects will be
pleasing during the greater part of the year—the
long,- pointed, and sharply-toothed leaves seem to
partake of the evergreen: character of so many of
the trees of the south in their thickness and gloss.
When young they are often of a beautiful red
colour, and when mature of: a very pleasant shade
of green, without the blue tint common to many
grasses, and though perhaps as brown as the leaves
of the Buckthorn, they are redeemed from dulness
by their shining surfaces. They are very much
the colour of the Hornbeam, or of the Beech when
no longer young and emerald-hued though not
yet opaque and dull. The venation is pinnate, the
midrib giving off about twenty secondary veins on
each side, between which is a fine meshwork of
tertiary veins. In the bud the leaves are folded
plicately along the secondary veins. These fine
leaves, sometimes eight or nine inches long, are to

46 FAMILIAR TREES

some extent crowded so as to form tufts at the ends
of the branches, and from their “axils,” ze. the
angles where they are given off from the stem,
spring the long pendulous catkins of flowers. In
a favourable autumn the leaves turn to a clear
lemon-yellow, stained with orange and brown
where damp decomposes the, as yet, perfect’ texture.
Some of the leaves seem, however, first to clear
their green, light green patches occurring at the
base of “the sere, the yellow leaf,’ and the whole
tree gaining a varied and revivified aspect, the
forlorn hope of life before the winter death.
Flowers of both kinds are borne on every tree.
The slender yellowish catkins are five or six inches
long, hanging from the axils of the young leaves
in May. Each catkin bears a series of small scale-
like “bracts,” some littie distance apart, and in
the axil of each of these scales there are either
seven staminate or three pistillate flowers. Each
kind of flower is surrounded by a calyx of six
minute greenish leaves, which in the female
blossoms form a tube enclosing and adhering to
the ovary. There are from eight to twenty stamens
in each male flower, which discharge an enormous
quantity of pollen, like a cloud of sulphur. So
abundant is this pollen that, if it has not con-
tributed, as has that of the Pine, to our tradi-
tionary folk-lore concerning rains of sulphur, it will
certainly cover the water of any neighbouring pond
with its film of yellow dust, which is perhaps suf-
ficient reason for not planting the tree on the
margin of any small piece of ornamental water. At

Photo: H. Irving, Horley.
SWEET CHESTNUT.

49

TRANSVERSE SECTION OF SWEET CHESTNUT WOOD (X 30 DIAMETERS).

59

THE SWEET CHESTNUT 47

the season when the pollen is ripe the flowers pro-
duce a very powerful and somewhat hircine odour.

The “cupule,” formed from the four bracteoles
of the two lateral florets, corresponds to the cup of
the acorn, the leafy husk of the Hazel-nut, or the
hook-covered casing of the Beech-mast. Until the
fruit is ripe it is entirely invested by this husk,
which is thickly beset with prickles, each of them
said to represent an abortive branch. This ball-
like chevaux-de-frise of protection ultimately splits
into its four constituent bracteoles, disclosing the
glossy brown fruits within. The ovary contains
from five to eight chambers, and there are an
equal number of stigmas, which are easily recog-
nised, as they spread outwards in a radiating
manner above the calyx which, even in the fruit
stage, surmounts the ovary. There are generally
two ovules in each chamber of the ovary, out of
all of which one only, or three at the most, is
matured into a seed.

The well-known fruit, so often confused by the
botanical tyro with the seed of the Horse-chestnut,
a tree with no real relationship to our present sub-
ject, does not often in this country reach eatable
proportions, though the gales of every autumn blow
down the bright green fuzz-balls of spines, bursting
them open and liberating the three brown fruits,
more or less shrivelled, within. Upwards of 50,000
bushels of chestnuts are annually imported into
England; and they still form a staple article of
food in the central plains of France and _ the
valleys of the Alps, for they contain so large a

48 FAMILIAR TREES

percentage of starch and so little oil or fat that
they might fairly be classified among farinaceous
bread-stuffs. The tough, leathery “ pericarp,” or
outer. skin of the fruit, resembles the “testa,”
or outer skin of the seed, in the Horse-chestnut,
but differs from it in terminating in a point, where
the remains of perianth and stigmas can often be
detected. Removing the woolly coats of the seed,
we find the edible cotyledons. or seed-leaves which
are considerably crumpled.

The timber of the Chestnut resembles Oak,
being brown, moderately hard, fine-grained, and
rather porous; but, being of slower growth, its
rings are narrower ; the “medullary rays” are not
traceable, nor is there any distinction between the
heart-wood and the sap-wood. Our photo-micro-
graph shows the marked contrast in each annual
ring between the Jarge vessels of the spring wood
and the smaller ones formed later. It was for-
merly supposed that the roof of Westminster Hall
and other old woodwork in London was of this
timber, a fact which would have been an argu-
ment for the antiquity of the growth of the Chest-
nut in England; but upon examination these
buildings have proved to be of Oak. Beyond the
use of its saplings as Hop-poles, Chestnut timber
is applied to no special purpose; but, growing as
it will even in poor, sandy soil, or under the shade
of Fir-trees, it is a good deal planted as cover for
game, —

COMMON LAUREL,

THE COMMON OR CHERRY LAUREL.

Prunus Lauroce’rasus L.

PopuLaR names and their suggestiveness of error
cannot be better illustrated than by a consideration
of the trees known as Laurels. The name is said to
be connected with the Latin word luwus, “ praise” ;
but the origin of the associations of the name is
Greek. Apollo, having slain the Python, the ancient
serpent formed from the slime left after Deucalion’s
flood, fled for purification to the Laurel-groves of the
vale of Tempe. Here he became enamoured of the
nymph Daphne, the daughter of the river Peneus, and
on his pursuing her she took refuge in her paternal
stream, and was metamorphosed intoa Laurel. Apollo,
returning to Delphi, instituted the Pythian games to
commemorate his victory, and the prizes there
awarded were chiefly crowns of the leaves and berries
of the shrub, which henceforth was looked upon as
sacred to the god—the Lawrea Delphica or Apol-
linaris. Apollo being the god of poetry, his emblem,
that of victory and clemency, became the favourite of
the poets, and hence of scholars generally, so that
successful graduates of universities or other learned
men became known as “laureates,” or “ baccalaurei,”
from the berried crown. Such graduates, like the
fellows of colleges down to our own time, were not
allowed to marry, lest the duties of husband and
father should take them from their literary pursuits,
27 49

50 FAMILIAR TREES

and hence the term “bachelor” became extended to
unmarried men in general.

The Laurel was also believed to be a protection
against lightning; and accordingly, the Emperor
Tiberius, when it thundered, wore a Laurel-wreath
made from the tree at the imperial villa on the
Flaminian Way, which sprang from a shoot said to
have been miraculously sent from heaven to Livia
Drusilla. Used as an emblem of truth, like the Olive,
both trees were equally forbidden to be put to any
profane uses; but the crackling of burning Laurel-
leaves was also employed as a means of divination.

Dr. Lindley argued that the true Delphic Laurel
was Rus'cus racemo’sus, sometimes called the
“ Alexandrian Laurel,” a low-growing, berry-bearing
shrub, with glossy green leaf-like branches, akin to
our English Butcher’s-broom; but it is more gener-
ally considered that the Daphne of the Greeks was
our Bay-tree (Law'rus nobilis L.), fine trees of
which now adorn the banks of the Peneus. This,
no doubt, was Chaucer’s

“Fresh grene laurer tree,
That gave so passing a delicious smelle,”’
and was the only Laurel generally known in Europe
in Shakespeare’s time. Its popular name has now,
however, been completely transferred to a totally
different and unrelated plant, the “Cherry Bay” or
“Cherry Laurel” (Prunus Laurocerasus L.). There
is little in common between the two plants beyond
the evergreen character of their leaves.

The Cherry Laurel was referred by Linneus to

the genus Prunus, and is retained in that position

THE COMMON OR CHERRY LAUREL 51

by Bentham and Hooker. The genus Prunus is
characterised by its. fruit being a “drupe ”—a suc-
culent fruit, formed from one carpel, with a strong
inner layer, or “endocarp,” and containing two
pendulous ovules, only one of which commonly
matures into a seed. The calyx falls off with the
petals. The Cherry Laurel differs from the Plums,
and agrees with the Cherries, in the absence of
“bloom ” from the surface of the fruit; but, together
with the Bird-cherry (P. Pa‘dus-L.) and the Portugal
Laurel (P. lusita'nica L.), it constitutes a distinct
sub-genus (Lawrocerasus), characterised by having
“eonduplicate” leaves and “racemes” of flowers,
which appear after the leaves, whilst the rest of
the genus have their flowers either solitary or in
“ fascicles.” .A “fascicle” is a tuft of flowers whose
stalks spring nearly from one point, whilst a “raceme”
has an elongated main stalk or peduncle, giving off
successive lateral “ pedicels” or flower-stalks.

The Cherry Laurel is exceptional among its con-
geners in having green shoots, and the yellowish-
green tint of its leathery evergreen leaves is also
characteristic. They somewhat resemble those of
the Orange or of the Magnolia, They are “ovate-
lanceolate” in outline, are provided with a few scat-
tered teeth along their margins, and (like those of
many allied “drupaceous” or “stone-fruit” trees)
have from two to four glands on their under sur-
faces. The “racemes” are shorter than the leaves,
and the fruits are “ovate-acute” in outline.

The species is one of rapid growth, i increasing from
one foot to three feet in height in a single year; but

52 FAMILIAR TREES

with us it is somewhat more susceptible to the
action of frost than its congener the Portugal
Laurel (Prunus lusitanica). Its long racemes of
small white flowers are produced after the young
leaves, during April or May; and the fruit, which is
green at first, ripens to a pure black by October.
This fruit, though insipid, is perfectly harmless.

The Cherry Laurel is wild in sub-alpine woods in
Persia, the Caucasus, and the Crimea, and was first
introduced into Europe by Clusius in 1576. He
received it from David Ungnad, who was at that
time ambassador of the Emperor at Constantinople,
and it is related that all the plants sent home by
Ungnad to Vienna perished with the exception of
one Horse-chestnut and one Laurel, the latter
tree being then known as Tra‘bison curma’si, the
Trebizonde Date or Plum. Clusius’s plant died
without flowering; but a cutting from it flowered
in 1583. The earliest mention of the plant in
England is in “ Paradisi in sole Paradisus Terrestris ;
or, a Garden of all Sorts of Pleasant Flowers, which
our English Ayre will admitt to be noursed up:
By John Parkinson, Apothecary of London” (1629).
It is as follows :—

“Laurocerasus. The Bay Cherry. This beautiful Bay, in his
naturall place of growing, groweth to be a tree of a reasonable
bignesse and height, and oftentimes with us also, if it be pruned
from the lower branches ; but more usually in these colder countries
it groweth asa shrub or hedge bush, shooting forth many branches,
whereof the greater and lower are covered with a dark grayish
green barke, but the young ones are very green, whereon are set
many goodly, fair, large, thick and long leaves, a little dented
about the edges, of a more excellent, fresh shining green colour, and
far larger than any Bay leaf, and compared by many to the leaves of

LEAVES AND FRUIT OF COMMON LAUREL.

THE COMMON OR CHERRY LAUREL 53

the Pomecitron tree (which, because we have none in our countrey,
cannot be so well known) both for colour and largenesse, which
yeeld a most gracefull aspect; it beareth long stalkes of whitish
flowers, at the joynts of the leaves, both along the branches and
towards the ends of them also, like unto the Birds Cherry or Padus
Theophrasti, which the Frenchmen call Putier and Cerisier blanc,
but larger and greater, consisting of five leaves with many threds in
the middle; after which cometh the fruit or berries, as large or
great as Flanders Cherries, many growing together one by another
on a long stalke, as the flowers did, which are very black and
shining on the outside, with a little point at the end, and reasonable
sweet in taste, wherein is contained a hard, round stone, very like
unto a Cherry stone, as I have observed as well by those I received
out of Italy, as by them I had of Master James Cole, a merchant of
London lately deceased, which grew at his house in Highgate, where
there is a fair tree which he defended from the bitternesse of the
weather in winter by casting a blanket over the top thereof every
year. . . . I had a plant hereof by the friendly gift of Master
James Cole, the merchant before remembred, a great lover of all
rarities, who had it growing with him at his countrey house in High-
gate aforesaid, where it hath flowred divers times, and born ripe
fruitalso. . . . Dalechampius thinketh it to be Lotus Aphricana,
but Clusius refuteth it. Those stones or kernels that were sent me
out of Italy came by the name of Laurus Regia, The King’s Bay.”

In the appendix to Johnson’s edition of Gerard’s
“ Herball” (1633) is a similar description, illustrated
by two very fair woodcuts. The bark is described as
“swart green,” and the leaves as “snipt lightly about
the edges” ; and it is added that—

“Tt.is now got into many of our choice English gardens, where
it is well respected for the beauty of the leaves, and their lasting or
continuall greennesse. The fruit hereof is good to be eaten, but.

what physicall vertues the tree or leaves thereof have it is not yet
knowne.”

In the first edition of his “Sylva” (1664), Evelyn
speaks of it as “resembling (for the first twenty years)
the most beautiful-headed Orange in shape and

54 FAMILIAR TREES

verdure, and arriving in time to emulate even some of
our lusty timber-trees ; so as I dare pronounce it to
be one of the most proper and ornamental trees for
walks and avenues of any growing.” “The leaves,” he
continues, “boiled in milk, impart a very grateful
taste of the Almond ; and of the. berries, or cherries
rather (which poultry generally feed on), is made a
wine, to some not unpleasant... . and of the wood
are said to-be made the best plough-handles.”

He then relates, with speculations of his own as to
the tree having come more probably “from some
colder clime,” the not unlikely story that the Laurel
was introduced “from Civita Vecchia in 1614, by
the Countess of Arundel, wife to that illustrious
patron of arts and antiquities, Thomas, Earl. of
Arundel and Surrey.” The Countess certainly did
return from Italy that year, which would be con-
sistent with Parkinson’s possession of the shrub
prior to 1629, and there. are still a number, of very
old Laurels at Wardour Castle, the family seat.

Ray, in 1688, in his “ Historia Plantarum,” speaks
of the Laurel as being then very common in gardens
and shrubberies, and remarkably hardy and quick in
growth, braving our winters even in exposed situa-
tions, but, on account of its thick and woody
branches, not fitted for the close-clipt “ topiary-
work,” then so much in fashion. We may, perhaps,
attribute to the introduction of the Laurel, and the
naturally rapid increase in the popularity of its
bright foliage, the victory of a more natural and less
formal style of gardening over the Dutch taste for
mazes, alleys, peacocks, and teapots in Yew or Box.

Photo: H. Irving, Horley.
COMMON LAUREL.

51

2g
(SUBALAWVIO O& X) TAYNV]T NOWWOO 3O GOOM JO NOILOSS ASHSASNVYL

THE COMMON OR CHERRY LAUREL 55

Philip Miller, in that storehouse of the botanical
and horticultural knowledge ef his time, the “Gar-
dener’s Dictionary” (Sixth Edition, 1752), speaks of
the Laurel as being susceptible to frost if “pruned up
in order to form them into stems,” and recommends
as preferable the massing or clumping of many plants
together, as then first carried out by the Duke of
Bedford at Woburn Abbey. He also mentions that
near Paris, where it is not as hardy as with us, it was
grafted on the Cherry or Plum—a practice which has,
he says, but little, if anything, to recommend it; and
he also states that “the Berries have long been used
to put into Brandy, to make a sort of Ratafia, and the
leaves have also been put into Custards.”

The infusion of the leaves, known as laurel-water,
seems first to have been recognised as “ one of the most
speedy and deadly poisons in Nature,” about the year
1731, by the Abbé Fontana, whose experiments are
described in the 70th volume of the Royal Society’s
“ Philosophical Transactions”; but it was the murder
of Sir Theodosius Boughton by his brother-in-law,
Captain Donaldson, by means of it, in 1780, that first
directed general attention to it; and it was not until
1802 that Schrader identified the results of the dis-
tillation of the leaves as oil of bitter almonds and
prussic acid. Though a few crumpled leaves may
produce sneezing, and will rapidly prove fatal from
their fumes to moths and butterflies, they may, like
Peach-kernels, be used with impunity in small quan-
tities for flavouring.

The Laurel certainly flourishes best in sheltered
situations, and in a deep and rather light soil. It is

56 FAMILIAR TREES

invaluable as underwood, relieving the monotony of
the bare stems of timber trees. When so grown
it requires to be periodically cut back or pegged
down, or its stems become naked below. A Laurel-
bush may frequently be seen from twenty to thirty
feet high, and with stems considerably over a foot
in diameter; but perhaps the largest in the world
are those described by Loudon in 1835, at Minward,
in Argyllshire, and at Shelton Abbey. Of these,
the former was then thirty-one feet high, six feet
nine inches in the diameter of the trunk, and 176
feet in the circumference of the head, whilst the
latter, then ninety years old, was forty-five feet high,
six feet in the diameter of its trunk, and nearly
320 feet in the circumference of its head!

The allied Portugal Laurel is probably, as its name
indicates, a native of Portugal, and of Madeira, where
it reaches from forty to sixty feet in height, with a
trunk sometimes two feet in diameter. Its leaves
‘are narrower than those of the Cherry Laurel, and
a much darker shade of green, free from the yellow
tint of the allied species. Its buds and twigs also
are purplish-red instead of green. In our gardens it
generally forms merely a rounded bush.

HAZEL.

THE HAZEL.

Cor'ylus Avella'na.

Tue Hazel seldom has the habit or dimensions of
a tree. It is generally a shrub, sending up many
slender limbs remarkable for their brown bark and
their great flexibility. At Eastwell Park, Kent,
however, it is a tree thirty feet in height, with a
girth of three feet at the ground.

The young twigs are hairy and glandular and of
a rusty-brown hue, and the blunt rounded buds
have their scales fringed with reddish glandular
hairs. The flowers appear in January, or ex-
ceptionally even as early as October, but are most
frequently not open until March, whilst the leaves
do not open until the end of April or beginning
of May. The male and female blossoms occur on
the same tree, but in distinct clusters or “ catkins.”

The male catkins are pendulous, first appearing
as minute sausage-shaped buds of a dull brownish
hue, but lengthening to two inches or more, and
becoming, when the anthers are fully matured, of
a pale greenish-yellow or primrose colour, which is
more decidedly green when the pollen has been
shed. Each catkin consists of a number of bract-
like scales, each of these bearing eight anthers on
its inner surface, so that a cloud of fine-grained
yellow pollen is shaken from them by the March
gales, after discharging which they drop off.

28 5T

58 FAMILIAR TREES

The female flowers are grouped in little egg-
shaped, bud-like tufts, sessile on the branch, con-
sisting of several overlapping green bracts, each of
which bears two flowers on its inner face, the
crimson stigmas forming a tassel at the top of
the cluster. The flower itself is only a two-
chambered ovary, surrounded by a velvety cup-like
“bracteole” (which afterwards grows into the large
leafy husk or “cupule” of the nut), and is sur-
mounted by a short style and two of the long,
crimson, tongue-like stigmas.

Concerning the nut, the Rev. H. N. Ellacombe
writes :—

“There is a peculiarity in the growth of the nut that is worth
the notice of the botanical student. The male blossoms or catkins
(also anciently called ‘agglettes’ or ‘blowinges’) are mostly pro-
duced at the ends of the year’s shoots, while the pretty little
crimson female blossoms are produced close to the branch; they are
completely sessile or unstalked. Now, in most fruit trees, when a
flower is fertilised the fruit is produced exactly in the same place,
with respect to the main tree, that the flower occupied ; a peach or
apricot, for instance, rests upon the branch which bore the flower.
But in the nut a different arrangement prevails. As soon as the
flower is fertilised it starts away from the parent branch; a fresh
branch is produced, bearing leaves and the nut or nuts at the
end, so that the nut is produced several inches away from the
spot on which the flower originally was. I know of no other

tree that produces its fruit in this way, nor do I know what
special benefit to the plant arises from this arrangement.”

Towards the solution of this problem it may be
suggested that as it produces no petals the shrub
has energy to form abundant pollen, some of which
will certainly be wind-wafted on to the spreading
stigmas if there are no leaves in the way. Hence

THE HAZEL 59

the advantage to wind-fertilised flowers of blossom-
ing before the leaves appear. As the two kinds
of flower in the Hazel often do not come to
maturity simultaneously, the advantage of cross-
fertilisation is thus secured. Again, a cluster or
short spike of flowers (each of which is structurally
a short branch), surrounded by bracts and sessile
on a bough, will stand a better chance of keeping
its place, in spite of spring storms, than a single
flower. Moreover, the tufted stigmas secure the
fertilisation. of some of their number. Fertilisation
acts as a stimulus. The male catkins have per-
formed their function and have dropped off, so
nourishment flows towards the female one. In
order, however, that the fruit may not ripen too
soon and so fall to the ground and rot before
the winter’s frosts, it must not develop thus early
in spring. The food is, therefore, thus employed in
producing a.branch below the nascent bunch of
nuts.

The leaves of the Hazel are three to four inches
long, broadly ovate, heart-shaped, and somewhat
one-sided at the base, with irregularly toothed
edges, a long point, a downy under-surface, and a
short stalk. In the bud they are folded into
several longitudinal plaits, and when young are
bright and pleasing in hue ; but later on they take
yellow-brown tints of green and a dull woolliness,
that render the tree heavy as a feature in the
landscape, except when relieved by the brown stem,
the pale green clusters of unripe nuts, or their own
autumnal changes into yellow, dull orange, or red.

60 FAMILIAR TREES

The Hazel is found in North Africa, in Central
and Northern Asia, and throughout Europe south
of 63° N. latitude. It reaches an altitude of about
3,800 feet in the Alps, and 1,600 feet in the north
of Britain.

The specific name of the Hazel (derived
originally from Abella or Avellino, towns in the
Neapolitan Campania, where the tree was much
cultivated) becomes additionally interesting from
its connection with that of the great tree-lover
John Evelyn. He tells us himself that in some
ancient records in his possession his ancestors’
names were generally written, “Avelan, alias
Evelin.” Evelyn’s account of the soil suited to
Hazels is that they, “above all, affect cold, barren,
dry and sandy grounds; mountainous, and even
rocky, soils produce them; they prosper where
quarries of freestone lie underneath, as at Hazel-
bury in Wiltshire, Hazelingfield in Cambridgeshire,
Hazelmere in Surrey, and other places; but more
plentifully if the ground be somewhat moist,
dankish, and mossy, as in the fresher bottoms
and sides of hills, holts, and in hedgerows.” In
Kent, where the Hazel is abundant both in a wild
and in a cultivated state, it thrives best on a light
calcareous loam, resting on the ragstone or the
chalk ; but in Scotland it often grows on a granite
subsoil. It seems, in fact, to require at once
abundant moisture and good drainage.

The name Corylus is of doubtful etymology,
being variously derived either from the Greek xépus
(korus), a cap, from the husk of the nut; or from

CATKINS, FRUIT, AND LEAVES OF HAZEL.

THE HAZEL 61

kdpvov (karyon), a nut. “Hazel” is said to come
from the Early English “hes,” a behest, connected
with the German “heissen,” to give orders, the
sceptre of authority among the simple chieftains of
a more primitive time having been a Hazel-wand.
The wild Hazel has grown abundantly in Britain

since prehistoric times, and its nuts appear to
have formed part of the food of the Swiss lake-
dwellers. Both the Hazel and the Filbert were
cultivated by the Romans, who are said to have
given Scotland the Latinised name of Caledonia,
from Cal-Dun, the Hill of Hazel, whilst the Filbert
was called by them Nux Pontica, having been
brought originally from Pontus. Its modern name
is almost certainly a barbarous compound of
“feuille,” a leaf, and “beard,” referring to_the long
cupule projecting beyond the nut; but in very
‘early times a more poetical origin was found for
it. Phyllis, despairing at the prolonged absence
of Demophoon, put an end to her life, but, as
Gower tells us in his “Confessio Amantis ”—

“Phyllis in the same throwe

Was shape into a nutte-tree,

That alle men it might see;

And after Phyllis, Philliberde
This tre was cleped in the yerde.”

Many of the old vocabularies allude to the same
fanciful etymology, and Spenser speaks of “ Phillis’
philbert.”

Virgil states that THazel-twigs were used to
bind the vines; but that, the roots of the nut-
tree being considered injurious to the vines from

62 FAMILIAR TREES

their spreading character, spits of Hazel were also
used in the sacrifice to Bacchus of the goat that
browsed on the plants sacred to him. In medieval
times considerable respect seems to have been paid
to the Hazel, and many cases have been recorded,
both in England and on the Continent, of the
occurrence of Hazel-wands in the coffins of
ecclesiastics, possibly in commemoration of a
pilgrimage performed by the deceased. But its
chief importance was for ages derived from its
supposed magical powers of divination. The use
of the divining-rod would seem, from Hosea iv. 12,
to be of extreme antiquity, and the “virgula
Mercurialis,” as it was termed in Roman _ times,
though sometimes, as now, made of Willow or
other wood, or even of metal, was frequently of
Hazel. Its virtue was supposed to depend upon its
having two forks, which were so grasped in the
fists, with the fingers uppermost, that the free
end might turn downward towards the object
sought. In other cases the rod was peeled and
simply laid on the palm of the hand. In the
fifteenth century this art of divination was named
rhabdomancy. “It is,” says Evelyn, “very won-
derful, by whatever occult virtue the forked stick
(so cut, and skilfully held) becomes impregnated
with those invisible steams and exhalations, as by
its spontaneous bending from a horizontal posture
to discover not only mines and subterranean trea-
sure and springs of water, but criminals guilty of
murder, etc. . . . Certainly next to a miracle
and requires a strong faith.” Even Linneus con-

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SECTION OF HAZEL

TRANSVERSE

THE HAZEL 63

fessed himself to be half a convert to this belief,
and the practice of “dowsing” as it is there called,
is still common in Cornwall and other western
counties. According to the local superstition, the
rod is guided to the metalliferous lodes by guardian
pyxies, the “kobbolds” of the German miner. It
was no doubt this popular term “dowsing ” which
suggested to Scott the mame of Dousterswivel,
the charlatan in “The Antiquary,” who uses a
forked Hazel-rod in his magical performances. ‘lhe
rhabdomancist is stated to feel a sudden accelera-
tion or retardation of the pulse, or a sensation of
great heat or cold, at the moment of discovery.

In many places an ancient custom prevailed,
which it was thought unlucky to omit, of going
a-nutting on Holy Rood Day, September 14th ;
whilst the practice of burning nuts on All-
Hallows Eve, October 31st, alluded to by Burns
in his “ Hallowe’en,” and by Gay, was so general
that the vigil was called Nutcrack Night. The
Vicar of Wakefield and his neighbours, it will be
remembered, religiously cracked nuts on All-
Hallows Eve.

The wood of the Hazel is a whitish red, close
and even in grain, soft, highly elastic and easily
split, and has been used in turnery, whilst well-
veined veneers are obtained from the larger roots.
Under the microscope it exhibits some very broad
pith-rays, radial lines of small vessels and nearly
circular annual rings. The tree is mainly grown,
however, as coppice, its shoots being useful for
hampers, for “corf” rods (ie. for baskets used in

64 FAMILIAR TREES

Durham coal-pits, known as “corves”), for hoops,
wattles, walking-sticks, fishing-rods, whip-handles,
etc. Rustic seats and baskets for gardens made of
Hazel-rods, varnished with the bark on, are found
to be very durable. This coppice also makes good
oven-wood, and its charcoal is suited for crayons or
for gunpowder.

It is for its fruit, however, that the tree is most
valued, and it is on this account that it is largely
cultivated in “the Garden of England,” round Maid-
stone. The rows of heavy, dull-leaved, close-grow-
ing shrubs cannot be considered ornamental, but in
the autumn ‘woods, when

“The scrambling shepherd with his hook,
’Mong Hazel-boughs of rusty brown,
That overhang some gulping brook,
Drags the ripened clusters down,”
the Hazel gains the charm of association with the
careless joys of our boyhood.

“The scrambling shepherd” will, however, often
find, in lieu of the nut he seeks, that chariot of
Queen Mab—

“An empty Hazel-nut
Made by the joiner-squirrel or old grub,
Time out of mind the fairies’ coach-makers.”
The grub in question is the Weevil (Balani’nus
nu'cum), & tawny-brown beetle that may be seen
creeping along the boughs or flying round the
nut-bushes in the early summer.

SERVICE-TREE.

THE SERVICH-TREE.

Py'rus tormina’lis Ehrh.

In addition to the Apples and Pears and the Medlar
the genus Pyrus comprises some ten kinds of British
trees. To all of these the name Service-tree may be
applied, since they constitute the sub-genus Sorbus,
and the name “Service,” which might be supposed
to be in some way connected with the Latin cerevi’-
sia, beer, is merely a corruption of Sorbus. Virgil
uses the word sorbum for a fruit, and Pliny men-
tions four kinds of tree under the name Sorbus, all
of which are probably members of the group as
now recognised by botanists. The characters of
the sub-genus are that the fruit is small, often
having less than five chambers, the styles being
accordingly from two to five in number, that the
core is brittle, and that the flowers are small, white,
and in branching, but flat-topped or “corymbose,”
clusters. The leaves may be simple, but are gener-
ally either deeply notched or pinnately compound.
Of the ten British forms which have been
described, three only are at all commonly met with,
the Wild Service, P. torminalis Ehrh., the White
Beam, P. A’ria Ehrh., and the Rowan, Mountain
Ash, or Fowlers’ Service-tree, P. Aucupa’ria .Ehrh.,
the others being either slight variations, possible
hybrids, or trees of very local distribution. P. ru-
pic'ola Syme is closely allied to the White Beam, as
29 65

66 FAMILIAR TREES

algo is P. rotundifolia Bechst. and presumably the
variety described by Mr. N. E. Brown under the name
decipiens. P. min‘ima Ley, from Brecon, and P.
interme'dia Ehbrh., from Arran, Wales and the West of
England, may also be classed with P. Aria taken in
a comprehensive sense. PP. fen'nica Bab. may be a
hybrid between the last-mentioned and the Mountain
Ash; and P. pinnatifida Ehrh., chiefly known in
cultivation, is also possibly the result of the crossing of
some form of White Beam with the Rowan. We may,
therefore, defer the consideration of these. P. domes’-
tica Ehrh., the True Service-tree, is a very distinct
species ; but, though common on the Continent, has
no claim to rank as British. It was long represented
by a single tree, and that probably introduced, in
Wyre Forest, near Bewdley, in Worcestershire. The
Wild Service-tree (P. torminalis Ehrh.) also occurs
in the same locality, and both trees seem to be known
there as “ Whitty Pear,” a name more appropriate to
P. domestica, seeing that it only has a whitish under-
surface to its leaves and a truly pear-shaped fruit. An
attempt has been made to derive the name from the
Old English word “ witten,” to know, meaning the
wise tree, as there was formerly a belief in these trees
and in the Rowan as protections against witches.
The hard little fruits were hung up for this purpose
in houses; but in Worcestershire the Rowan was
distinguished as the Witchen tree and considered
the less efficacious of the two.

The true Service-tree, known in France as
cormier, grows from twenty to sixty feet high, and,
contrary to statements which have been made, is

THE SERVICE-TREE 67

not slower in growth than most species of the genus
Pyrus. Its shoots are smooth and gummy, its leaves
are pinnate, like those of the Rowan, but larger and
with more sharply serrate leaflets, which, however, are
free from all serration along the basal third of their
margins. There are from eleven to nineteen of these
leaflets and they are downy beneath when young, but
become smooth and paler later on. The individual
blossoms are as large as those of the Hawthorn, and
cream-coloured, and have always five styles. Of the
fruit there are two forms, pear-shaped (var. pyriform‘is),
the more common, and apple-shaped (var. maliform’is).
In France this species lives to a great age—perhaps
upwards of a thousand years; its wood, is harder and
heavier than that of any other native tree. It is a red-
dish fawn colour, slightly veined, fine-grained, and sus-
ceptible of a high polish ; but is chiefly in request for
the teeth of mill-wheels, the screws of presses, mathe-
matical rulers, turnery and coarse engraving. The
fruit, which is known as “cormes” and is sometimes
upwards of an inch long, is reddish, and is spotted with
brown cork-warts, from which the English names
“Chequers” and “Chess-apples” are applied to its
allied species, P. torminalis and P. Aria. When
unripe, this fruit is extremely austere, producing a
very painful and lasting irritation in the throat; but,
after it has been exposed to frost or has been kept for
some time, it undergoes the fermentative process
known as “bletting,” familiar in the case of the
allied Medlar. As in this process the fruit not only
becomes soft and eatable but also turns to a brown
colour, it has been mistakenly supposed to be rotten.

68 FAMILIAR TREES

The Wild Service-tree (P. torminalis Ehrh.) occurs
somewhat locally in woods and hedgerows in the
southern and midland counties of England; but not
in Scotland or Ireland. It is slow in growth, and
seldom reaches any very considerable size. The
bark is smooth and grey, and the twigs are stiff and
sub-angular, reddish to purplish-brown in colour,
and polished, though dotted with numerous small,
pale cork-warts. The buds are blunt, and almost
globular, polished and dry, those terminating the
twigs being larger than the lateral ones, the scales
being few in number, broad, short and green with
narrow brown margins.

The leaves, which are “conduplicate ” in the bud,
are borne on slender stalks about half the length of
their blades, and are of a very characteristic form,
though, perhaps, sufficiently like those of the Plane
to justify the comparison made by such an ancient
and uncritical observer as Pliny. The blade is from
two and a half to four and a half inches long, ovate-
deltoid in general outline, very slightly heart-shaped
at the base, and divided into seven, or sometimes
five, triangular lobes. The lobing extends from a
third to a half of the distance from the periphery to
the midrib, and the lobes and their veins—the
secondary ribs of the leaf as a whole—are arranged
pinnately, though the basal secondary ribs, and con-
sequently the basal pair of lobes, diverge at a larger
angle from the main rachis than the rest, thus giving
the leat a pseudo-palmate appearance. The lobes
are sharply pointed, and the margins are irregularly
serrate. The leaf-blade is firm and green on both

FLOWERS, FRUIT, AND LEAVES OF SERVICE-TREE.

THE SERVICE-TREE 69

surfaces when fully developed, and its upper surface
is then shining, the network of finer veins being
distinctly visible ; but, when young, the leaves are
downy, the under-surface being then bluish or grey.
In autumn the leaves turn to a yellowish-brown.
The flowers appear, in April or May, in large flat
clusters with downy stalks, and are individually about
half an inch across. They are thus rather larger than
those of the Mountain Ash, and they also gain in
beauty by the greater looseness of their grouping in
the often-branched corymbs which they form. Their
styles vary in number from two to five, and are
smooth, whilst the number of chambers in the fruit,
of course, corresponds. The fruit itself is about a
third of an inch across, or a little larger than a
Hawthorn berry. It may be pear-shaped or more
globose, but is generally somewhat oval. It is green,
much dotted or chequered with brown, and is at first
very hard and dry, but when “bletted” by frost is
agreeably acid and wholesome Ray even expressed
a preference for them over those of the True Service
(P. domestica). In some country markets thesé
“ chequer-berries” are regularly sold in November.
Half a century ago Dr.. Bromfield, indeed, recorded
that they were offered for sale at Ryde, in the Isle of
Wight, as “ Sorbus-berries.” Aubrey, in his “ Natural
History of Wiltshire,” writes: “ Dr. Gale tells me that
Sorbiodunum, now Old Sarum, has its denomination
from sorbes, but the ground below the castle is all
turned to arable”; and many other references suggest
that this tree was once far more frequent, before our
primeval woodlands had given way on the one hand

70 ' FAMILIAR TREES

to agriculture and on the other to plantations of more
valuable timber.

In the woodlands of Kent, Sussex, and even
Middlesex, this species forms a small standard tree;
but on the rugged precipitous limestone cliffs that
overhang the “sylvan Wye,” as at the Great Doward,
the Windcliff or the romantic heights of Lancaut,
opposite Percefield, amid grotesque Yews and gnarled
Beeches, it is but a small bush. One of the most
remarkable examples of the species, however, is in
the south-west of England—in Warleigh Wood, near
the mouth of the River Tavy. This tree is between
thirty and forty feet high, and has its bole clear of
branches for about six feet from the ground and
four feet in girth at its base.

The wood of the Service is hard and tough. Under
the microscope it exhibits its small vessels slightly
more crowded towards the inner margin of each
annual ring, but also distributed throughout the
whole radius of the ring, almost in single rows
between every two of the fine but distinct pith-
rays. At Edenbridge, in Kent, where it is termed
Chequer-wood, it used to be preferred to all other
woods for flails; but Beis of corn is
now rarely seen.

Some of the other Teel names recorded for =
species, such as “shir” in Surrey and “lezzory”
“lizzory” in the Cotswolds, are difficult to ie
but the name “ Maple Service” seems to be merely a
somewhat unhappy book-name, derived from some
resemblance in the lobing of the leaf to some kind
of Maple.

Photo: H. Irving, Horley.
SERVICE-TREE.

55

WOOD (X10 DIAMETERS).

Ww
Ww
a
‘=

TRANSVERSE SECTION OF SERVICE

THE SERVICE-TREE 7

Gerard, in his “ Herball,” in 1597, speaks of Sorbus
torminalis as growing in Kent “aboute Southfleete and
Gravesend,” and also of many small trees in a little
wood a mile beyond Islington; and he had the species
in cultivation in his garden in Holborn a year before
this. Thomas Johnson enumerates it among the.
plants of Hampstead Heath in his “Ericetum Ham-
stedianum” in 1629; whilst eleven years later we
find John Parkinson treating of it in his “ Theatrum
Botanicum,” and very rightly placing Sorbus between
the “Wild Ash or Quicken tree” (Pyrus Aucuparia)
and the Medlars. The passage is too long to quote,
but it suggests that, unlike their predecessors of
a century or two earlier, the seventeenth-century
botanists, of whom Parkinson is an excellent ex-
ample, were no mere book-worms, mere jugglers
with the words of Theophrastus and Dioscorides,
but were. constantly comparing the descriptions of
earlier writers with the plants themselves. Though
the relative value of characters in tracing the
affinity of plants had not then been grasped, though
they were ignorant of the physiology of pollination,
and had not learnt how the vegetative organs
especially are apt to be transformed in adaptation
to their immediate environment, it is clear that
they were keen and careful observers. If their
language lacks the brevity of a technical terminol-
ogy, it is not wanting in fundamental clearness ;
and even the simplicity of the binominal system of
nomenclature commonly ascribed to Linnzus was
to a considerable extent in use among them. They
studied plants in a wild state, and in their own

72 FAMILIAR TREES

physic gardens, rather than in herbaria; and if the
prominent place given to “the vertues” in their de-
scriptions ranks them among students of applied
botany rather than of pure science, it does not
seem to have blinded them to the importance of
anatomical investigation.

Botanists seem to have been generally at a loss
for an apt comparison for the leaves of P. tor-
minalis. We have already quoted the difference of
opinion as to Pliny’s reference to the Plane, and
have alluded to the modern name “ Maple Service.”
Caspar Bauhin, who classes the tree in the genus
Mespilus (with the Medlars, that is), calls it Mespilus
Apii folio sylvestris non spinosa, or Thornless Wild
Parsley-leaved Medlar; and Ray compares the leaves
to those of the Water Elder or Wild Guelder-rose,
adding the qualification, “pedis anserini forma”
(shaped like the foot of a goose).

Without trying to match it among other plants,
we may recognise that the form, the lightness, and
the early autumnal colouring of the leaf give to the
Wild Service-tree what.ver claim it has on the score
of beauty to a place in our shrubberies. The fresh
green turns to light golden brown, and this, mingled
with green, as yet unchanged, and patches of purer
gold, is by no means a despicable contribution te
the glories of autumn.

MEDLAR.

‘THE MEDLAR.
Mes'pilus germaniica L.

MODERN criticism unfortunately disproves Chaucer's
authorship of that dainty little poem, “The Flower
and the Leaf,’ which Professor Skeat attributes to a
lady writer of the fifteenth century; so that the
pretty little verse on a Medlar tree, which occurs in
it, cannot now be assigned to the “well of English
undefiled.”

‘“‘ And as I stood and cast aside mine eie
I was ware of the fairest Medler tre
That ever yet in all my life I sie,
As ful of blossomes as it mighte be ;
Therein a goldfinch leaping pretile
Fro bough to bough; and, as him list, he eet
Of buddes here and there, and floures sweete,”

We have, however, a mention of the fruit in Alfric’s
vocabulary of the tenth century; and another Chau-
cerian reference, in thé Reeve’s Tale, shows that the
father of English poetry was acquainted with it and its
most striking characteristic, for he makes the elderly
reeve compare old men to Medlars in a phrase which
may have been in Shakespeare's mind when writing
As You Like It :

“ Till we be roten, can we not be rype.”

In days when there was no foreign import trade
in fresh fruit, such references, especially when they
cannot be traced to any reminiscences of the Latin

39 73

74. FAMILIAR TREES

poets, tell in favour of personal knowledge on the
part of the writer.

After centuries of cultivation, it is extremely dif-
ficult to speak with any confidence as to the truly
indigenous character of any plant from its present
mode of occurrence. Buildings and gardens may have
existed on spots where their former presence would
not now be suspected: the non-human methods of
seed-dispersal, the wind, the fleeces in which burrs
become entangled, squirrels, dormice, and fruit-eating
birds, have been in operation year by year, until we
may almost imagine the seed of every species in the
country to have had an opportunity of sprouting on
every inch of our land. Woods, too, have been so
artificialised by felling, clearing, and replanting, that
we can hardly consider any of them much more truly
primeval than our hedgerows ; and plants once culti-
vated may have had time in the lapse of centuries
even to degenerate to a more primitive wild type. If,
however, we find a species, which is not likely ever to
have been planted in woodlands, uniformly distributed
over a wide area, growing in the heart of forests and
woods of mixed species, and always presenting marked
characteristics unlike its cultivatedrepresentative, there
is some considerable a priori probability of its being
wild. Judged by this test, we have little hesitation in
considering the Medlar indigenous in northern France;
but we are far less confident as to its having any claim
to beso classed on this side of the Channel, unless, per-
haps, in the extreme south of our island.

The name Mespilus, or rather its Greek original
Mespilon, dates from Theophrastus, and it seems to

THE. MEDLAR 6)

be admitted that the tree is wild in Asia Minor and
Persia, if not also in Greece on the one side and in
China on the other.

Such high authorities as Nyman and Sir Joseph
Hooker doubt its being truly wild elsewhere; and
Pliny, it must-be admitted, says that the Medlar was
unknown in Italy in Cato’s time. He is, however,
undoubtedly speaking of the cultivated fruit-tree.
Fée considers the Medlar native in northern central
Europe, and French botanists generally express no
doubt as to its being truly wild in their own land.
We have ourselves repeatedly found it in a very
spinous, small-leaved, bushy form in dense thickets
and extremely wild-seeming woods in Normandy,
The late Professor Babington, in 1839, writes of it as
“truly wild ” in Jersey, where it still exists.

That the tree has been known, probably in a
cultivated form, in northern Europe, from the earliest
times of civilisation in that area, is clear from the
changes which its name has gone through from the
original Latin. Whilst the Italian Mespoli and the
Dutch Mespelboom indicate the minimum of change,
the German has become Mispel, Mespel, and Nespel-
baum, the Spanish Nispero, and the French has been
modified from Mesplier and Meflier to Néflier. As the
English name Medlar does not seem even to occur
as early as the time of Chaucer, it would seem to be
rather of old French than of German origin, and may
indicate the Norman introduction of the cultivated
tree. William Turner just enumerates “ Mespilus, a
Medlor tre,” in his “ Libellus de re herbaria,” in 1538 ;
but is more precise in his “Names of Herbes,” ten

76 FAMILIAR TREES

years later, “Mespilus,” he says, “called in greeke
mespile, is of two sortes, the one hath three stones
in the fruite, and that kynde is not wyth us. The
other kynde hath in the fruite, fyve stones, and
thys kynde is commune in Englande, and it is called
in englishe a Medler tree.” This obviously does not
amount to any reference to the tree in a wild state.

When, in his “ Herball,” in 1597, Gerard mentions
its occurrence, “often-times in hedges among briars
and brambles,” it is clear from his use of the name
“Mespylus sativus” that he is speaking of the
cultivated tree, or, as Parkinson calls it, “the great
manured Medler,” in an escaped. condition, for in the
earlier writers sativus is always used in this strict
sense, as opposed to sylvestris for sylvan, or wild forms.

It is interesting to remember that it was just when
Gerard was writing his “ Herball” that Shakespeare was
writing Romeo and Juliet, the first of his plays to
contain any reference to the Medlar, whilst Richard
ITI., which contains so wonderful an epitome of the
whole art of gardening, was printed in the very same
year as Gerard’s magnum opus. As, owing to its
hard core, the seed of the Medlar takes about two
years to sprout, the tree is at the present day
commonly grafted upon a Pear stock; and we may
almost believe that the myriad-minded Shakespeare
was aware of such a practice when in As You Like It
he makes Rosalind say to Touchstone, “I'll graff it
with you, and then I shall graff it with a Medlar: then
it will be the earliest fruit i’ the country; for you'll be
rotten ere you be half pS, and that’s the right virtue
of the Medlar.”

FLOWERS, FRUIT, AND LEAVES OF MEDLAR.

THE, MEDLAR WT

Within a few years of Shakespeare’s time it was
certainly the practice to graft the Medlar upon a
Hawthorn stock, for Cowley writes of man that

‘*He does the savage Hawthorn teach

To bear the Medlar and the Pear;

He bids the rustic Plum to rear

A noble trunk and be a Peach.”
Shakespeare was, as we have seen, following Chaucer
and many others of his predecessors and contempor-
aries in speaking of the “ bletting” of the Medlar as
rotting. Green fruit, when growing, behaves physiolo-
gically like leaves, taking in considerable quantities of
carbon-dioxide from the air, and giving off oxygen ; but
when growth ceases and ripening begins this is reversed,
Carbon-dioxide and water are given off, oxygen is taken
in, the temperature rises, tannin and acids are formed ;
and there may be some softening of texture. At this
stage many fruits are eatable, and are considered ripe;
for, as in the eating of freshly killed or “ hung” meat,
fish, or game, there is undoubtedly a certain amount of
conventional taste or fashion as to the exact stage at
which each kind of fruit is best fitted to be eaten. The
Japanese, for instance, always eat peaches in a con-
dition that we should consider unripe, and think those
that we call ripe to be rotten. Ata subsequent stage
more oxygen is absorbed, and first the astringent tannin
and afterwards the malic, citric, tartaric, and other
fruit acids disappear, whilst the proportion of sugar
increases. Further softening occurs at this stage, and
there may be a change of colour, both internally and
externally. This is “bletting,” and it is, no doubt,
mainly because the change of the pale greenish or

78 FAMILIAR TREES

yellowish tints of the flesh of a fruit to brown isa
general concomitant of decay, that a bletted Medlar
has been thought to be rotting. Soon after bletting,
the sugar of the fruit begins to oxidise, and then it is
that true decay has set in.

Parkinson, in his “Theatrum Botanicum” (1640),
gives woodcuts of the three forms in which the leaves
of the cultivated Medlar are represented as narrower
and blunter than they are, and there is no adequate
representation ‘of the strong thorns terminating the
branches which are so distinctive of the wild form.

It is noteworthy that Caspar Bauhin in his
“Pinax” (1623) speaks of the wild form under the
name Mespilus Germanica folio laurino non serrato,
sive Mespilus sylvestris” ; and that when, in 1666,
Christopher Merrett, in his “ Pinax rerum naturalium
Britannicarum,” first mentioned any precise English
localities for the Medlar, he did so under the name
Mespilus sylvestris spinosa. His localities were “in
the Hedges betwixt Hampsted-heath and Highgate,
and in a Holt of Trees three Miles Westward from
Crediton in Devonshire.” Of these, the first has never
been confirmed ; but the late Rev. T. R. Archer Briggs
recorded the spinous shrubby form as “possibly
native” at several spots in east Cornwall and south-
west Devon.

In his “Synopsis stirpium Britannicarum,” John
Ray (1690) ignored most of Merrett’s records as un-
trustworthy; and the only locality he gives.for the
Medlar is “in all the Hedges about Minchiville; Mr.
Du Bois.’ Charles Du Bois was probably a trust-
worthy observer, and on the-strength of this record,

Photo: F. Mason Good, Winchfield.

OLD MEDLAR TREE,

57

TRANSVERSE SECTION OF MEDLAR WOOD (X 80 DIAMETERS),

68

THE MEDLAR 79

which refers to Minshull in Cheshire, the Medlar has
been constantly since quoted as wild in that county.
It finds no mention, however, in the careful posthu-
mous “Flora of Cheshire” by the late Lord de Tabley,

When, in 1828, Sir James Edward Smith pub-
lished his “English Flora,” he seems to have had no
suspicion that the Medlar was not wild in this
country. He speaks of it as “ thorny in a wild state,”
quotes the Rev. J. Davies as having found it “ about
Ashburnham, Sussex, truly wild,” and adds, “The
thorns disappear by culture, and are not to be seen in
gardens, though I have noticed them on foreign wild
specimens, and my late friend, Mr. Davies, of Trinity
College, Cambridge, observed them in Sussex. See
also the wooden cuts of old authors.” We venture to
surmise, however, that this statement about thorns
disappearing on cultivation is pure theory so far as
Sir J. E. Smith is concerned; and we very much
doubt whether anyone in modern times has subjected
it to the test of experiment. The occurrence of the
‘spinous variety in Sussex, Surrey (where it was
recorded many years ago), and Devon may, perhaps,
therefore, suggest that the bush is as truly wild in the
south of England as in the north of France. It has
not, like the Crab-apple, been carefully preserved in
our ancient deer-forests, and is now certainly rare. On
the other hand, it must be admitted that all hedge-
row localities are suspicious, and that birds and,
perhaps, even more probably, squirrels may have
contributed to its dissemination from gardens.

It is more as an ornamental than as a fruit-bearing
tree that the Medlar is valued in our gardens to-day.

80 FAMILIAR TREES

Its heavy foliage and close zigzag branching render
it an excellent shade tree for the lawn, and its large
white blossoms, each an inch and a half across,
relieved by the five long points of the sepals, on their
appearance in June and July redeem it from the
charge of monotony. It is, however, in the autumn
colouring of its foliage that the Medlar has most
claim to beauty. The large, soft, lance-shaped leaves
then present endless contrasts of green, yellow, orange,
russet and red. Nearly all these colours may, indeed,
be found on a single leaf, one as spots upon another,
and among them appears a vivid but deep red, red
rather as blood than as flame; though in sunshine it
may truly be said—
“The drooping Medlar’s dusky shade,
From summer’s suns a glad retreat,

Lights up with crimson fire the glade,
And warms the fleeting autumn’s feet.”

Some of the finest old Medlar trees in England are
to be seen at Syon House, Ham House, and in various
old gardens about Twickenham—trees upwards of
thirty feet high and with heads nearly forty feet in
diameter.

YEw.

THE YEW.

Taunus bacca’ta L.

For botanist, artist, poet, or moralist, few trees have
so unique an interest-as the Yew. Its very
name is mysterious in its simple brevity, and has
been traced back to the sacred word MM’, Jehovah,
the Immortal. In Latin and Portuguese, va; in
Old German, Jwa; in Welsh, yw; in Anglo-Saxon,
cow; in Old English, iw, ew, ewe, eugh, and uhe ;
in French, if; in Swedish, id; and in modern
German, Eibe, “we find,” says Dr. Prior, “ the Yew
so inextricably mixed up with the Ivy that, dis-
similar as are the two trees, there can be no doubt
that these names are in their origin identical.”

In the discussions as to the reasons for its fre-
quent presence in our churchyards several facts are
commonly overlooked: first, for example, that the
species is an indigenous one, and was formerly un-
doubtedly far more abundant in Britain and other
parts of Europe than at present; secondly, that the
trees may be older than the churches, and even than
Christianity itself; and thirdly, that in most cases
the venerable Yew is on the south or south-west side
of the church.

Its hard, durable, reddish wood presents
characters that enable us readily to recognise it
in the peat-beds of prehistoric times. In the

bogs of Ireland, Scotland, and Cumberland, in the

31 81

82 FAMILIAR TREES

Cambridgeshire fens and the submerged “ moor-logs ”
at the mouth of the Thames, it is as perfectly pre-
served as bog-oak, being of a rich brown tint; and
under the microscope it exhibits in its woody fibres,
as when alive, a unique combination of “bordered
pits”-and spiral lines. Whilst, moreover, we may
often see trees in situations that suggest their having
been planted, no one can have visited the groves of
Yew in Cranborne Chase, or the Hampshire Downs,
or the basaltic hill of Arely, in Staffordshire, or have
noticed its sporadic occurrence round Coulsdon in
Surrey, or Tunbridge Wells, without being convinced
of its truly indigenous character. It is curious to
follow with the eye a line of sombre Yews winding
along the downs in Surrey or Kent, marking the
so-called Pilgrims’ Way—a road which leads not only
to many a quaint, little sequestered Norman church,
with perchance an exceptionally venerable Yew
shadowing its silent graves, but also to many a far
more ancient earthwork.

The wood of the Yew, which, from being sus-
ceptible of a high polish, used to be much valued in
cabinet-work, is not, as is often thought, exceptionally
slow in forming. The contrary opinion has been
formed from a consideration of the slowly-increasing
girth of those large trunks of aged Yews which are
so disproportionately large, as compared with the
extent of bough and leafage, that the formation upon
them of the very thinnest growth of wood represents
really a very fair total cubic amount. Unlike that
of other Conifers, the wood of the Yew contains no
resin.

THE YEW 83

From the measurement of the layers of annual
growth in many Yews, De Candolle concluded that it
was within the mark to.reckon their increase in
diameter at a line a year throughout their life, and it
was from such measurements that he concluded that
such trees as sometimes occur with a girth of twenty-
seven feet, or more, may even have passed the age of
two thousand years. An exaggerated estimate may,
however, be formed of the age of a Yew tree from
the fact that vertical branches given off near the
base of the stem are apt to become enclosed within
the bark, and so add considerably to the girth.

As an evergreen, overshadowing the crops, the
Yew would do more harm than larger and perhaps
raore valuable deciduous trees, and the herdsman
must soon have discovered that it was frequently
fatal to his cattle, so that it is not to be wondered at
that the species should have become less abundant in
our hedgerows than it once was. Bearing the stam-
inate and pistillate flowers on different trees, one
individual would moreover, if solitary, be unable to
reproduce itself by means of seed.

There were, however, many cogent reasons why
some specimens of the tree should be preserved.
Ages before Christianity had invested the gloomy
evergreen with a glamour of superstitious veneration,
the fancies of the uneducated had, no doubt, sur-
rounded it with a halo of poetic romance; but we
have no positive evidence connecting it with Druidical
worship. It is not improbable, however, that its
green boughs, “renewing their eternal youth,” may
have been connected with the spring festival of

84 FAMILIAR TREES

Eostre, which the Christian Church was able to
sanctify and adopt, as it adopted also the winter use
of the Holly, which lent itself yet more readily to
Christian symbolism ; whilst it was unable to do the
same for the Mistletoe, which social progress has
gradually stripped of all its impropriety, and of nearly
all its significance. As the pagan nations of antiquity
in South Europe took the Cypress as a symbol of
immortality, so the Yew. may well have been adopted
in the North; and certain it is that while the Holly
lingers round ancient British earthworks, and has long
effected its entrance into our churches, it does not
oceur in our churchyards. Even the additional argu-
ment that Yew twigs were used to sprinkle the holy
water in the “ Asperges ” before mass will hardly be a
sufficient answer to this objection.

Herrick’s verses for Candlemas Eve are, however,
worth reproduction in this connection :—

“ Down with the Rosemary and Bayes;-
Down with the Mistleto ;

Instead of Holly, now upraise
The greener Box for show.

“The Holly hitherto did sway,
Let Box now domineere
Until. the dancing Easter Day,
Or Easter’s Eve appeare.

“Then youthful Box, which now hath grace
Your houses to renew,
Grown old, surrender must his place
Unto the crisped Yew. .

“When Yew is out, then Birch comes in,
And many flowers beside ;
Both of a fresh and fragrant kinne,
To honour Whitsontide.”

ERS, SEED, AND LEAVES OF YEW.

FLOW

THE YEW 83

It is not only for Easter decorations that Yew
boughs are utilised by the Church; for, out of the
lands of Palms and Olives, the Catholic Church has to
make shift with Willow and Yew on Palm Sunday, so
that the latter tree has in many districts acquired thé
name of “Palm,” though Willows are more generally
so called. That staunch Protestant, William Turner,
need not have opened, as he does, the vials of his
wrath upon the Popish priests for this custom as a
‘deception, since the prayers in the mass for the day
expressly add the words, “and other trees,” after
mentioning Palm and Olive. In the Churchwarden’s
Accounts for Woodbury, Devon, in 1775, it is
recorded that “a Yew or Palm tree was planted in
the churchyard, ye south side of the church, in the
same place where one was blown down by the wind a
few days ago, this 25th of November.”

The Yew was also used in funevals—a custom
alluded to by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night, in the
line— .

“My shroud of white, stuck all with Yew”;

and Sir Thomas Browne suggested that sprigs so used
have taken root and grown into our churchyard trees.
Again, in some parts of the country corpses were
rubbed with an infusion of Yew leaves to preserve
them.

Perhaps the best evidence, faute de mieux, to con-
-nect the Yew with Druidic times is the fact that it is
particularly abundant in the churchyards of Wales
and the West of England. In the churchyard at
Mamhilad there are, for instance, twelve or thirteen

86 FAMILIAR TREES

trees, one of which has a girth of more than thirty
feet.

Man is apt in all ages to be utilitarian, and if the
shade of the “ dismal Yew” had once been a rendez-
vous for the clan where the Druid, as chief medicine-
man, dispensed justice and wisdom, it was, no doubt,
soon found desirable that the material for the chief
weapons of the day should be enclosed, that it
might not be browsed, with results possibly fatal, by
the cattle. It is probably to this use of it for making
bows that the tree owes its Latin name of Taxus.
Thus, in his earliest botanical work, “ Libellus de re
herbaria ” (1538), William Turner writes: “ Taxus an,
uhe tre wnde hodie apud nos fiunt arcus” ; and the
poet Spenser, in 1590, speaks of it as—

“The eugh, obedient to the bender’s will.”

It was to bows of Yew that we mainly owed
the victories of Crecy and Poictiers; and Edward IV.
enacted that every Englishman should have a bow of
his own height. English Yew-wood, however, for this

‘purpose, only fetched one-third the price of that
which was imported.

The position of the Yew to the south, or more
strictly south-west, of the church, must probably be
accounted for by some such belief as that referred to

by Robert Turner, in his “ Botanologia” (1664), as
follows :

“The Yew is hot and dry, having such attraction that if planted
near a place subject to poysonous vapours, its very branches will,
draw and imbibe them. For this reason it was planted in church-
yards, and commonly on the west side, which was at one time
considered full of putrefaction and gross oleaginous gasses exhaled

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THE YEW 87

from the graves by the setting sun. These gasses, or will-o’-ther
wisps, divers have seen, and believed them dead bodies walk-
ing abroad. Wheresoever it grows it is both dangerous and
deadly to man and beast; the very lying under its branches
has been found hurtful, yet the growing of it in churchyards
is useful.”

This belief in the fatal effect of even sleeping
under the boughs of the Yew dates back from Galen
and Dioscorides ; whilst Cesar records the death of
Catibulus, king of the Eburones, from drinking its
juice. Gerard, however, in his “ Herball” (1579),
rashly denies all this, saying, “ All which I boldly
affirm as untrue, because I have eaten my full of the
berries, and slept in the branches, not once, but oft,
without hurt.”

The facts would seem to be that the seeds them-
selves are poisonous, but the fleshy pink cup, or
“aril,” as the botanists term it, of which children are
so fond, is harmless. As to the boughs and leaves, it
appears that cattle can be gradually accustomed to
them when mixed with other food ; but that, either
when green or when cut and half withered, they have
been repeatedly fatal to horses, oxen, sheep, and
deer. Gilbert White was probably right when he
said that it was “either from wantonness when full
or from hunger when empty” that the Yew is eaten
by them with fatal consequences. Though the leaves
are believed to act as a vermifuge, they are likely
to be equally fatal to children, the poison acting
either on the cerebro-spinal nerves or directly on the
heart.

The topiarian art in many an old farmhouse
garden shows the Yew, patient under the shears,

88 FAMILIAR TREES

tortured into peacocks, pyramids, teapots, and other
unnatural shapes. Certainly it is a tree which in its
varied surroundings reflects many aspects of our
history, religion, and social life.

SECTION OF NEEDLE LEAF OF YEW

LINDEN.

THE LINDEN.

Tilia europe’a L-

SEVERAL forms of the Linden were lumped together
by Linneeus under the scientific name Tilia europea.
Though these have been so extensively planted in
England during the last two centuries as to be
familiar to most people, only two of them, the
Small-leaved Linden, 7. corda'ta Mill, and the Large-
leaved Linden, 7. platyphyl'los Scop, have any
claim to be truly indigenous. The latter is confined
to rocky woods in West Yorkshire, Radnorshire, and
Herefordshire. :

The genus, being confined to Northern Asia,
America, and parts of Europe, would probably not
have been known to the primitive Aryan race in
their ancestral home in the uplands of Central Asia,
so that their descendants have no common name for
it. It was the Phi'lyra of the Greeks, whilst the
Romans named it Tilia; and the Teuton, perhaps
aware of the tough “bast,” or inner bark, rémind-
ing him of the “lin,” or “lint ’—z.e. the Flax (ZLi’num)
—named it also “linta,’ “linde,” or “lind.” Of
these three names, the first is Old German, and
the second is Modern, whilst the third is common to
Early English, Swedish, and Icelandic. The modern
name, Lime, is merely a corruption of Line, and
belongs properly to the Sweet Lime, a species of
Citrus, closely related to the Lemon.

32 89

90 FAMILIAR TREES

To the ancients the Lindens seem to have ap-
pealed rather by their utility than by their beauty.
It is doubtful whether Aristophanes, in the allu-
sion to the tree in his “Birds,” is merely speaking
of a rival poet as being light as Linden-wood, or
is accusing him more specifically of wearing an
effeminate article of dress, strengthened in those days
by laths of Linden-wood in place of the whalebone of
modern times. Pliny, too, alludes to the lightness
of the wood, as well as to the use of the inner bark
for paper, when it was known as liber (so becoming
extended to books, and giving us the word “ library”),
and also for tying garlands; whilst Virgil, in the
words (“ Georgies,” Book i.)

“ Ceditur et tilia ante jugo levis,”

(«A light Linden-tree also is felled betimes for the
yoke”) is referring to the use of its wood in the
making of the plough.

Botanists must ever look with reverence upon
this tree; for whether or not a meadow encircled
by a hedgerow of Lindens gave the family name
to our own great botanist, Lindley, it is tolerably
certain that one of these trees growing near the
home of his ancestors furnished a cognomen to a
far greater than Lindley—the immortal Carl von
Linné, better known as Linneus.

Apart from any associations, however, the Lindens
are sufficiently beautiful and sufficiently useful to
command attention. They are’ straight-stemmed
trees, with smooth bark, either round-topped or,
when more perfectly developed, draped in equal

THE - LINDEN 91

drooping boughs from the ground to their summits
eighty or ninety feet in height, so as to present a
grand columnar aspect. Then, as the poet says—

“All about the large Lime feathers low—
The Lime, a summer home of murmurous wings.”

They may reach five, or even nine, feet in
diameter, the latter being the size of the famous tree
that gave the town of Neustadt, in Wiirtemberg, the
name of “Neustadt an der grossen Linden.” At
Harste, near Gdttingen, a tree known as the old
Linden in 1425, measured 274 feet in circumference
in 1871. The delicate leaves are lop-sided, heart-
shaped, and gracefully toothed along their margins ;
the greenish flowers, overflowing with honey and
sweetly scented, are borne in stalked clusters of from
three to seven on a curious adherent, leaf-like bract
which becomes of a buff tint; and the fruits that
succeed them are small spherical capsules, which but
rarely, however, ripen in England.

Of the various forms, the Small-leaved Linden
(Tilia cordata Mill.) occurs in our woods from York-
shire southwards, and is also wild in Siberia and
throughout Europe, with the exception of Turkey
and Greece. It has smooth, yellowish-brown twigs ;
its smooth leaves are seldom more than two and a
half inches across, and are smooth on their under
surfaces, with the exception of tufts of yellowish hair
at the forks of the veins; and the capsule is faintly
marked with ribs when ripe. The Intermediate
Linden (7. interme'dia DC.), which is the one most
largely planted, occurs over the same area as the last,

92 FAMILIAR TREES

with the exception of the more northern parts. Its
fruit is unribbed and downy, and its leaves are rather
larger than those of T. cordata. The Large-leaved
Linden (7. platyphyllos Scop.) has downy twigs, five
prominent ribs upon its fruit, and leaves often more
than four inches across. Along with its variety, the
Coral Linden (7. rw‘bra Stev.), which differs only in
having reddish-brown bark to the young branches
and smooth fruit, the Large-leaved Linden is only
wild in Europe south of Denmark.

Though, owing to their retaining their leaves
later into the autumn, some American species are
recommended as preferable to the above for
avenues—the great ornamental use of the Linden—
it cannot be denied that our European forms have a
choice beauty of their own. In early spring the red-
tinted twigs, like branching coral, bear buds which
throw off scales, or “stipules,” blushing pink and
white, only to reveal the first delicate gloss of the
tender leaf. The leaves then hang vertically down-
wards, and the older ones are so folded over the
younger as in every way to protect them as far as
possible from the nipping effects of excessive radiation
in our frosty May nights. It is said, moreover, to be
the mode of their arrangement in the buds that
produces, as it were mechanically, the graceful one-
sidedness in the outline of their base which is not un-
common amongst forest trees. The leaves are also
at this season more gracefully tapered at the apex
than later, when they increase in breadth; and
the charm of their pendent position and bright
and graceful greenery naturally suggested cheerful-

FLOWERS, FRUIT, AND LEAVES OF LINDEN

THE LINDEN 93

ness to Chaucer, when he wrote, in his “Clerke’s
Tale ” :—
“Be ay of, chere as light as lefe on Linde.”
It was, too, at this, the season of its virginal
beauty, that Mrs. Browning paid her more explicit
tribute to the Linden, of which she wrote:—

“ Here a Linden-tree stood, bright’ning
All adown its silver rind ;.
For, as some trees draw the lightning,
So this tree, unto my mind,
Drew to earth the blessed sunshine
From the sky where it was shrined.”

The twigs form a zigzag, the terminal bud being
constantly suppressed ; but, lying in one plane and
giving off their leaves in a strictly alternate or dis-
tichous manner, they form a flat spray. . The flat,
blunt buds project outwards from the branches, and
when the leaves unfold, their outline and veining are
well worth attentive study. The toothing of their
edges is absent at the base, and the secondary veins
given off from the base of the midrib on the larger
side of the leaf are so big as to suggest rather a
“palmate” than a “pinnate” arrangement. Fine
tertiary veins are given off at right angles to the
larger ones, so as to form cross-ties between them;
and from these, and from the forking marginal
extremities of the larger ones, proceeds a complex
polygonal meshwork of still finer or quaternary veins.

In summer the foliage of the Linden becomes
duller in tone, as do most leaves, from the dense
accumulation of their green colouring matter, or
chlorophyll, and of other substances within their

94 FAMILIAR TREES

cells. The tree, however, then acquires a new beauty
—that of blossom. The curious membranous bracts,
of a tint resembling the petals of the Mignonette—
a tint which gave to the silk-mercer the name
tilleul for one of his numerous novelties in aniline
—then unfold their inconspicuous flowers. Incon-
spicuous they may be in their small, regular
whorls of greenish organs; but their perfume, and
their copious stores of nectar, render them as
attractive to the insect world as the most gaily-
coloured of blossoms, so that the whole tree hums
like a vast hive of bees. The pale-coloured honey
made from the Linden blossoms by the busy visitors
is of excellent quality.

Autumn brings new grace as the foliage turns to
yellow, clear in some years as the green of spring;
but, alas, even more fleeting. The avenue which has
been so full of green and golden light, and scented so
sweetly, soon becomes strewn with fallen leaves, from
which the green and gold have faded, as the hopes
and happiness of youth fade in the autumn of dis-
appointment.

Ray speaks of the Linden as being considerably
planted in his time; its culture was advocated by
Evelyn, and it was the favourite tree of William III.
This monarch’s partiality for the species is said to
have led to the planting of the fine avenue at Ashtead
Park, Surrey; and it may also account for the fine
Lindens at Bushy Park and at Fulham Palace, whose
lovely gardens’ owe so much to his sturdy supporter,
Bishop Compton. The four rows of fine trees, mostly
Lindens, which give the name Unter den Linden to

ASSL aes ers paw Riecibsttannd

Photo: & dU. Wallis, Kew.
LINDEN.

61

Seabees
bye
ae waaReas

NDEN WOOD (X10 DIAMETERS),

TRANSVERSE SECTION OF LI

62

THE LINDEN 95

one of the finest streets in Berlin, are of world-wide
fame, though not equal to the avenue, a mile and a
quarter long, at Herrenhausen, near Hanover, planted
in 1726; but one of the most beautiful of Linden
avenues is that of Trinity College, Oxford, where the
bare boughs in winter form a perfect Gothic arcade,
like the roof-timbers of some cathedral aisle. One
of the charms of such an avenue is the wreath of
“ adventitious ” or supernumerary shoots that encircles
the base of the trunk—a wreath of coral branchlets
as they sparkle in the faint sunlight of spring, a wreath
of verdure in summer, and a wreath of gold in autumn.
There are fine Lindens also at Syon House, Isleworth,
and at Ken Wood, Hampstead ; but, from its position
on the brow of a hill, surrounded by scenery of ex-
quisite loveliness, and from the size of its trees, one
of the finest avenues in the world must be that at
Dromana, co. Waterford.

The sap of the Linden can be fermented into an
agreeable wine; its wood makes a fine charcoal, and
is used for musical instruments; while the bark is in
Germany used in the manufacture of cordage. Apart,
however, from its beauty, the main uses of the Linden
are the application of its tough but flexible inner bark
to the making of Russia matting, and that of its fine-
grained wood to carving. Its value for the latter pur-
pose has been supremely demonstrated by the mar-
vellous work of Grinling Gibbons, whose use of wood
makes one think of it as a plastic substance, most of
his carving being in this material. Chatsworth, Trinity
College, Cambridge, Windsor Castle and the choir
of St. Paul’s, possess the finest examples of his art.

96 FAMILIAR TREES

It seems, however, mean and petty to be thinking
of the uses to which its dead body can be put, when
one is in the presence of the majestic beauty of a
living Linden, rising in its columnar form like some
gigantic Norman pillar of verdure from the park or
lawn. Were it absolutely useless as timber or for
other purposes, were it even destitute of its melli-
fluous flowers with their delicious perfume, the
Linden would yet, for the sake of its form and its
foliage alone, deserve to be a favourite tree; and it
is fortunate that, though its excessive formation of
honey-dew is somewhat of a drawback to its use in
gardens, it is fairly able to withstand London smoke,
and thus precedes the Planes and Poplars in enliven-
ing our parks and squares. It-submits meekly to the
pruning-knife, and—horribile dictu !—the saw of the
suburban gardener, and, as a consequence of this
patience, may be seen in too many places butchered
into carcases that even the beautifying and healing
hand of Nature in spring can hardly succeed in
rendering aught but repulsive. ;

It is undoubtedly a regrettable circumstance that,
as they precede many other trees in unfolding, so too
the leaves of the Linden precede those of most other
trees in falling, and remind us, as they litter our
lawns, of the approach of autumn, when we are only
just beginning to realise our too brief and tardy
English summer. But at that season we still have
our Planes in full verdure; and even Sycamores and
Horse-chestnuts, not to mention Oaks and Elms,
show no signs as yet of leaving us a mere mass
of melancholy boughs.

DOUSLAS FIR.

THE DOUGLAS FIR.

Pseudotsu'ga Dougia'sii Carr.

FEw men assuredly are commemorated by more last-
ing monuments than the Cherokee Sequoia and the
Scottish botanical collector David Douglas. The
latter was the son of a working mason at Scone,
Perthshire, and was early apprenticed in Lord Mans-
field’s gardens at Scone Palace. Douglas was subse-
quently employed in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens,
and in 1823, on the recommendation of Sir William
Hooker, was sent out to the United States as collector
by the Royal Horticultural Society. In the following
year he landed at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia
River and worked southward, re-discovering the tree
which now bears his name in 1826, and bringing it
home when, in 1827, he crossed the Rocky Mountains
to Hudson’s Bay, where he met Franklin, Back, and
Richardson returning from their overland Arctic
voyage. Sent out again in 1829, he explored Cali-
fornia and the Fraser River, and in 1832 and 1833
visited the Sandwich Islands, where in 1834 he met
his death. Falling accidentally into one of the pits
which the natives were in the habit of digging as
traps for wild cattle, he was gored and trampled to
death by an infuriated bull.

Many as were the novelties which the ill-fated
Douglas introduced into our gardens, the Douglas Fir
was not exactly one of them. It had been originally

33 97

98 FAMILIAR TREES

discovered in 1792, on the shores of Nootka Sound,
by Archibald Menzies, another Perthshire man, who
accompanied Vancouver in his voyage of circum-
navigation. From specimens brought home by
Menzies, without cones, Lambert in 1803 described
the tree as Pi’nus taxifolia, a name which Poiret,
recognising its affinities, altered in the following
year to A’bies taxifolia. David Don, in the 1828
edition of Lambert’s work, while retaining the tree
under the genus Pinus, renamed it in honour of its
introducer P. Douglasii ; and, retaining this specific
name, it was referred once more to the genus Abves
by Dr. Lindley in 1833, to Pice‘a by Link in 1841, to
his new genus Jsu’ga by Carriére in 1855, and to
Pseudotsu’ga, a genus constituted for it, by the
same botanist in 1867. Finally Mr. Kent has pro-
posed to set aside the name Pseudotsuga as a
barbarous mixture of Greek and Japanese in favour
of Abve’tia.

Writing of the tree in its original home, Professor
Newberry says :—

“ As it usually grows in its favourite habitat, about the mouth
of the Willamette, it forms forests of which the density can hardly
be appreciated without being seen. The trees stand relatively as
near each other, and the trunks are as tall and slender, as the canes
in a canebrake. In this case, the foliage is confined to the tuft
at the top of the tree, the trunk forming a cylindrical column as
straight as an arrow, and almost without branches for two hundred
feet. The amount of timber on an acre of this forest very much

exceeds that ona similar area in the tropics, or in any part of the
world I have visited.”

This description is borne out by timber of this
species now largely shipped from Puget Sound, and

THE DOUGLAS FIR 99

by the well-known flagstaff in Kew Gardens. The
wood now comes to market in clean, straight spars,
forty to 110 feet in length and nine to thirty-two
inches in diameter. These as a rule show no sign of
branches, and are singularly free from the knots that
mark the loss of them. The flagstaff or spar at Kew
was felled in British Columbia, and was presented
to Kew in 1861. It is 159 feet long, the tree from
which it was made having been 180 feet high, and
having about 250 annual rings, averaging eleven rings
to each inch of its radius. It tapers from a dia-
meter of twenty-two inches to one of eight inches,
and weighs about three tons. British grown speci-
mens on the other hand, twenty-five years old, have.
averaged only three rings per inch of radius.

The Douglas Fir is the most widely distributed
of all American trees, extending over no less than
thirty-two degrees of latitude, from 55° N. near Lake
Tacla in British Columbia to the neighbourhood of
San Luis Potosi, in Mexico. It thus possesses a con-
stitution, as Professor Sargent says, that
‘enables it to endure the fierce gales and long winters of the north,
and the nearly perpetual sunshine of the Mexican Cordilleras, to
thrive in the rain and fog which sweep almost continuously along

the Pacific coast range, and on the arid mountain slopes of the
interior, where for months every year rain never falls.”

It reaches its greatest dimensions, however, in the
humid lowlands of southern British Columbia, Van-
couver Island, Western Washington, and Oregon,
especially round the shores of Puget Sound, and on
the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, where there is
an abundant rainfall from the Pacific. Here it attains

100 FAMILIAR TREES

a height of 300 feet, and a diameter of from six to
twelve or, it is stated, even twenty feet. In these
plains the stems are free from branches for more than
200 feet from the ground ; and their canopy of foliage
is so dense overhead as completely to shut out the
light of the sun. On the steep slopes of the mountain
cafons, on the other hand, trees often stand alone,
and are clothed with branches from base to sumunit.
On the Californian Sierras it seldom grows at an alti-
tude of more than 5,000 or 6,000 feet above sea-
level; but in Northern Arizona it forms forests at a
level of between 8,000 and 9,000 feet ; and in Colorado
it even extends to an elevation of 11,000 feet. At all
these high levels, however, it attains dimensions far
less than those it reaches in the plains, and at its
highest vertical limit it is but a low shrub. The
“ Douglas Fir” and “ Douglas Spruce” are the names
most commonly applied to it in the European
pinetum ; but “ Oregon Pine” is the name by which
the timber is chiefly known in our market, though it
was at one time known as the “Nootka Fir.” In the
Uintah Mountains it is known as “Swamp Pine” and
“ Bear River Pine,” while such misleading appellations
as “Western Pitch Pine” and “Hemlock” are natura]
to the non-botanical pioneer who sees slight resem-
blances. “Black Fir” or “Black Spruce” refers pro-
bably to the dark green of the foliage; but “Red
Fir” and “Yellow Fir” seem to belong to different
varieties of the wood, the produce most probably of
different conditions of growth.

The sapwood is generally narrow and yellowish ;
but the heart is sometimes also yellow, fine-grained

CONES AND LEAVES OF DOUGLAS FIR

THE DOUGLAS FIR 101

and light in weight, or it may be red, coarse-grained,
and heavier. The wood is close, straight and regular
in grain, firm, tough, and elastic, not in the least liable
to warp, and very durable. In appearance it more
nearly resembles the wood of the Canadian Red Pine
(Pinus resino’sa Sol.) than any other species; but,
under the microscope, a longitudinal section shows
a structure that distinguishes it from all allied woods.
Its “tracheids,” or elongated vessel-like elements,
have spiral lines of thickening, especially in the
spring-wood of each annual ring. Such spiral thick-
ening occurs throughout the somewhat similiar
wood of the Yew; but the Yew is non-resinous, while
the Douglas Fir produces an abundance of resin.
The transverse section shows the sap-wood and heart-
wood, resembling those of the Larch, but that the
latter is of a more rosy red. The annual rings are
sharply defined by the broad and darker band of
autumn-wood. This character places the wood of the
Douglas Fir commercially with the “ Hard Pines.”
The bark, thin, smooth, and greyish on young shoots
and warty with resinous pustules a little later,
becomes from three to five inches thick on old trees,
splitting into broad, rounded ridges and breaking up
at its surface into reddish-brown scales. Through
its longitudinal fissures it discloses a redder inner
bark.

In the leaves, and to a less extent in the cones, we
have those resemblances and differences which justify
us in making separate genera for the Hemlock Spruces
and the Douglas Spruce, and at the same time excuse
the use of the word Spruce in their popular names.

102 FAMILIAR TREES

The Hemlock Spruces (fsuga) have but one central
resin-canal in the leaf, the true Spruces (Picea) have
-one or two lateral ones, and the Douglas Fir (Pseudo-
-tsuga), like the Silver Fir (Abies), has always two
lateral ones. The leaves of the Douglas Fir are
arranged singly and spirally as in both Spruces and
Firs, but though twisted so as to form a two-sided
spray, they do not he as flat in two rows as do those
of the Silver Fir, but are rather in three or four
‘rows. They are of a bright shining green above, and
remain on for six or seven years. Three-quarters of
an inch to an inch and a quarter long, they are flat,
narrowly linear in outline, bending slightly upwards
at the apex, and varying considerably in the sharp-
ness or bluntness of that extremity. The stomata
-are confined to two silvery lines, which are fainter
than those of the Silver Firs. In section the leaf is
elliptical, without the thinner areas on either side
of the midrib characteristic of Abies and Tsuga, or
the four-sidedness of Picea. The hypoderm varies,
but is generally only slightly developed; there is
a large-celled mesophyll and a single undivided
vascular bundle, much as in Picea.

The staminate flowers are mostly on the under
side of the twigs of the preceding year, forming
axillary egg-shaped masses. The pollen-grains have
not the air-bladders that occur in the Pines.

The tree generally bears cones from about its
twenty-fifth year. These very distinctive features are
borne at the apex of the twig, hanging downwards,
first appearing in May, ripening in their first year,
and falling off whole. They are egg-shaped, from two

Photo: H. Irving, Horley.
DOUGLAS FIR

63

eer a

Sasa

TRANSVERSE SECTION OF DOUGLAS FIR WOOD (X10 DIAMETERS),

64

THE DOUGLAS. FIR 103

and a half to. four inches long, and an inch or more in
diameter and of a reddish-brown colour. «The ovuli-
ferous scales are rounded, with slightly wavy margins,
but the most striking: character is the bract-scale,
which is longer than the ovuliferous and is three-
lobed, the two lateral lobes diverging slightly and the
central one prolonged into a rigid acute awn.
This type of cone has been termed “ feathered.” The
true Hemlock Spruces (Tsuga) have smaller cones,
the bract-scales of which are not longer than the
ovuliferous ones. The seeds of Psewdotsuga are small
and winged.

The resinous wood of the Douglas Spruce is largely
used in its native area for fuel as well as for all kinds
of carpentry, house-building, and engineering work.
It is excellently adapted for the lower masts, yards,
and bowsprits of sailing vessels, though inferior for
topmasts, which are much exposed to friction, to
Kauri Pine, or the Riga and Dantzic varieties of
Pinus sylves‘tris. Puget Sound now exports it
largely to South America, Australia, the Sandwich
Islands, China and India, as well as to Great Britain.
Time has hardly as yet permitted an adequate test of
the durability of British-grown timber of this species,
Its much more rapid growth here suggests consider-
able inferiority as compared with the Oregon wood ;
and yet it appears to compare favourably with Larch
for such purposes as railway-sleepers.

No exotic species of tree introduced within the
last hundred years has, perhaps, attracted so much
attention, from a utilitarian point of view, as the
Douglas Fir, and that not only in Britain but. also

104 FAMILIAR TREES

in France and Germany. This has been owing in
great measure to its rapid growth during early
youth and its supposed immunity from insect and
fungoid attacks.

Probably the most interesting specimen of the
Douglas Fir in England is that in the celebrated
pinetum at Dropmore, close to Burnham Beeches,
Buckinghamshire. It was raised from some of the
first seed brought home by Douglas, in December,
1827. It bore its first cone in 1835, when only
eight years old, and in 1837 it was nineteen feet high.
In 1871, ~e. at forty-four years of age, it was 100 feet
high and nine feet seven inches in girth at three feet
from the ground, and in 1897 it was 108 feet high,
giving an average growth in height of twenty-five and
a half inches a year for fifty-one years, a rate probably
unprecedented in this country. Such specimens, in
favourable soil and with full room to develop, are
believed to have laid on a mean annual increment
of wood of as much as three cubic feet, as against one
cubic foot as. the most that could be anticipated from
a Larch. It is an interesting fact that the finest
specimens. in Scotland are growing close to the
birthplace of Menzies, the discoverer, and Douglas,
the introducer of the species, viz. at Castle Menzies,
Murthly Castle, Scone, and Taymount, all in Perthshire.

TRANSVERSE SECTION OF NEEDLE LEAF OF DOUGLAS FIR.

BEECH IN AUTUMN.

THE BEECH.

Fa/gus sylvat'ica L.

Ir must surely be difficult to resist enthusiasm for
our British trees when standing, at the close of
April or beginning of May, under the young foliage
of a Beech. This grand tree may not have full
claim to rank as a native of Britain, since we find
no prehistoric remains of its wood; but we have
no records of its introduction, and certain it is that
the Beech-groves of our chalk and limestone hills
need not yield, so far as the grandeur or beauty of
their existing trees is concerned, to those of any
other region.

Belonging to the same family as the Oaks, the
Beeches occur over a great part of the world.
They are absent from Africa and Southern Asia,
but clothe the hills alike of Japan, New Zealand,
South Australia, Tasmania, Tierra del Fuego, North
America, Norway, Spain, and Asia Minor, our own
‘species, Fagus sylvatica, occurring in the three last
of these regions.

The name Beech is in early English boc, bece,
or beoce; in German Buche, and in Swedish bok,
and signifies either “ book” or “tree,’ the two
senses being supposed to be connected by the fact
that the ancient Runic writings were engraved upon
beechen boards. “The origin of the word;” says
Dr. Prior in his “ Popular Names of British Plants,”

34 105

106 FAMILIAR TREES

“is identical with that of the Sanskrit bdké, letter,
békés, writings; and this correspondence of the
Indian and our own language is interesting as
evidence of two things, viz. that the Brahmins had
the art of writing before they detached themselves
from the common stock of the Indo-European race
in Upper Asia, and that we and other Germans
have received alphabetic signs from the East by a
northern route, and not by the Mediterranean.”
This last remark of the learned Doctor’s refers, of
course, to our old black-letter Gothic characters and
not to our modern Roman alphabet.

As to the name Fagus, it is possible that this
may be of Celtic origin; and, in the time of Pliny,
the Britons, as well as the Gauls, may, as he de-
scribes, have mixed the ashes of Beech-wood with
goat’s-fat to make a red dye tor their hair and
moustaches; or this name may then have per-
tained to the Sweet Chestnut, to which tree Cesar
may have referred when he wrote that in Britain
there was every kind of timber as in Gaul, except
“fagum” and the Fir.

The Beech requires a thoroughly drained soil,
and accordingly flourishes on high ground, whether
calcareous or sandy. Its grey stems may thus be
seen—often of great girth—throwing out their
spreading roots on the earthworks of an ancient
British camp on the greens and hills of Kent, as
at Oldbury, near Ightham, while but a few miles
off a fine clump crowns the conspicuous chalk
summit of Knockholt; and in Surrey we have as
fine trees on the sands of Haslemere, Hascombe,

THE BEECH 107

and Tilburstow as on the chalk at Betchworth and
Norbury. The hills of Gloucestershire on either
side of the Severn, though ot very different geologi-
cal ages, bear some splendid woods of Beech; the
chalk hills of Buckinghamshire (a county that owes
its names to its former wealth of “ buck” or beech-
mast) still supply the chairmakers of High
Wycombe; and the Londoner glories alike in the
grand old pollards of Burnham in that county, and
in the mostly younger, but often unlopped, trees
in the forest of Epping, in Essex—both now pre-
served to him and his successors in perpetuity by
the City Corporation.

Though not glossy, like that of the Birch, the
smooth, olive-grey bark of the Beech gives it a
charm even in the winter months. Then, too,
though the lower boughs are often still decked
with the crisp, dead leaves of the previous year,
which reflect each transient sungleam from their
surfaces of polished copper, we can see most
clearly the splendid outlines of this king of the
forests. Its roots spread far and close together to
gain a firm footing that the gale can seldom over-
come, and above them towers the smooth, unbroken,
pillar-like stem, often seen with a girth of from
fifteen to twenty feet, and reaching as many feet in
height without a branch. When not pollarded, the
Beech frequently bifurcates naturally, each branch,
of which there may sometimes be three or four,
rising vertically, “each in itself a tree,’ like the
clustered columns of a Gothic aisle. From the
main branches sweep outwards the more knotted

108 FAMILIAR TREES

branchlets and twigs, bending slightly downwards,
and giving to the whole tree a rounded outline.
The head of the fine Beech at Knole Park, near
Sevenoaks, called the King’s Beech, is 352 feet in
diameter.

It is in April, however, that the beauty of the
Beech generally first commands our attention. The
pointed, dull-brown buds assume a more glossy
hue. They swell almost visibly from day to day
under the influence of the genial sunshine, warmth,
and moisture. As the sunlight falls on a sloping
Beech-wood from a white cloud hanging in the deep
blue of an April sky, it will be seen to glow like a
sheet of bronze; and just before bursting the buds
will be almost red. Then on one particular tree,
year after year, often on one particular branch, the
first leaves burst forth as the clearest emeralds,
heralds of the coming of the full springtide glory.
As they grow in size the leaves deepen in tint.
To enjoy them in their fullest beauty, we should
walk under the trees when the sun is shining
brightly through them, and we can then see each
pellucid sunshade to be fringed with a row of
most delicate silky hairs—hairs that protect it from
undue moisture or the radiating cold of the late
frost.

When the leaves of each emerald tier of verdure
lose these silky hairs, the tree has parted with one
of its charms, though when the leaves are more
opaque, as they then are, their glossy surfaces,
reflecting every glint of sunshine, still render the
tree, as a whole, anything but a heavy feature in

FLOWER, FRUIT, AND LEAVES OF BEECH.

THE BEECH 109

the landscape. Then it was, in early summer,
Pelleas

“Riding at noon

Across the forest call’ of Dean,

saw
Near ‘Win & a noua of siete loping side,
Whereon a hundred stately beeches grew,
And here and there great hollies under them.
But for a mile all round was open space,
And fern and heath: and 3
It seem’d to Pelleas that the — without
Burnt as a living fire of emeralds,
So that his eyes were dazzled looking at it.
Then o'er it crost the dimness of a cloud
Floating . . . .”

The Beech generally flowers in May; but neither
its long-stalked globular clusters of male flowers
nor its smaller assemblages of female ones, are con-
spicuous among the foliage. The male catkins hang
from the axils of the lower leaves on the shoot,
whilst the female inflorescences, each consisting of
two or three flowers invested by a single “ cupule,”
rise erect from those of the leaves nearer the grow-
ing end of the shoot. When the four-sided “ cupule ”
of rigid bracts, covered with recurved hooks and
enclosing two or three triangular fruits of a rich
chestnut colour, grows to a larger size and turns
brown, it not only becomes conspicuous, but causes
a greater litter on the lawn on which the tree may
chance to stand.

The closely matted roots and the dense shade
rather perhaps than any poisonous exhalations, or
even than mere drip. render the Beech generally
fatal to grass, and injurious even to evergreens

110 FAMILIAR TREES

growing beneath it. The well-arained soil in which
it delights is by it drained yet more thoroughly ;
so that it has a marked power of holding the
ground against other species, as noticed by both
Evelyn and Gilpin. This has earned for it the
evil reputation of symbolising selfish ambition, the
ambition of a forest prince in his rivalry of the
monarch Oak. Though its leaves enrich the soil,
this characteristic renders it perhaps better suited
to the grove, the wilderness, or a corner of the
park than to the garden lawn, Hollies and other
evergreens, bracken and brainbles will grow beneath
its shade, and it must not be forgotten that it is
a tree which, for the development of its highest
beauty, should occupy an isolated position.

The modern scientific forester looks upon the
Beech as “the mother of the forest,” attaching the
very highest value to it as undergrowth protecting
the soil from drought and denudation, and enrich-
ing it with its fallen leaves.

In spring and summer beneath the Beech-tree’s
shade wander those abusers of “our young trees,”
who, from the time of Paris and (Enone to that
of Orlando and Rosalind and onwards, have been
tempted by its smooth bark to make it the medium
of perpetuating their love. Well might Campbell

put into the mouth of a Evech-tree the complaint
that

“Youthful lovers in my shade
Their vows of truth and rapture made,
And on my trunk’s surviving frame
Carved many a long-forgotten name.”

Bet hn

wis

if

PO
EM,
9

e

A oe

‘65

Photo: H. Irving, Horley.

TRANSVERSE SECTION OF BREECH WOOD (X 39 DIAMETERS).

66

THE BEECH 111

As the tree grows, the letters engraved upon it
grow also. As Ovid says:—
“Incise servant a te mea nomina fagi,

Et legor Ginone, falce notata tua;
Et quantum trunci, tantum mea nomina crescunt.”

(“The Beeches, faithful guardians of your flame,
Bear on their wounded trunks Cinone’s name ;
And as the trunks, so still the letters grow.”)

The annual growth of bark strives to hide the
wound of the knife, and ultimately the inscribed
name will become buried in the heart of the old
tree, to remain ages after that of the lover shall
have ceased to beat.

It is in autumn, however, that the beauty of
the Beech stands pre-eminent. As Dr. Edwin Lees
has eloquently put it, “The autumnal splendour
of every other tree fades before that of the Beech,
which continues the longest of all, and under par-
ticular circumstances is of the most brilliant
description. This arises from its lucid leaves, which
vary in hue from auburn to gold colour and
umber, reflecting back the level rays of the
descending sun, and thus burning with pre-
eminent lustre, like-a sudden illumination. Blazing
characters irradiate the grove wherever the Beech
presents, in spectral pomp, its vivid outline; and
if a passing rain-cloud, shrouding for a moment the
zree-tops, bear upon its purple breast the glowing
{ris, with one limb intermingled with the golden
foliage, the splendid effect will long rest upon
the memory of the spectator.”

The light brown, hard, and moderately heavy

112 FAMILIAR TREES

timber of the Beech is close and even in texture,
with a fine silky grain, and, being easily worked
and fairly strong and durable, is in demand for
a variety of purposes. If wholly submerged or
quite dry it keeps well, and has therefore been
used for keels and for piles, whilst on the con-
tinent it is much used for railway-sleepers, for
sabots and for charcoal. Though used in turnery,
its chief use with us now is chair-making. As the
stem commonly reaches a girth of ten or twelve
feet, and occasionally of from eighteen to twenty
feet or more, and adds perhaps on an average an
inch to its diameter in five and a half years, this
species seems to reach the age of from 250 to 400
years. The Bicton Beech in Devonshire has a
girth of twenty-nine feet; the King’s Beech, at
Ashridge, Herts, is 118 feet in height; and one of
those in Norbury Park, Surrey, is stated to reach
160 feet; but many of the trees of largest girth
are gouty old pollards, like those at Burnham,
whose decapitated trunks have grown out into
gnarled excrescences that are very misleading as
to age.

The brown nuts or “ mast,’ once so valuable
a source of rustic wealth, when Gurth and Wamba
pastured the swine of the Saxon thane in the
forest, are still used in France as a food for
poultry and pheasants, and are stated to contain
from seventeen to twenty per cent. of an oil
suitable for burning, and used occasionally instead
of butter in cooking. It is by this “mast” that
the Beech is commonly propagated.

ASPEN.

THE CORNELL

Cornus sanguinea L.

In the Cornel we have to do with the one woody
British representative of a small group allied
on the one hand to the Ivy and Unmbelliferous
families, and on the other to the Honeysuckles. This
is the Corna'cee, an Order belonging mainly to the
temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, and
familiarly represented in our gardens by the so-called
Japanese Spotted or “Cuba” “Laurel” (Aw’cuba
japon'ica). They are mostly woody plants with
simple exstipulate leaves in opposite pairs, and clusters
of small flowers having the petals valvate in the bud,
meeting, that is, without overlapping, and the “in-
ferior ” ovary forming a fleshy fruit with a bony stone.
The genus Cornus is specially characterised by having
most of the parts of its flowers in whorls of four and
by the stone of the fruit being composed of two one-
seeded chambers.

There can, in fact, hardly be a better lesson
in the geometrically regular symmetry of the flower
than to examine in June one of the little creamy
blossoms of the Dogwood. In the bud it is en-
closed by four minute sepals, which soon disappear.
Alternating with these are the four narrow-pointed
creamy-white petals. They are, as we have said,
valvate in the bud, and afterwards bend downwards.
Alternating with these again, and thus each stand-

113
35

114 FAMILIAR TREES

ing in front of one of the sepals, are the four awl-
shaped stamens which spread outward and upward,
springing from beneath a honey-secreting ring-shaped
glandular disk which surmounts the ovary. In the latter
alone do we have a departure from the symmetrically
alternating whorls of four, the two chambers of which
it consists, each representing a carpel, being placed
with their midribs and seed-bearing placentas in
front of the sepals and stamens of what is termed the
median plane—a plane passing from back to front of
the blossom through the bract in the axil of which
the flower springs.

Though its congener, the Cornelian Cherry (Cornus
mas L.), is mentioned by Homer, Virgil and Theo-
phrastus, the earliest botanical history of our hedge-
row shrub is not quite so clear. As Parkinson puts
it, “There is much doubt and question among many ot
our later writers about this female Cornell, whether
it should be the Virga sanguinea of Pliny, or the
Hartriegell of Tragus, or his Faulbauwm, some refer-
ring it to the one, some to the other, but the general
tenet of the most is, that in most things it answereth
both to the Thelycrania of Theophrastus, and may
well enough agree with the Virga sanguinea of
Pliny.”

It must be explained that Thelycrania is the
Greek equivalent for Corn'us fo'mina, since kranon
or krania are the old Greek names of the Cornelian
Cherry, names connected with a root signifying hard-
ness, just as the Latin cornus is most probably
connected with cornu, a horn, with reference to the
horny texture of the wood of one species. Zhe'lus

THE CORNEL 115

means female ; but, as is familiarly brought to our
recollection by the old names“ Male Fern” and“ Lady
Fern,” the ancient application of these sex terms to
plants had a purely figurative significance, generally
meaning only robust and less robust in growth.

Though the wood of the Dogwood is not nearly so
hard as that of the Cornelian Cherry, we should
hardly term it spongy or useless; so that commen-
tators have suggested that Pliny is referring to a
very different plant, one of the Honeysuckles. Hart-
reegell, meaning hard rail, is also obviously only
applicable to a hard wood; but there can be little
doubt that Matthiolus was right in interpreting Virga
sanguinea or Bloody Twig, in another passage in
Pliny, as referring to the shoot or autumn leaves of
our common Dogwood.: This interesting old com-
mentator upon Dioscorides not only records that
the people of Trent extracted an oil by boiling
the berries of the Dogwood,and used it in their
lamps; but he adds that if persons bitten by mad
dogs hold twigs of this tree in their hands until they
become warm they are driven mad. To this startling
statement Parkinson adds that “If one that is cured of
the biting of a madde dogge, shall within one twelve
moneth after touch the Cornus femina, or Dogge
berry tree, or any part thereof, the disease will returne
againe.”

No doubt before these “facts” were imagined
the bush had acquired the name of Dogwood, and
some explanation of that name was felt to be wanted.
In ®lfric’s tenth-century vocabulary cornus is
merely translated “corn-treow,” and in one of the

116 FAMILIAR TREES

fifteenth-century as “ pet-tre,” a name I have found
nowhere else.

Turner, in his “ Names of Herbes,” gives the first
botanical mention of the species in England. Under
“Cornus” he writes: ‘The female is plétuous in
Englande, and the buchers make prickes of it, some
cal it Gadrise, or dog tree, howe be it there is an other
tree that they cal ‘dogrise also.” He seems here. to
recognise “rise” as meaning tree or rather under-
shrub; but to have no suspicion of the meaning of
Gadrise or its connection with Dogrise. Neither
apparently had Gerard, when, enumerating it as
the Dogberrie-tree in the Catalogue of his garden, he
says in his “ Herball ” (1597), “In the North countrey
they call it Gaten tree, or Gater tree, the berries
whereof seem to be those which Chaucre calleth Gater
beries.”

It is interesting to come across this reference to
Chaucer in Gerard’s “ Herball” ; but the passage in the
“ Nonnes Preestes Tale” to which it relates has the
further importance that it indicates the use of the
berries of the Dogwood as a laxative in the fourteenth
century, while Philip Miller in the eighteenth tells us
that they were often brought to market and sold as
those of the Buckthorn. Partelote, the hen, in
Chaucer’s poem, recommends Chaunticlere, the cock,
to have “laxatives . . . of gaitre-berries.”

Parkinson, too, evidently thinks the popular name
requires explanation, and adopts a bold one. “We
for the most part,” he says, “call it the Dogge berry
tree, because the berries are not fit to be eaten, or to
be given to a dogge. I heare they call this in the

FLOWERS, FRUIT, AND LEAVES OF DOGWOOD.

THE CORNEL 117

North parts of the Land, the Gatter tree, and the
berries Gatter berries, yet some say they call the
Euonymus so.”

Even Loudon makes an essay in the same direc-
tion, suggesting that the name was given “from the
astringent properties of the bark and leaves, a
decoction of which was formerly used as a wash for
curing the mange in dogs.” No doubt such a wash
was employed, primarily perhaps on account of the
name of the tree, though in this matter, as in most of
its names, there is a very general confusion of this
tree with the Spindle-tree (Huon'ymus ewrope'us L.)
and with the two British species of Guelder-rose
(Viburn'um); but assuredly this wash was not the
origin of the name Dogwood.

As the late Dr. Prior pointed out, these hard,
tough and horny hedgerow woods were those most
handy and suitable for the making of dags, skewers,
and goads, and hence came the original names
Dagwood, Dag-tree, Dag-timber, Prickwood, Prick-
tree, Prick-timber, Skiver-wood, Skewer-wood, Gad-
rise, Gad-treow, Gatten-tree or Gaitre-tree. Gatter
Bush is simply Gad-tree bush, and perhaps Gatter-
idge may represent “Gaitre rouge,” the red-shooted
Goad-tree. Cat tree and Catteridge are, of course,
easily explained corruptions, whilst Hound’s Tree and
Houndberry Tree are, no doubt, more modern names,
dating from a period when the origin of the name had
been forgotten. Thus nearly all the many names of
this tree, which in themselves prove its former utility,
can be reduced to a very simple series, practically
three in number.

118 FAMILIAR TREES

The confusion of name and use, however, between
this and other small woods is still reflected in one
trade—the manufacture of gunpowder. The name
Dogwood has been shared between Cornus sanguinea,
Euonymus europeus, Rham'nus Fran’‘gula and
Viburnum Op'ulus : the wood of all of them probably
has been employed in the manufacture of a. fine-
grained charcoal, such as is used for some gunpowder :
that of the Spindle-tree is said to be the best for
drawing-crayons ; but for gunpowder it is Rhamnus
Frangula which retains the name Dogwood.

It is more particularly on a chalk or limestone
soil that this bush abounds in thicket and hedgerow,
and it does not occur in Scotland and is uncommon
in Ireland ; so that, speaking of the country generally,
it is not so frequent as we might think from our
experience of it in the south-eastern counties. It
grows from four to eight, or even fifteen or twenty
feet in height, its round straight branches springing
in opposite pairs from the leaf-axils and spreading
in a horizontal or ascending direction. Their small
slender buds are enclosed by a few velvety scales, and
the surface of the young twigs is also pubescent.
These twigs may be olive-green, faintly, if at all,
tinged with red; but in spring and winter, when
affected by frost, they glow with the blood-red hue
that has given the shrub its specific name—sangwinea.
As they get older they lose their down and their red-
ness, becoming grey and then olive-brown, and cork-
warts make their appearance, fissuring the hitherto
smooth bark into scales. This bark and the leaves,
when bruised, have a strong fetid odour, to which the

29

‘qoomsoag
Rajsoy ‘Burns; *H + 0ZO4g

TRANSVERSE SECTION OF WOOD OF DOGWOOD. TREE (X 30 DIAMETERS)

638

THE. CORNEL. 119

French names puine and bois punais, “ bug-wood,”
are said to be due.

The opposite leaves are short-stalked, somewhat
broadly egg-shaped and pointed, with entire margins.
Though they are generally not-much more than two
inches long, we have found them on suckers nearly three
times as long. Their veining is characteristic, though
not unlike that of the Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathar’-
ticus). The veins are not only prominent in appear-
ance, but are so exceptionally tough that, as in the
case of the common plantain, if a leaf be snapped
asunder in several places, the vascular bundles will
hold the fragments together, and can be drawn out
unbroken. When young the leaves are hoary or
silky, but they become perfectly smooth later. In
spring they may, like the twigs that bear them, be
suffused with a fainter tinge of the rich vinous colour
which they are destined to exhibit in all its perfection
at a later season. They then become a somewhat
dull yellowish or sap green, resembling the foliage ot
the Buckthorns. It is in early autumn, however, that
they show themselves in a mingled richness of colour
that challenges comparison with American Maples or
with the Muscat Grape-vine. Mixed with the un-
altered green of summer, deep crimson, light rose-red,
a dark maroon approaching the purple of a plum,
may then be seen, side by side with yellow and
orange leaves, and with those that blend several of
these tints on a single blade. Later on in the season
of change whole bushes of deep purple or blood-red
may be seen, but the more varied charm belongs to
the earlier time.

120 FAMILIAR TREES

The somewhat rounded clusters of cream-white
flowers terminate the branches in June and July.
Rich in honey, and freely visited by a variety of
insect life, they have a pungent unpleasant smell.
The pointed form of the petals, and the fact that each
of the four is distinct, and not united into a tube as
in the Guelder-roses and Elders, give a distinctive
character to the inflorescence. There is no struc-
tural obstacle to prevent self-pollination, though, no
doubt, the many flies and small beetles that visit the
blossoms often bring pollen from a distance and so
effect a cross.

The flowers are succeeded by small green berries,
which are nearly globular, and are surmounted by the
much-withered traces of the calyx and honey-disk.
In September they ripen to a purple-black, and, like
every other part of the plant, are intensely bitter ; but
they are eagerly devoured by thrushes. Whilst, as
we have already seen, they were formerly boiled for
lamp-oil, they are stated to be used in France at
the present day for soap-making, yielding about a
quarter of their weight of oil. ,

There are, doubiless, many shrubs more beautiful
than the Dogwood ; but its close-growing habit, its
clusters of starry blossoms and polished berries, and,
above all, its autumn colouring, justify its claim to a
place in the shrubbery with Danewort, Spindle-tree,
and Snow-berry.

A small plantation of this species by itself has
recently been made, chiefly for the sake of its autumn
colouring, by the margin of the Pen Ponds in
Richmond Park.

THE ASPEN.

Po'pulus trem/ula L.

Tue chief structural characters of the Aspen are
that its shoots are downy, and its leaves on very
long stalks; those on the suckers heart-shaped,
pointed, but not toothed; those on the branches
rounded, with incurved. teeth ; and all of them silky
on the under surface when young, though generally
becoming smooth later. Its buds are slightly viscid,
and the flowers in the female catkins are densely
crowded together. The lobed catkin-scales are
fringed with hairs; the two stigmas are each divided
into two erect segments; and in the male plant
each catkin-scale bears generally eight stamens
in its axil.

The Aspen is not usually a large tree, though
Loudon records a specimen at Castle Howard, in
Yorkshire, 130 feet high, and three and a half feet
in diameter, and various other examples reaching
diameters of four feet, and one at Bothwell Castle,
Renfrewshire, 117 feet in the spread of its branches.
This latter tree was eighty years old; but the species
is not a long-lived one, and, like all Poplars, is very
liable to rot from the tearing off of boughs by wind,
and to subsequent attacks by various insects. As
the tree gets older its horizontal branches become
pendulous. The young shoots are generally reddish,
with prominent brown hairs—or both these shoots

36 121

122 FAMILIAR TREES

and the root-suckers may be hoary—but they are
never cottony as in some other species.

Like all trees having a wide geographical range,
the Aspen, though not now much esteemed as
timber, has been applied to a variety of uses. In
Asia it occurs mainly in the north and in Asia Minor;
it is abundant throughout Russia from the White
Sea to the Caucasus, and throughout Northern Africa
and the South of Europe; and it is indigenous in
Ireland and as far north as Sutherland. The Aspen
grows at an altitude of 1,600 feet in Aberdeenshire.
Its bark has been employed in tanning, and its wood
is used in turnery and cooperage, as well as for many
minor purposes, such as sabots and clogs, and to a
small extent for gunpowder charcoal.

During the last thirty years the wood, in common
with other species of Poplar, has come into extensive
use in the manufacture of paper-pulp, for which
purpose wood has all but superseded the Alpha
or Esparto grass of the Western Mediterranean.

Formerly, however, it must have been more
valued than it is now, for in the reign of Henry V.
an Act of Parliament was passed (4 Hen. V., c 3)
which was not repealed until the reign of James I.
to prevent its consumption otherwise than for the
making of arrows, with a penalty of 100. shil-
lings if used for making pattens or clogs. Spenser
alludes to it as “the Aspine good for staves.”

Its roots, running near the surface, are apt to
impoverish the soil, and its leaves, when fallen, kill
the grass, though, whilst on the tree, their constant
motion so permits the passage of light as to render

THE ASPEN 123

its shade but very slightly injurious to any plants
beneath it. The profusion of suckers springing from its
roots, however, makes the Aspen an undesirable tree
for lawns, meadows, or hedgerows. They yield an
abundant supply of faggots, or poles, if the tree be
treated as coppice-wood, and cut down either every
seven or eight, or every fifteen or twenty years. The
rapid growth and usefully-moderated shade of this
species adapt it well to act. as a “nurse” in moist
woodlands for the Oak or Beech; and it may be
propagated either by cuttings or, more readily, by
seed.

It is, however, chiefly for the grace and beauty of
the grey bark of its stem and its rustling leaves that
the Aspen is now valued. This rustling of the leaves,
which are scarcely ever still even in the stillest air, is
the most striking feature of the tree, and the point
of most allusions to it in literature. Mr. Ruskin, in
whose “ Modern Painters” the Aspen is treated with
such loving detail, when discussing Homer’s treat-
ment of landscape, writes as follows on the scene
between Ulysses and Nausicaa :

“The spot to which she directs him is another ideal piece of
landscape, composed of a ‘beautiful grove of Aspen Poplars, a
fountain, and a meadow,’ near the roadside; in fact, as nearly
as possible such a scene as meets the eye of the traveller every
instant on the much-despised lines of road through lowland France
—for instance, on the railway between Arras and Amiens: scenes
to my mind quite exquisite in the various grouping and grace of
their innumerable Poplar avenues, casting sweet tremulous shadows
over their level meadows and labyrinthine streams. We know
that the princess means Aspen Poplars, because soon afterwards
we find her fifty maid-servants at the palace, all spinning, and in
perpetual motion, compared to the ‘leaves of the tall Poplar’; and

124 FAMILIAR TREES

it is with exquisite feeling that it is made afterwards the chief
tree in the groves of Proserpine, its light and quivering leafage
having exactly the melancholy expression of fragility, faintness,
and inconstancy which the ancients attributed to the disembodied
spirit. The likeness to the Poplars by the streams of Amiens is
more marked still in the Iliad, where the young Simois, struck by
Ajax, falls to the earth ‘like an Aspen that has grown in an
irrigated meadow, smooth-trunked, the soft shoots springing from
its top, which some coach-making man has cut down with his keen
iron, that he may fit a wheel of it to a fair chariot, and it lies
parching by the side of the stream.’”

In spite, however, of Mr. Ruskin’s decision, Pro-
fessor Daubeny was of opinion that Homer’s Aigeiros
was not the Aspen, but the Black Poplar (Po’pulus
nigra L,), on the ground that the latter is common,
the former not common, in Greece. Fraas, however,
found Aspen at an altitude of 1,800 feet on the north
side of Parnes and on the Achelous, and Sibthorp
records it in Beotia. But we cannot help thinking
that any species of Poplar has sufficiently mobile
leaves to suggest the poet’s language.

From Homer to Thomson is indeed a fall; but

there is true observation in the latter’s description
of

“A perfect calm; that not a breath
Is heard to quiver through the closing woods,
Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves
Of Aspen tall.”

The grace of the whole tree would seem more
than once to have suggested the fair sex to writers on
the Aspen, though their remarks are hardly compli-
mentary. Thus Gerard says of it: “In English
Aspe and Aspen-tree, and may also be called Trem-
ble, after the French name, considering it is the

CATKINS AND LEAVES OF ASPEN.

THE ASPEN 125

matter whereof women’s tongues were made (as the
poets and some others report), which seldom cease
wagging.” Among many other allusions to this tree,
Scott’s address to woman in Marmion, as

“Variable as the shade
By the light quivering Aspen made,”

is one of the best known. Far more strikingly
poetical is the old Scottish and English legend on
the subject, so beautifully told by Mrs. Hemans:

“. . . a cause more deep,
More solemn far, the rustic doth assign
To the strange restlessness of those wan leaves ;
The cross, he deems, the blessed cross, whereon
The meek Redeemer bowed His head to death,
Was formed of Aspen wood, and since that hour
Through all itsrace the pale tree hath sent down
A thrilling consciousness, a secret awe,
Making them tremulous, when not a breeze
Disturbs the airy thistle-down, or shakes
The light lines of the shining gossamer.”’

A very different version was thus strikingly
narrated by a contributor to Notes and Queries
many years ago :—

“At that awful hour of the Passion, when the Saviour of the
world felt deserted in His agony, when—‘The sympathising sun
his light withdrew, And wonder’d how the stars their dying Lord
could view’—when earth, shaking with horror, rang the passing
bell for Deity, and universal nature groaned, then from the loftiest
tree to the lowliest flower all felt a sudden thrill and, trembling,
bowed their heads, all save the proud and obdurate Aspen, which
said, ‘Why should we weep and tremble? We trees, and plants,
and flowers are pure and never sinned!’ Ere it ceased to speak, an
involuntary trembling seized its every leaf, and the word went forth
that it should never rest, but tremble on until the day of judgment.”

126 FAMILIAR TREES

This constant agitation of the foliage by the least
breath of wind, owing to the unusual length and
flattened form of the leaf-stalk, though commen to
the whole genus, is most conspicuous in the case of
the Aspen. To it the tree owes its French name, and
it is explained scientifically by the length of the
slender leaf-stalk and its lateral compression, so that
the broad and heavy leaf is suspended on a sup-
port which is itself readily acted on by the smallest
atmospheric movement. The rustling noise, as of a
babbling brook, is, of course, produced by the friction
of the leaves on one another.

In March or April the bare grey boughs or
brownish shoots are thickly covered with catkins, and
the male ones produce a general effect of warm vinous
red. When the foliage appears, associations of refresh-
ing coolness and of laughing mirth, suggested by the
resemblance of the sound made by the leaves to the
music of a brook, mingle, as we gaze at their pallid
colour, and as the rising wind changes the rippling
laugh into a long drawn sigh, with those of the deepest
melancholy. When autumn, its “gold hand gilding
the falling leaf,” spread its badge of splendid decay
over each leaf in succession, the tree gains in variety
of colour, but its rustling gives it even a more
melancholy effect than it had before.

The soft woods of all the Poplars are naturally
very liable to the burrowing of insect larve. The
caterpillars of the Goat-moth (Cos’sus ligniper’da) and
the Wood Leopard (Zew’zera w’sculi) are among the
most destructive. Entomologists also associate the
Poplars with the beautiful Poplar Hawk - moth

Photo: H. Irving, Horley.

ASPENS.

69

TRANSVERSE SECTION OF ASPEN WOOD (X 30 DIAMETERS).

70

THE ASPEN - 127

(Smer'inthus po'puli) and the Continental Poplar
Butterfly (Limenv‘tis po’pult), resembling our own
White Admiral.

From its more spreading habit of growth the
Aspen has none of the formality in landscape effect
of the Lombardy Poplar, and, though useful, along
with its congener the Abele (Po'pulus al'ba L.), in
the marshy wood, it deserves a place in the fore-
ground of the copse bordering a lake or stream. A
row of Aspens in such a situation would prove very
effective, reflecting, as it were, in their quivering
leaves the ripple of the water at their feet.

In open heathy glades in Epping Forest, where
careless or incendiary fires have laid bare the surface,
and where formerly the Birch only was wont to sow
itself, this species now springs freely. Its readily
dispersed plumed seeds may be derived originally
from cultivated specimens of the tree somewhere on
the borders of the woodland ; but, once sown, they are
certainly showing themselves capable of holding their
own. Similarly it is recorded that in 1813, after the
burning of Moscow, seedling Aspens sprang up over
the ruins of the whole city.

The roots of the Aspen spread mostly at a small
distance below the surface of the moist ground in
which it delights, and it has thus but a slight power
of resisting wind.

It has been suggested that the Grey Poplar (P.
canescens Sm.) may be a hybrid between the
Abele and the Aspen. It grows to the same size as
they do, but is of slower growth, and accordingly
Mr. James Crowe, of Lakenham, Norfolk, who, about

128 FAMILIAR TREES

the close of the eighteenth century, noticed this form
growing wild in various parts of his county, recom-
mended its wood for flooring. Poplar wood in general
has the advantage over resinous woods of not readily
igniting. The leaves of the Grey Poplar are thin,
rounder than those of the Abele and less deeply
toothed, with bluntly triangular lobes and apex and
a general outline approaching the orbicular. Their
under surfaces are grey rather than white, and they
become smooth, or nearly so, later. The veins are
pinnately arranged, but the two lower secondary ones
are nearly as large and prominent as the midrib, thus
producing a slight development of that “ pseudo-
palmate” condition which is more marked in the
more lobed leaves of the Abele. The buds and shoots
are cottony, much as are those of the Abele. The
most distinctive feature of the form is the stigma,
which is not merely two-lobed or four-lobed, as in
other Poplars, but, as Mr. Crowe discovered, eight-
lobed and purple.

PEAR.

THE PHAR.

Py'rus commu'nis L.

SPRING, with the bursting of green leaf-buds and the
joyous opening of many blossoms, is essentially the
season of hope. The colours of summer have not yet
come: many of the trees put forth their blossoms, as
it were, prematurely upon leafless boughs, and those
blossoms are often of a chilly whiteness that might
be expected to depress the spirits so recently emanci-
pated from the dull thraldom of winter frosts; but
the promise of verdure and warmer colour is here,
and man refuses to be depressed.

The Pear puts forth its snowy blossoms at a date
when snow can hardly be assumed to be a thing
entirely of the past, so that the trees massed in
orchards suggest lingering snowdrifts ; but before the
blossoms fall the green leaves have generally made
their appearance among them, and the likeness to
snowdrifts is gone.

The Pear (Pyrus communis L.), so well known in
our orchards, is by no means common in a wild state,
and does not occur in the extreme North of England
or in Scotland. No doubt it is in many cases an
escape from gardens, its seeds being often swallowed
and dropped by fruit-eating birds, so that some
botanists deny its claim to rank as an indigenous
British tree, and date its introduction from the time
of the Roman occupation of our island. N evertheless,

37 129

130 FAMILIAR TREES

one can with difficulty persuade oneself that all three
of the varieties of Wild Pear recognised by our
botanists, with fruits seldom two inches long, and so
harsh in flavour as to be as unpalatable as a Crab-
apple, are merely the results of rapid degeneration.
Nor is there any @ prtord reason against the native
character of the Pear. It is in its distribution con
fined to a limited area in Europe, not occurring south
of the Balkans, nor in the northern parts of Russia,
Sweden. and Norway. This agrees with its absence from
the North of Scotland; whilst its presence in a wild
state in Ireland, which was never conquered by the
Romans, is a difficulty in the way of the theory of its
introduction by them. Though there can be no doubt
that the cultivated varieties all have a common
origin, it seems highly probable that this primitive
stock diverged into several distinct races whilst still
uncultivated, and that their cultivation throughout
Europe, from Ireland to the Caucasus, may date from
a time anterior to the Roman Empire.

It is found—apparently as an article of food—in
the Swiss lake-dwellings, and is mentioned, under the
names “ Akras,” “Onkne,” and “ Apios,” in the oldest
Greek writers as common to Egypt, Syria, and Greece.
The absence of any Sanskrit name for the tree, and
the lack of similarity of those in use by Chinese,
Persians, Arabs, and the Slavonic nations of Europe to
those of the West, are most simply explicable on the
theory of a primitive limitation of its range. The
Latin Pyrus, the French Poire, the English Pear,
and even the German Birn, can all be affiliated with
the Keltic Peren. The late Professor Karl Koch

THE PEAR 131

derived all cultivated Pears from three species: P.
per'sica, the ancestral form of the Bergamot Pears;
P. eleagnifolia Pall, the Oleaster-leaved Pear of
the Caucasus and Asia Minor; and P. sinen’sis, the
Sandy or Snow Pear of China and the gardens of
India and Japan. Professor Decaisne, however, re-
cognised six races, descended from a single species :
the Mongolic, represented by P. sinensis; the Indian,
including P. variolo’sa and others ; the Pontic, repre-
sented by P. eleagnifolia ; the Hellenic, including
P. parviflora, a red-flowered form occurring in Crete,
P. sina‘ica, which is perhaps identical with P. per-
sica, the Wild Bergamot Pear, and others, such
perhaps as P. nivalis Jacq., the Snowy-leaved species
of the Austrian Alps, from which some of the culti-
vated sorts used in France in the manufacture of perry
are probably derived; the Germanic, including our
two commoner forms, P. A’chras Gaertn. and P.
Pyras'ter Borkh. ; and lastly, the Keltic, represented
by P. corda‘ta Desv., formerly known as Briggs‘it
Bosw.-Syme.

This last-mentioned form, with leaves which are
heart-shaped at the base, and almost smooth, and
with very small globose, Apple-like fruit, is most in-
teresting, as occurring in a wild state in Devonshire,
Cornwall, and Brittany, and as, in the opinion of com-
petent authorities, being perhaps the “ Apples” of the
“ Inis yr Avalon ”—the Isle of Apples in the Arthurian
traditions.

Pliny describes the varieties of Pear in cultivation
in his time as exceedingly numerous, including both
early and winter sorts, and mentions thirty-two;

132 FAMILIAR TREES

whilst Gerard says of them that “the stocke or
kindred of Pears are not to be numbered; every
country hath his peculiar fruit, so that to describe
them apart were to send an owle to Athens, or to
number things that are without number.”

Among the Pears of the sixteenth century were
the Popering Pear, mentioned by Mercutio in Romeo
and Juliet, probably a Flemish variety, named from
Popering in Flanders, and possibly introduced by
Leland the antiquary, who was made Rector of
Popering by Henry VIII.; and the Warden or Luke-
wards Pear. This last-mentioned variety seemingly
originated in the horticultural skill of the Cistercians
of Warden Abbey, in Bedfordshire, which was founded
in the twelfth century. Three of these fruits appear
in the arms of the Abbey. They were probably called
Lukewards from ripening about October 18th (St.
Luke’s Day), and were eaten in the “ Warden pies”
coloured with saffron (as we now colour stewed Pears
with cochineal), to which allusion is made in A
Winter's Tale. More than two hundred and fifty
sorts were known at the end of the eighteenth century,
and nearly seven hundred in 1831.

The most remarkable cultivated Pear-tree in
England is probably that at Holme Lacy in Here-
fordshire, which by the rooting of its branches once
covered more than an acre of ground, and produced
as much as fourteen hogsheads of perry in the year.

In a wild state the Pear is but a small tree, some-
times a mere shrub, more often twenty feet high than
forty; but its rough bark, its upright growth and
pyramidal shape, with pendulous boughs, give it a

FLOWERS, FRUIT, AND LEAVES OF PEAR.

THE PEAR 133

grace that does not belong to the more straggling
Apple-tree, though the rosy blossoms of the latter
may be more attractive than the wan bloom of its
congener. The dwarf shoots or spurs of the Wild
Pear are generally spinous, and marked with crowded
ring-scars. The branches spring from the main stem
in an ascending manner at an angle of less than
forty-five degrees, afterwards curving outwards and
downwards.

The leaves are scattered alternately along the
young shoots, but crowded together in bunches
or “fascicles” on the old wood. Country-bred folk
learn to distinguish at a glance the leaves of the
Pear from those of the Apple. The leaves of the
Pear are generally on a longer and more slender
stalk than those of the Apple, and are consequently
more pendulous. Speaking only of our wild forms,
they are also slightly smaller, not exceeding one and
a half inches in length. They are sometimes heart-
shaped at the base, and vary in general outline from
“ ovate,” i.e. broadest near the base, through “ oblong,”
i.e. with approximately parallel sides and broadest
across the centre, to “ obovate,” z.¢. broadest near the
point. On young trees the leaves are often lobed, as
in the allied Service-trees, and in all cases they are at
first pubescent, at least on the under surface. They
vary, however, in different soils, especially on the
Continent, where those of several of the mountain
forms are as white on their under surfaces as those
of the White Beam (P. A’ria L.), and the form is
sufficiently variable to acquire such names as
“Willow-leaved” and “Sage-leaved” for some of

134 FAMILIAR TREES

the varieties. The leaves are always acutely pointed,
though the apex varies from an abrupt point (“ cuspi-
date”) to a long and tapering one (“acuminate ”),
They turn black when dried.

By about the middle of April the Pear-trees of
our suburban orchards ought, in favourable seasons,
to spread over the landscape the snowy sheet of their
full bloom. The flowers, however, continue for some
time, lasting generally until about the middle of the
following month, thus preceding the warmer-tinted
Apple-blossom by about a fortnight. Though the
flowers of the Pear are as “ precocious” in their first
appearance on the bare branches as those of the
Blackthorn, the white mass of bloom is soon relieved
by a delicate background of tender green. The
flowers are grouped in flat-topped, or “corymbose,”
clusters, and each one of the bunch is an inch or an
inch and a half across—the same size, that is, as those
of the Apple, from which they are technically distin-
guished, not by their colour, but by having their
styles distinct to the base instead of being united
below. This union, of course, takes place later, when
the so-called “calyx-tube” binds together the five
carpels into a single Pear. As the study of the not
uncommon specimens of abnormal fruits shows, this
structure, which is essentially nothing more than an
expansion of the flower-stalk or “ floral receptacle,”
contributes far more largely to the fruit than is the
case in the Apple. It grows first as a thickened
cylinder below the flower, and then expands in a
globular form around the five carpels or “core”
which it imbeds. This “core,” it should be observed,

Photo: H. Irving, Horley.

PEAR.

pe Ma cet

*

TRANSVERSE SECTION OF PEAR WOOD (X 30 DIAMETERS)

THE PEAR 135

occupies a higher relative position—ze, is farther
from the stalk—in the Pear than in the Apple. The
outline of the fruit, tapering gradually, as it generally
does, into its stalk, though very characteristic of the
Pear, is no more absolutely so than is the depression
into which the stalk is usually inserted in Apples.
A more universal distinction in structure between
the fruits of the two species is the presence in that
of the Pear only of the well known “grittiness,”
due to small clusters of cells, thickened with woody
deposits in their walls, which are scattered through-
out the fleshy part of the fruit. Few Wild Pears
produce fruits one quarter the size of the common
cultivated varieties; nor does their texture or flavour
render them fit to eat.

In some favourable autumns the Pear exhibits
beauties that perhaps surpass those of the pure white
and virginal green of spring, its leaves turning to a
vivid crimson. Though the tough and indestructible
character of its fallen leaves may render the Pear
undesirable on a lawn, it well deserves for its beauty
alone a place in the cottage-garden, the farm-close,
or the shrubbery. Few more delightful surprises
await us in our rural walks than to come upon a
well-grown Pear-tree standing apart in a small
woodland clearing, whether it be decked in the snow
of spring or the crimson of autumn.

Of our three wild varieties, none of which can be
termed common, P. Pyraster Borkh. has “acuminate”
leaves, which, though downy beneath when young,
become smooth, and a typically Pear-shaped or “ tur-
binate” fruit, tapering gradually into its stalk; P.

136 FAMILIAR TREES

Achras Gaertn. has broader leaves, more abruptly
pointed, which always remain downy or flocculent
below, and a more globular fruit, rounded at its stalk
end; whilst P. Briggsii Bosw.-Syme, as has already
been stated, has almost smooth “cordate” leaves and.
a very small globose fruit.

The wood of the Wild Pear is heavy, strong,
compact, fine-grained, and of a reddish-brown tint.
Though inferior to Box and Hawthorn for engraving,
it has long been used for this and kindred purposes.
Gerard says it “likewise serveth to be cut into many
kindes of moulds, not only such prints as these
figures are made of, but also many sorts of pretty
toies, for coifes, breast-plates, and such like, vsed
among our English gentlewomen.”

It is commonly employed for T squares and
other drawing instruments, or is stained black in
imitation of ebony; and it is said to be excellent
as fuel, and to yield good charcoal.

STONE PINE.

THE STONE PINE.

Pi'nus Pi'nea L.

Puiny, speaking in his “Natural History” of the
Pinus, which he identifies with the pitus of Dios-
corides, says that it was common about Rome in
his time, that its nuts were eaten, and that it sends
out branches at the top. This description would of
itself make us identify the tree in question with
Pinus Pinea, which is to-day a conspicuous feature
in the landscape of Rome; but it is curiously con-
firmed by a letter of the younger Pliny describing the
great eruption of Vesuvius in a.D. 79 which destroyed’
the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii and was fatal
to his uncle the naturalist. In this letter he compares
to this Pine the form of the mass of smoke which rose
from the volcano, and nothing could well be more
apt. Just as the mingled steam and dust rise from
the crater in a vertical column, and then, under the
influence of gravitation, spread out laterally on all
sides, so does the Umbrella Pine, as it is called in
Italy, rise unbranched to a considerable height and
then send out its branches in a more or less flat
mass at its summit.

The Cluster and Stone Pines have several points
in common. In both the needles are long, straight,
rigid, and comparatively broad; the cones are large
and pointed, and have pyramidal apices in the

centres of their rhomboid tesselle ; and the buds are
38 137

138 FAMILIAR TREES

woolly and free from resinous exudations, whilst the
scales become reflexed. The two species differ, how-
ever, in that P. Pinas‘ter has, as its name of Cluster
Pine indicates, its cones generally in whorls of from
three to eight; each cone being not more than two
and a half inches wide, and of a brightly polished
light brown; the scales about an inch long and
three-quarters of an inch broad, and terminating
in a hard, sharp point; and the needles from six to
twelve inches long ; whilst P. Pinea has solitary cones,
sometimes four inches wide, of a lighter colour, the
scales about two inches long, an inch or more in
breadth, and terminating in a broad blunt prickle,
and the needles five to eight inches long.

Whilst the abbreviated, parasol-like habit is un-
doubtedly the most striking peculiarity of the species,
it has many other botanical characters which, if
not individually distinctive, are when taken together
what we mean by the species P. Pinea. The bark
of the trunk is reddish-grey, fissured longitudinally,
sometimes to a considerable depth, so as to expose a
light reddish-brown inner cortex. In this country
the stem commonly divides at no great distance from
the ground into several large limbs spreading with an
upward curve and themselves soon forking in the
same manner, as is well seen in the small but typical
tree at Kew. The twigs are pale brown and rather
slender, and long retain the bristle-like bases of the
fallen leaf-spurs; and the buds are cylindrical and
slightly pointed, but less so than those of the
Cluster Pine, which they resemble in many points.
They are also more woolly and entirely without

THE STONE PINE 189

resinous excretion. The needles are of a dark
green, but brighter than those of P. Pinaster,
semicircular in section, with finely serrulate edges
and sub-acute points, but soft to the touch. They
remain on for two or three years. Internally they
exhibit a row of resin-canals all round the leaf
at some depth below its surface, each surrounded
by a layer of hard tissue or “sclerenchyma.”
The. stomata occur on both the flat and the con-
vex surfaces, and are deeply sunk in the epidermal
tissue. The scale-leaf or “basal-sheath” is whitish
and half an inch long the first year, but is reduced
to half its length, much lacerated, and darkened
in colour during the second year. The dwarf
shoots, or leaf-spurs, are so arranged as to form
a triple spiral series round the branch that bears
them.

The catkins of staminate flowers are yellowish,
and are grouped in bunches near the apex of
slender shoots of the current year, surmounted
by some slightly developed leaves. Each catkin
is about half an inch long, cylindrical, and very
short-stalked, having a number of scale-like
bracts at its base. Each stamen has a prominent
“connective” or “crest” projecting between its
anther-lobes, which in this species is rounded
and toothed. The female catkins are placed, two
or three together, at the extremity of the
strongest shoots; they are oval and about half
an inch long, are short - stalked, and enveloped
in reddish membranous scales. The cone-scales
themselves are at first whitish-green; but they

140 FAMILIAR TREES

become gradually reddish from their apices down-
wards before reaching maturity. The seed is larger
than in any other European Pine, and it has a
hard stony “testa,” or envelope, which gives the
tree the name of Stone Pine; whilst its hatchet-
shaped wing is so small as to appear to be a
merely “vestigial” structure, useless, that is, for
that purpose of seed-dispersal for which this
structure has presumably been evolved in allied
forms. The entire cone is much lighter in colour
than those of the Cluster Pine, and the * apophyses,”
or “ tesselle,” differ in having keel-like ribs proceed-
ing from each of their four-rounded angles, instead
of the one diagonal keel in those of that species.
In the centre of each tessella is a greyish rhom-
boidal depression, from the centre of which rises
the broad, blunt prickle.

Young plants of the Stone Pine exhibit a pe-
culiarity not noticed in other species of the genus.
After branching has begun, and some of the dwarf
shoots with paired needles have been produced, the
plant puts forth long slender twigs bearing single,
i.e. not paired, needles, without scale - leaves or
“basal sheaths,” half the length of those of the
typical adult foliage, and of a bluish-grey-green.
Later on, shoots bear these so-called “primordial”
or “protomorphic” leaves mixed with the ordinary
dwarf shoots; and then the former cease to appear.

The Stone Pine may perhaps be a native of
China, where it is plentiful, as in the South of
Europe it is seldom seen in situations far removed
from habitations. It occurs in the South of France

CONE AND LEAVES OF STONE PINE,

THE STONE PINE 141

‘

in Spain, where it flourishes at an altitude of 4,000
feet, in Greece, and in Barbary; but it is most
closely associated in our minds with Italy. The
brilliant skies of the landscapes of Claude have
their effect frequently heightened by the contrast
with its heavy masses of dark foliage. Gilpin is
most enthusiastic in its praise :—

“ After the Cedar,” he says, “ the Stone Pine deserves our notice.
It is not indigenous to our soil, but, like the Cedar, it is in some
degree naturalised ; though in England it is rarely more than a puny
half-formed resemblance of the Italian Pine. The soft clime of
Italy alone gives birth to the true picturesque Pine. There it always
suggests ideas of broken porticos, Ionic pillars, triumphal arches,
fragments of old temples, and a variety of classic ruins, which in
Italian landscape it commonly adorns. The Stone Pine promises
little in its infancy in point of picturesque beauty ; it does not, like
most of the Fir species, give an early indication of its future form.
In its youth it is dwarfish and round-headed, with a short stem, and
has rather the shape of a full-grown bush than of an increasing
tree. As it grows older it does not soon deposit its formal shape.
It is long a bush, though somewhat more irregular, and with a longer
stem ; but as it attains maturity its picturesque form increases fast.
Its lengthening stem assumes commonly an easy sweep. It seldom,
indeed, deviates much from a straight line ; but that gentle deviation
is very graceful, and, above all other lines, difficult to imitate. If,
accidentally, either the stem or any of the larger branches take a
larger sweep than usual, that sweep seldom fails to be graceful. It
is also among the beauties of the Stone Pine that, as the lateral
branches decay, they leave generally stumps which, standing out in
various parts of the stem, break the continuity of its lines. The
bark is smoother than that of any other tree of the Pine kind, except
the Weymouth ; though we do not esteem this among its picturesque
beauties. Its hue, however, which is warm and reddish, has a good
effect ; and it obtains a kind of roughness by peeling off in patches.
The foliage of the Stone Pine is as beautiful as the stem. Its colour
is a deep warm green; and its form, instead of breaking into acute
angles, like many of the Pine race, is moulded into a flowing line by
an assemblage of small masses. As age comes on its round clumpish

142 FAMILIAR TREES

head becomes more flat, spreading itself like a canopy, which is a
form equally becoming ; and thus we see what beauty may result from
a tree with a round head, and without lateral branches, which re-
quires, indeed, a good example to prove. When we look on an Ash
or an Elm from which the lateral branches have been stripped, as
is the practice in some countries, we are apt to think that no tree
with a head placed on a long stem can be beautiful; yet in Nature’s
hands, which can mould so many forms of beauty, it may easily be
effected.”

Valued for its shade, it is sometimes called
the Umbrella Pine, the “Pin Parasol” of Southern
France, though this name now belongs rather to
the Japanese Sciadop'itys verticillata S. & Z.
The Stone Pine is more abundant on the Riviera
di Levante than on the Riviera di Ponente; but,
says the author of “Riviera Nature Notes,”

“Tf the Riviera di Ponente has few Stone Pines, we make up for
the deficiency by possessing the finest specimen of the tree. The
famous Pin de Bertaud, which grows on the high-road between
Cogolin and St. Tropez, is the largest in Europe—at least, so the
guide books say.

“What a strange region is this, where the tropic and the Arctic
doras meet; where the Pine, son of the snowy north, stands side by -
side wide with the Palm, daughter of the burning south! Here is
realised the dream of Heine’s Fir Tree:

“Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Im Norden auf Kahler Hoh;
Ihn schla/efert, mit weisser Decke
Umbiillen ihn Eis und Schnee.

“«Er trua/emt von einer Palme
Die fern in Morgenland
Einsam und schweigend trauert
Auf brennender Felsenwand.’”

Writers, slavishly copying one another, say that
the Stone Pine was cultivated in England previous

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THE STONE PINE 143

to 1548 because it is mentioned in Turner’s “ Names
of Herbes,” published in that year. The passage in
question runs as follows :—

“Pinus, as Theodore translateth, is called in greeke Peuce, in
englishe a pyne tree, in duche Ein forthen, in french Ung pin. Pines

growe fayrest in gardines, There groweth one fayre one in Rich-
mund. Pine nuttes are hote and drye.”

This passage may, as Mr. Britten, the editor of
the modern reprint of Turner’s scarce work, considers,
refer to the Scots Fir (Pinus sylvestris). In the
sixteenth century the Scots Fir was probably rare
enough in Southern Britain for one tree growing at
Richmond to call for special mention, and its seeds,
like every other known vegetable substance, native or
foreign, would be tested by the careful apothecaries of
that age. Turner knew Italy and its plants: well, but
may not have recognised a distinction between the
two species. It is doubtful, therefore, whether the
Stone Pine was grown in England before the time of
Evelyn, or even before 1750, about which date
Peter Collinson planted it, together with all the
Conifers he could collect, at his house at Mill Hill.

In the South of Europe its soft, light, fine-
grained wood is used for masts and _ general
carpentry ; but it is not durable, and the tree is chiefly
valued for its large edible seeds, which are used as
food wherever the species grows. They do not ripen
until the fourth year, and are then three-quarters
of an inch long without their wings, and about
half as broad, and, being entirely free from resin,
have a sweet taste, resembling that of the Hazel-nut.
In Pliny’s time they were preserved in honey, and

144 FAMILIAR TREES

now they are commonly used at dessert, or in sugar-
plums and cakes instead of almonds. If not kept
in the cone, however, the abundant oil they contain
becomes speedily rancid. They are known in French
as “pignons,” whence the tree gets its name of “ Pin
pignon.” On the islands in the Sea of Marmora,
where the tree is very common, the cones are
exposed to fire to make them open and drop out
the seeds, which are known in Turkish as “ fistik.”
Besides being much eaten by squirrels, they form
the chief food of the cross-bill, a bird which
occasionally visits this country, and whose beak is
specially modified for their extraction from the
cone.

Where this Pine occurs in large groves of fine
trees, such as those which form one of the great
beauties of the ancient city of Ravenna, “Queen of
the Marshes,’ where these trees extend for miles,
the rustling and sighing of the boughs in the wind
has often arrested the attention of the poet.

TRANSVERSE SECTION OF NEEDLE LEAF OF STONE PINE.

PLANE.

THE PLANES.

Plat'anus orienta'lis L., and P. occidenta’lis L.

Lorp CHANCELLOR Bacon’s contribution to the
progress of modern science is still, to some
extent, a matter of controversy. If, however, the
tradition that it is to him we owe the introduc-
tion of the Plane-tree into England were well
founded, there can be no doubt that for this
alone we should owe him much gratitude, especi-
ally in London.

The genus Platanus, which undoubtedly derives
its name from the Greek wdarvs, broad, in reference
either to its broad leaves or to its spreading shade
is, according to the best authorities, almost the
sole representative of a very isolated type of cat-
kin-bearing trees, the five or six forms which it
includes constituting a distinct Natural Order, the
Platana‘cee, though they may be related to
Liquidambar. They are trees which commonly
reach a considerable height, up to even a hundred
feet; with nearly cylindrical stems—in old speci-
mens of enormous girth—and with wide-spreading
branches. It was probably with reference to the
general outline of the Oriental Plane that Spenser,
in his “ Faérie Queene ” (1589), borrowing his epithet,
no doubt, as was his wont, from some classical
authority, speaks of “the Platane round.”

The manner in which the bark flakes off in

39 145

146 FAMILIAR TREES

rectangular scales is very characteristic, and is, per-
haps, a main reason for the impunity with which
the Plane thrives in the soot-laden atmosphere of
our metropolis. A copious annual crop of smoothly-
polished leaves, readily washed by the slightest
shower, and thus presenting a large surface to the
food-giving light and air, and a bark which thus
yearly throws off all impurity, constitute an ideal
city tree.

We can hardly, perhaps, expect the enthusi-
asm of the poet to be quickly roused by the
foreign charm of exotic trees, so that it is
naturally the poets of America, the native home
ot one variety of the Plane, who sing its praises.
It is to the appearance produced by this shedding
of the bark that Bryant alludes when he writes of
the Green River:

“Clear are the depths where its eddies play,
And dimples deepen and whirl away;

And the Plane-tree’s speckled arms o’ershoot
The swifter current that mines its root.”

The leaves are large, with stalks of some length,
and prominent veins, generally five in number, radiat-
ing to the acute points of their gracefully-lobed
outline. They are, however, “ pseudo-palmate,” only
three veins radiating from the base, and the other
principal ones being branches of these, unlike the
Sycamore, in which five or more radiate from the
base. Individual leaves may be as much as nine
inches long and eight in breadth, and though a
certain general character of outline distinguishes
the different geographical “ races,” the variety of

THE PLANES 147

detail, even on a single bough, is practically in-
finite. No leaf rebels more against the misrepre-
sentations of the geometrical school of draughts-
men.

The bark is by itself sufficient to distinguish
the Plane from the Sycamore (A’cer Pseu’do-
platanus), which is commonly confounded with it,
especially in Scotland; but the Sycamore has also
its leaves in opposite pairs and far less smooth,
whilst in autumn they are almost always marked
with the round blots of an ink-black parasitic fungus.

When the foliage is yet young, the drooping
flower-stalks are produced, the pollen-bearing flowers
being on distinct branches from those that yield fruit,
though either kind is collected together into the
characteristic “buttons,” or globular catkins.

The Oriental Plane is first mentioned, among
English writers, by William Turner, in his “ Herbal,”
printed at Cologne in 1568; and in 1596 John
Gerard had it growing in his garden in Holborn,
the history of his specimen being subsequently
given by him in his “ Herball” (1597), p. 1304, as

follows :—

“My seruant William Marshall, whom I sent into the
Mediterranean Sea as chirurgion vnto the Hercules of London,
found divers trees heerof growing in Lepante, hard by the sea
side, at the entrance into the towne, a port of Morea, being
a ‘part of Greece, and from thence brought one of those rough
buttons. being the fruit thereof.”

Our Transatlantic neighbours still call the
Plane the Button-ball, or Button-wood.

One of the most striking structural peculiari-
ties of the Planes is the fact that during the

148 FAMILIAR TREES

summer the axillary buds are entirely concealed in
a conical hollow in the base of the leaf-stalk,
being only revealed at the fall of the leaf.

The flowering branches are from two to six or
more inches long, bearing from one to five, but
most commonly three, of the buttons. Those that
produce pollen are simply collections of short-
stalked stamens mixed with a few narrow-pointed
scales, and, as is generally the case with catkin-
bearing trees, the whole branchlet falls when the
pollen has been discharged. The fertile florets, too,
are of the simplest structure possible, being merely
one-chambered and one-seeded ovaries, each pro-
longed into a style, curved at its apex, and with a
sticky stigma down one side; whilst as this ovary
enlarges into a little nut, a tuft of bristles grows
up from its base, giving the burr-like character to
the whole catkin.

The timber of the Plane is fine-grained and of a
brownish-yellow oak colour, somewhat resembling
Beech, prettily marked, and thus well adapted for
ornamental use. It is almost exclusively used by
carriage-builders and _ pianoforte-makers, for the
sides of wagonettes and the bridges in the piano,
the manner in which it “takes paint” fitting it for
the former purpose, and its toughness and hard-
ness, by which the pins are securely held, for the
latter. When old, the wood sometimes has dark
veins in it, like those of Walnut.

One of the most interesting points connected
with the Plane is the geographical distribution of
its various forms, which most botanists treat as

AND LEAVES OF PLANE.

FRUIT.

FLOWERS,

THE PLANES 149

distinct species, though they have utterly failed to
bring forward any one strongly distinctive character.
No Planes are known to the east of Kashmir, though,
on the analogy of the distribution of Tulip-trees—if
the theory of the eastward retreat of the European
flora of Miocene times towards America be well
founded—we might expect them to occur in China
or Japan. In this connection it is interesting to
note, though the evidence must be but slight, that
the fossil Plane-leaves found in the Miocene rocks
of Europe were believed by Dr. Oswald Heer of
Ziirich to be more nearly related to the Occidental
than to the Oriental form. There can be little doubt
that the Oriental Plane is indigenous in Persia,
though it has also been cultivated in that country—
where it is known as chinar—from a very early
period; whilst if of human introduction in the
Balkan peninsula, that introduction must probably
date back more than 2,000 years. In Spain, and
even in our own country, it seems that its short
history has permitted of the origin of tolerably
distinct varieties. The Occidental Plane was first
brought into England from Virginia, in 1640, by the
younger Tradescant to his father's garden at Lam-
beth, where was that remarkable collection of curios-
ities which afterwards constituted the Ashmolean
Museum at Oxford. It is indigenous in the
United States from Mexico to Canada, and from
the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains. Its place is
taken in Mexico by two forms considered as species
by De Candolle, P. lindenia’na and P. mexica'na ;
and in California by a third, P. racemo'sa Nutt.

150 FAMILIAR TREES

It seems that the American Plane does not attain
the size or age of its Oriental brother. Neither form
occurs commonly in forests or even in large groups;
but single trees growing in plains or in river alluvium,
in which it rejoices, sometimes reach enormous di-
mensions, and, from the gratefulness of their shade,
in hot countries have long been venerated. At
Caphyee, in Arcadia, a beautiful Plane-tree was shown
to Pausanias, which was said to have been planted,
1,300 years before, by Menelaus, the husband of
Helen, before his departure for the Trojan War.
When Xerxes invaded Greece, another Plane so
delighted him by its size, that he—somewhat un-
kindly, but no doubt with good intentions—encircled
it with a collar of gold, stamped a figure of it on a
gold medal which he continually wore, and tarried
so long beneath it as to ruin his chances of success.
Pliny speaks of a Plane in Lycia over eighty feet
in circumference, so that eighteen persons could dine
within it; whilst at Buyukderé, three leagues from
Constantinople, there still exists a tree of this species
100 feet high, 165 feet in girth, and 130 feet in the
spread of its branches, being, perhaps, over 2,000
years old.

To the student of philosophy the Plane must
always be associated with the groves of the Academe,
in which walked the earliest of the peripatetic
philosophers. This may have been in the mind of
Tennyson, when he associated the Princess Ida’s
female Academe with “the thick-leaved Platans of
the vale.” Even in England, where it was thought
in 1633 that it would only flourish if “cherised and.

:E&. d. Wallis, le
PLANE TREE IN WINTER. Photog Bas Ma nara Kaw

75

RS),
(x 30 DIAMETE
ECTION OF PLANE TREE WOOD

SE $

TRANSVER

78

THE PLANES 151

watered with wine; and it is found by experience
that the same is very comfortable to the roots,” we
have some notable specimens, as at Highclere, and
at Weston Park, in Shropshire, where there is a
tree eighty feet high, spreading 100 feet, and having
a girth of eighteen and a half feet at five feet from
the ground.

The true Oriental Plane has a rounded outline,
a leaf with a wedge-shaped base, and deeply five-lobed,
and generally two or more “ buttons” in the fructifi-
cation. The Spanish variety has very slightly divided
leaves, and most of our London Plane-trees belong
to an intermediate forin (P. orientalis acerifo'lia)
somewhat resembling the Sycamore in its leaf-outline.
Of this form there are many fine specimens in and
around the metropolis, as in Berkeley, Bedford, and
Mecklenburg Squares, and the well-known irees in
Wood Street, Cheapside, and in Stationers’ Hall
Court. The latter was planted by Mr. Broome, treas-
urer of the Company, about seventy-five years ago,
There are also fine specimens, over 100 years old, at
Stanwell Place, Staines, and at Shadwell Court,
Norfolk ; and down to 1881 a magniticent tree of
equal age was standing in the garden of Lambeth
Palace, where a fine representative still lingers.

The Western Plane is far less common with us.
It has a looser outline, differing, it has been said,
from the Oriental kind in this particular, as a Pear-
tree does from an Apple; its leaves are divided to a
moderate depth, and are scarcely at all wedge-
shaped or tapering at the junction of the blade
with the stalk; and the fruiting branch commonly

152 FAMILIAR TREES

bears but a single “button.” In its native country
it rejoices in damp river-valleys, often growing
actually on the banks, and affording, in conse-
quence, a more quickly-grown timber than the
Oriental, though inferior to it in quality. Speci-
mens are recorded with a girth of over forty-
seven feet, and it sometimes grows to a great
height without branching.

So much confusion has arisen from the simi-
larity of the Occidental to the Maple-leaved Plane
(P. orientalis acerifolia), that it is impossible to
sift the evidence as to their relative hardiness; but
neither kind seems to compare for longevity with
the true Oriental form. Philip Miller, indeed, who
was gardener to the Apothecaries’ Company at
Chelsea from 1722 to’1771, states that he knew
from his own observation that the Maple-leaved
Plane was only a seedling variety of the Oriental;
in which case the former has, perhaps, been too
short a time in existence to be fairly tested.

All kinds are now raised from either seed,
cuttings, or layers, the last method being, on the
whole, the most satisfactory. Considering its pre-
eminent excellence as a shade-giving tree, capable
of withstanding the most vitiated atmosphere, the
cultivation of Planes may, it is to be hoped,
be greatly increased in the future, especially in
our towns. In the pure air of the country, how-
ever, where smoke has not to be taken into con-
sideration, the facts that it is late in coming into
leaf, and is somewhat opaque in colouring, may
cause some of our native trees to be preferred to it.

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