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Photo by Houston, Waterbury, Vt.
When the Sap Runs

{ Page 128)
OUR FIELD AND
FOREST TREES

BY

MAUD GOING

Author of
“ With the Wild Flowers ”
“ Field, Forest and Wayside Flowers ”
and “‘ With the Trees ”

ILLUSTRATED

 

CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1916
@
QK432
GG

Copyright
A. ©. McClurg & Co.
1916

Published October, 1916

 

Copyrighted in Great Britain

@ 13090

W. F. HALL PRINTING COMPANY, CHICAGO
PREFACE

 

Books oe trees, describing the character-

istics individual species, are many.
Legends aaa ee concerning trees have been
dug out of obscurity and delightfully retold.

But there are few books as yet about the forest,
still fewer which try to tell the high-school scholar
and the “‘ man in the street ” about the forest.

Moreover, I have tried to make a book which
is not local. It makes its diffident appeal to a
lover of trees anywhere from Nova Scotia to
California, from Hudson’s Bay to The Ever-
glades, wherever there is tree life and forest-clad
country.

It tries to avoid technical terms and phrases.

And it follows a plan which it is hoped will
prove convenient to teachers, as well as the
general reader.

“All the Nature books,” I am told, ‘‘ begin
with spring — and all the schools begin in
autumn.” Hence a busy teacher is confronted at
the outset with the task of turning the whole book

“ otherwise to.’

Bearing this in mind, I have begun with an

autumn chapter on the seed vessel and the seed.
Preface

There is a mighty precedent for this innovation,
for thus Nature begins. The chapters which
follow can be used as fittingly in the depth of
winter as at any other season. Towards the end
of the book, keeping pace with the advance of
spring, there are chapters on the budding and the
blossoming of trees.

For information and illustrations used in the
chapters on ‘‘ Our National Forests” and “ The
Forester and His Work” I am indebted to Mr.
Horace Bushnell of the United States Forest
Service. For literature and pictures I have to
thank the United States Bureau of Forestry, and
also the Forestry Branch of the Department of
the Interior at Ottawa — especially the Superin-
tendent of the Dominion Forest Reserves.

Kind assistance has also been lent me in the
Forest Products Laboratory of Canada, where
the chapter on Dominion Forests was read and
passed upon.

Thanks are due to the Montreal Star, the New
York Evening Post, and the Home and School
Visitor for permission to use again some material
which has appeared in those periodicals.

Mavp GoIine.
CHAPTER

I

II
ITI
IV
Vv
VI
VII
VIII
IX

XI
XII
XII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX

CONTENTS

Fruits and Seeds

Some Troubles of the Trees

In the Midwinter Forest

A Study of Winter Branches .

The Woods, the River, and the Rain .
Is there a Wood Famine Coming? .
Forest Fires . :

United States National Forests ‘
Dominion Forest Reserves .

The Forester and His Work .

The Delvers in Darkness

The Ascent of Sap ;
The Living Trunk and Branches .
Cork and Bark .

Buds

Exploring the Woodbile.

Blossoming

About Green Leaves .

The Murmuring Pines sie Their
Kindred Be Mint nets, Sar Dats ae las oe

PAGE

12
18
29
39
47
57
69
82
97
114
122
134
146
155
164
176
190

203
ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE PAGE
When the sap runs . . . . Frontispiece

1 Winged fruit of elm; winged twin-fruits of
maple . 3

2 Pine seed cut open to show the young plant;

young seedling pine . . 4

3 Apple seed showing the two coats: ‘with the

coats removed SOM the two cotyle-
dons 6

4 The sprouting “of a beech seed ; ‘seed cut

across; first foliage leaves; seed leaves
shriveling and foliage leaves expanding . 8

5 One fruit of the maple; a hollow globe, at-

tached to a veiny wing, encloses a solitary

seed ; the plant within; baby plant uncoil-
ing; ‘strap- shaped leaves unfurling . 9

6 The acorn bisected showing the two thick

cotyledons; the acorn rent by the coming
forth of the life within . : 10

7 “ Punks” or fruiting bodies of the fungus
which destroys the aspen 14

8 “ Witch’s broom” from a me ee tree; pine
cone willow gall . 20
9 Sap-sucker “honey pots” in a canoe birch | 20
io Natural pruning in process 24
iz An old “ weather,” or frost crack . 24
12 A sun scald 26
13 Open grown white spruce . : 26
14 Apple twig showing old bud scale marks’ 33
15 Cutting and bundling basket willow 36
16 Forest regions of the United States 44

17 View in a Pennsylvania coal mine showing
the great amount of timber that is used 51
Illustrations

FIGURE

18
19

20

ai

22
23
24
25
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
35

36

37

The result of recurring fires. .

A “ fire line” in the Uncompahgre N ational
Forest, Colorado . :

Section of a tree trunk to show how the
dates of fires are ascertained from the re-
maining surviving trees. .

Arapahoe National Forest, Colorado, ‘forest
officers ready to leave a tool box to go to
afire. .

National forests and ‘drainage of the United
States

“ Muskeg ” fringing ‘Mitishto river

Packing across Muskeg Brule

An average prairie homestead just after set-
tlement, near Pense, Saskatchewan .

The same place two years after planting .
Yellow pine cones spread to dry on canvas
sheets, Uncompahgre National Forest .
Extracting yellow pine seed from the cones .
A seedling maple of the natural size, show-
ing the root hairs; a bit of the root mag-

nifed . fs

The tip of a root much magnified, " showing
the root hairs and the root cap

A sweet birch, which, when it was a seed,
fell on stony ground .

Wood of a fea showing ‘its cellular
structure

Cross section of a young oak . i

Top of a stump showing the growth rings

The “stock” and “scion” prepared for

“ approach grafting”; “approach graft-
ing” completed . .

Neighbor beeches grafted together by ‘the
wind

Branches of alder and of poplar- leaved birch
showing lenticels .

PAGE

60
60

68

72
86
86

90
90

I0Oo
100

116
II7
120
123
140
142
143
144

I51
Illustrations

FIGURE

38

39
40
4I
42
43

44

45

47
48

49

Cross section of wood and bark of the west-
ern yellow pine, showing two of the deep
cracks in the bark, at the bottom of which
lenticels are placed ‘

Extending buds of the tulip tree, birch, and
almond . :

A tip-end bud of a horse- chestnut ‘bough

Sweet buckeye, a tree of the southern states

An old willow living and ene with all its
heart wood gone .

An apple tree growing in an " abandoned
orchard now used as a pasture .

Cherry blossoms; a flower cluster; a flower
blossom cut vertically ; ; one-half of the ripe
cherry . Beis

Pollen grain emitting the pollen tube .

Flowers of the European linden, lime or
basswood :

Blossoms of the oak; " pollen- shedding, or
staminate; pistillate . ;

Willow flowers. The silvery “tassel ; the
golden tassel; pistil with its covering
scale ; stamens and fringed scale .

Portion of a white lily leaf cut through and
magnified showing a section of the thick-
ness, the difference between the upper
and lower tissue, and the breathing pores

Structure of the epidermis of a leaf, show-
ing the stomata, or little mouths .

Part of the upper surface of a leaf, showing
one of the stomata with its lips closed .

A seedling pine

Spray and _ berries of the “red cedar. or

Needle-leaf cluster of the white pine :
Tamarack or larch twisted into a complete
circle . ogg

PAGE

152
156
159
162
170

170

194
198

199
204.

204
205

206
Illustrations

FIGURE

56

57

59
60

Flowers of the Scotch pine; the pollen-
shedding flower cluster; the community
of carpels; the young cone; staminal
leaves ; carpels . bt ee te

Young cone of the spruce .

Cone of a pitch pine

Spray and cones of the hemlock .

A spray of the balsam fir .

PAGE

207
210
211
212
214
OUR FIELD AND FOREST TREES
Our Field and Forest Trees

 

CHAPTER I
FRUITS AND SEEDS
Wie the Greatest of Teachers sought a

symbol for the greatest of miracles — the
growth of the divine in man — he found it in the
wild mustard, spreading its branches so widely,
though it had come from so small a seed.

This miracle of nature is equaled, and even out-
done, by many native trees. The willow seed is
almost too small for vision. It sails down the
wind upborne by what looks like a fluff of cobweb,
seed and flying apparatus together being but a
mere shining speck. Yet from this scarcely vis-
ible atom may grow one of those giant willows
which are the pride of our eastern valleys.

June breezes sow the willows, and some trees
are even more prompt in getting their families
started in life.

When the first daisies star the grass, red maples,
silver maples, and elms are all sending their chil-
dren away, in the care of the wind, to seek their

1
2 Our Field and Forest Trees

fortunes. The poplar seeds also by this time are
ripe and ready. The streets of many western
towns are shaded by the ‘‘ cottonwood ” or “‘ neck-
lace” poplar. Its glossy leaves shed soot and
dust, and so are healthy and clean when the foliage
of elms and maples is choked and dying. When
the chains of pods which drip from the poplars
give their treasures to the winds of May, white
piles of downy seeds drift, as snowflakes drift
before November gales, into sheltered corners.
For these seeds are, like those of the willows, very
numerous, very small, and fitted for flight with
tufts of silky hairs.

All these trees are inhabitants of swamps and
river margins. Though they can live and thrive
on city streets, they cling to old habits and send
their seeds out into the world at a season when
streams are low. When the willow, elm, and
maple offspring wander forth on home-seeking
excursions, the beaches are bare, and ready to
receive them.

But most seeds ripen in autumn, and remain
buried beneath the leaves and grass till winter is
over and gone.

The most important summer work of the trees
is the forming and maturing of their seeds, and
their chief autumn work is packing their young
families off into the great world.

The sower, going forth to sow, flings his seed
broadcast in order that the seedlings may not
Fruits and Seeds 8

stifle one another when they begin to grow, and
Nature, the first sower of all, has taken various
means to insure the wide scattering of her seeds.
Nature uses the winds as sowers. Winged seeds
are borne by the birch and catalpa, as well as by
the pines and many of their kin; while the ash,
ailanthus, elm (Fig. 1), alder, and tulip tree
grow up from winged fruits, wind sown. The

 

Fig. 1. A, Winged fruit of elm; B, Winged twin-fruits of maple.

maple babies, too, are carried away from the
mother branch in little airships (Fig. 1).

The wings which bear the ash tree’s offspring
to new homes are papery and opaque. Those
which fly with their precious freight from the
boughs of elms and maples are, like the wings of
katydids, veined and gauzy. Some of the wan-
derers, going by on autumn winds, are seeds in-
deed, and some are what an exact botanist would
call ‘‘ fruits”; for “ fruit,” to a botanist, means
what develops after the flower. It may be pleas-
ant to the eyes and good for food, or it may be
4 Our Field and Forest Trees

just a pod or a husk or a little dun-colored affair,
no more edible than a grain of sand.

Inside the fruit Nature puts the seed. And
inside the seed, folded closely and tranced in
sleep, is a minute plant — the coming generation
(lig, 2).

A fruit has three parts: an outer skin, a central
portion, and an inner skin, to which the seeds are
fastened. These can all be plainly
seen in a lima bean pod, which,
let us remember, is a fruit, even
though appearances be against
it. It has a leafy outer covering,
a pulpy middle portion, a pale
satin lining, and the beans are
the seeds.

In later spring, when the fruit
blossoms have just fallen, the
baby peaches are green seed
cases, differing but little from

 

. 2 Fig. 2. A, Pine
the tiny pods on the bean vines. seed “cut open to

show the young
But as summer goes on, the seed plant; B, Young

i seedling pine,
cases of the fruit trees are altered

amazingly. In the peach, the outer part of the
seed case becomes velvety and gorgeous, the
middle part grows juicy and luscious, the inner
part becomes very hard, and the bitter, almond-
like kernel is the seed.

Great changes take place in what is left of the
flower after its bright leaves fall. These may be
Fruits and Seeds 5

noted by comparing thin slices of the fruit, taken at
various stages of development, and thus finding
out what summer has done to the tiny case which
was left behind when the flower fell or faded.

But in shaping and coloring seed cases and seed
nature has had just one end in view — to prolong
the life and push the fortunes of the family.

Next after the wind, the sowing of the seed
depends upon the good offices of birds and small
animals. Seeds which are to be sown by such
means are served up in dainty fashion, surrounded
with juicy pulp, and brightly colored lest they be
passed by. ‘All these devices,” says Wallace,
‘“ are evidently intended to attract animals in order
that the fruits may be eaten, while the seeds pass
through the body undigested and are then in the
fittest state for germination.”

The autumn hedgerows are beaded with ber-
ries, which catch the attention and please the taste
of birds. Many such berries have seeds small
enough to be readily swallowed, but too hard to
be digested. Thus birds have sown the elder and
cedar bushes which spring up on wild islands, and
they, too, are the sowers of the raspberry and
blackberry bushes growing along old logging roads
in the deep woods.

Some fruits contain large eatable seeds, encased
in a very hard covering; as is the case with plum,
peach, and cherry stones; some, like the apple,
pear, and quince, have their seeds enclosed in a
6 Our Field and Forest Trees

tough core (Fig. 3). Having eaten the apple,
we throw away the core and thus perhaps sow an
apple tree.

Many herbs bear prickly fruits or seeds, which
catch hold and cling wherever
opportunity offers, and in this
way secure transportation. A
large number of seeds have
thus like tramps, crossed the
country in a series of stolen

. rides. Such hooked or thorny
A, Showlagthetwo costs; fruits or seeds grow on plants
B, With the coats re- ‘
signed event ewe” “yllode branches are likely to

brush the passing wayfarer.
No native tree bears prickly or thorny seeds.

The prickles of chestnut and beech burrs seem
merely given for a protection against prying paws
while the nuts are ripening. For when a nut is
eaten the baby tree folded within it is devoured
and done for; hence nature tries to hide nuts.
They are green while on the tree, so that they are
not readily seen among the leaves. But as they
ripen they turn brown, so that when they drop to
the ground they still match their surroundings —
the earth and the withered leaves.

Moreover, they are almost always protected by
coverings. ‘The walnut has a bitter rind, chestnuts
and beechnuts are enclosed in prickly burrs, and
the hazelnuts are so hidden in leaflike cases that it
is difficult to see them among the leaves.

 
Fruits and Seeds 7

But the hard shells have other services to per-
form. Large round nuts can travel far from the
parent tree by a long roll down hill, and all those
with woody shells can float, and thus go by water
route to new homes.

The cocoa and cashew nuts, and the seeds of the
mahogany tree, sometimes take long voyages. It
has been suggested that the mat of hairs which
covers the cocoanut is nature’s device to prevent
the shell from being battered in when waves dash
the nut against the rocks. The shell itself, too,
is very strong, and, thanks to these safeguards,
the cocoanut has been able to float to new-made
reefs till it is found on almost every island in the
warm seas.

Seeds from Pacific islands are sometimes
brought to North America by the Japanese cur-
rent, which strikes the coast of Oregon and Wash-
ington. Japanese junks have drifted across on
this current, and have actually been cast ashore;
so it is very likely that Asiatic seeds have made
the voyage, and reached the end of the journey
alive.

Our own native nuts seem unable to survive
very long swims. Many kinds contain so much
oil that they soon turn rancid — when they lie on
the ground they are more likely to decay than to
sprout. Most wild nut trees spring from nuts
buried by squirrels.

After the seed has reached its new home it
8 Our Field and Forest Trees

generally lies there, like a dead thing, till spring
returns. Indeed, some tree seeds will not sprout
till they have been frozen, and some sleep in the
earth for a year or more before germinating.

The length of time the seed lies waiting depends
chiefly upon the character of its coverings. If
the little plant is shut in behind horny walls,
months may pass before the earth’s moisture can
get through to help the growth
within. But if the coverings are thin
or very brittle, or if they are not
waterproof, seeds soon decay when
they cannot sprout.

We say “ coverings ”’ because there
are always two, though in many cases
they cling so closely together that
they seem to be one. An orange pip
shows the two coats plainly; the outer
one is fibrous and woody, the inner
one is richly colored and as glossy
as satin. Fig. + The sprouting of a beech

a seed. , Seed cut across; B, First
Inside the coats we foliage leaves; C, Seed leaves shriv-

faa ee plant shat . es eling and foliage leaves expanding.
be. Some tree seeds contain just the minute plant
and nothing else; but usually the trees, like faithful
parents, make ample provision for their children’s
start in life. This store of food may be packed
around the baby tree as it lies asleep within the
seed coats, or it may be part of the baby tree’s
plant-body (Fig. 4).

 
Fruits and Seeds 9

When we take the woody shell and the brown
inner covering off an acorn, cherry stone, peach
stone, or almond the white kernel inside all divides
naturally into halves. These are two leaves which
have changed their nature and become larders.
They are called cotyledons or seed leaves. Their
business is to feed the young plant till it is able

to gather nourishment for itself from
earth and air. When the little tree
becomes self-supporting, the work :
of the seed leaves is completed.
In almost any autumn walk one @
may find the twin fruits of the late
Cc C

flowering maple. Each is a hollow
globe, attached to a veiny wing,

B
and each encloses a solitary seed
(Fig. 5).
Within this seed we find a plant
already formed, with a short stalk
D

and a pair of leaves, as
° Fig. 5. One fruit of the maple.
unlike as possible to A, ‘"A hollow globe, attached to a

veiny wing, encloses a_ solitary

those which fall from 0." Seoilings "b. Suap-theped
the maple boughs leaves unfurling,

overhead. The leaves which we find in the
seed are rolled up with the rest of the baby plant,
which has been coiled, in its snug quarters, like
a watch spring. But when we straighten them
out we see that they are thick and strap-shaped.
Between them are the two first foliage leaves,

very tiny and bright colored. When the little
10 Our Field and Forest Tree

maple awakens, the stir of life within the seed
brings the wing up on end. The strap-shaped
leaves uncoil, and burst the shell which has en-
closed them, showing a membrane which has been
the inner coat of the seed. Soon this
too is ripped apart, and the strap-
shaped pennants unfurl, disclosing the
pair of true maple leaves between
them.

The strap-shaped leaves are thick
and succulent. The crimson leaves
are delicate and fine, and anyone who
watches a maple begin life soon sees
the reason for this difference. For as
the young tree pushes upward, put-
ting forth a second pair of delicate
maple leaves, and then a third, the
strap-shaped affairs Fig. 6. A, The acorn bisected,
grow limp and yellow PGS ssa Vent by. the’ comme
and shrink away; they forth of the life within.
are leaves which have changed their nature and
become storehouses for food.

Mother oaks and beeches, through many days
of sun and shower, gather and treasure a store
which is laid away in the swelling seeds to feed the
oak and beech seedlings of another year.

And after all their pains a host of hungry ani-
mals — squirrels and rabbits, pigs and turkeys, as
well as mice and men — devour the store. With
it, quite incidentally, they swallow the little trees

 
Fruits and Seeds 11

for whose sake all this food supply was garnered.

Sometimes, when the mother trees are very
liberal to their children and the cotyledons are
very heavy, the stem of the seedling is unequal to
the task of lifting them above the ground. This
is the case with sprouting acorns and horse chest-
nuts. ‘The cotyledons of both these trees remain
in the shell and in the ground (Fig. 6).

Everywhere among last season’s fallen leaves,
in the spring woods, the rootlet of the little oak
makes eager headway through the mold, while
the first foliage leaves seek the light above.

The acorn, rent by the coming forth of the life
which it has enclosed, is soon drained of all its
stores and reduced to a mere withered shell.

For, ‘“ that which is sown is not quickened ex-
cept it die.”
CHAPTER II

SOME TROUBLES OF THE TREES

1% the White Mountains is a hilltop which,

three years ago, was covered with noble pines.
Under these were lithe, young saplings, ready to
renew the forest when time should bring the life
of the pines to an end. And under all were deep
moss, delicate ferns, and the sweet, fragile flowers
which love the forest shadows.

Now, in that place, instead of the pines there
are stumps about three feet high. All over the
ground, among these stumps, one can see what is
left of the saplings. Some of them are bent,
with crowns to the earth; some broken, some up-
rooted, and many are chopped down. Every-
where is a litter of broken boughs, and under all
are the wildwood plants, the lovers of the
shadows, dying or dead.

People who loved the wood now cut down
speak of the place with deep regret, for it is just
one example of what goes on all over the country
— wasteful lumbering.

Careful woodcutters, in felling trees, spare the
little ones, so that in a few years there may be

12
Some Troubles of the Trees 18

more trees in that place large enough to furnish
another cutting of lumber. It is, of course, trou-
blesome to take a cut tree through the wood with-
out breaking the slender saplings, which should
be, and generally are, coming up everywhere under
the tall timber. It requires much more time and
care than is expended by the lumberman who
simply drags the felled tree along, crushing and
tearing everything that grows in the way. But
the whole country loses many valuable trees each
year because the selfish lumberman is allowed to
destroy little trees in hewing down big ones.

We noticed in the wood another way of the
wasteful lumberman. It is, of course, easier to
chop and saw through a tree trunk if the men work
the tools at about the level of their elbows. But
when they do this they leave a stump three or
four feet high. This stump is the broadest part
of the trunk and contains several, perhaps many,
cubic feet of excellent timber. All this is wasted,
and worse than wasted; it soon becomes a source
of mischief to the surrounding forest.

Trees, like other living creatures, have their
diseases. Foresters could give us a long list of
tree diseases, and most of these are caused by
plant-enemies. Growing trunks and branches, and
felled timber also, may be spoiled for every use-
ful purpose by what lumbermen call “ dry-rot.”
Many large old trees prove, when felled, to have
dry-rot in their hearts. One place in the trunk,
14 Our Field and Forest Trees

instead of being hard and firm, is found to be a
mere mass of powder, or a great bundle of very
short, woody threads. Such spoiled timber is
called punk. This destruction has been done by
plants growing and feeding in the wood.

Botanists know a score of plants which destroy
timber as it stands in the forest, and another score
which destroy logs and woodwork. ‘These mis-
chief-makers scarcely look like plants. When we
think of a plant, our minds picture root, stem,
leaves, flower, and seed. But the devourers of
the trees have none of these. They are what
botanists call fungi.

A tree fungus starting in life is just a tangle of
threads, scarcely thicker than cobwebs. These
threads, branching and branching again, go
through the wood until it is all interlaced with a
flimsy network of them. And wherever the threads
penetrate, the wood is destroyed.

After many cubic feet of valuable timber has
been turned to worthless punk, the destroying
fungus prepares to sow itself. From some crack
in the bark there is thrust forth a hump or knob,
and after a while this develops into a woody shelf
or bracket (Fig. 7). This is often mistaken for
the whole plant. Really, it is merely the fruit-
bearing portion; it corresponds to the pods of the
pea vine or the berries on a raspberry bush. The
main body of the fungus is inside the tree. Lum-
bermen call these outgrowths “‘ conches.”” Many
 

 

From Bulletin No. 6, Forestry Branch. Ottawa.

Fig. 7. “ Punks,” or fruiting bodies of the fungus which destroys
the aspen.
Some Troubles of the Trees 15

of them live on from year to year and may be
seen even in winter woods.

One sometimes sees such outgrowths on the
ends of railroad ties, and other exposed wood.
These belong to a fungus which has woven
innumerable fine threads all through the timber
it destroys.

In the deep woods, late in summer, there are
strange growths on the ground — big toadstools
of brilliant colors. These are fruit-bearing por-
tions of other kinds of fungus. They belong to
plants which are growing underground in molder-
ing roots or in buried wood.

One fungus which lives in dead wood is familiar
to most country boys. The fine threads with which
it interlaces the wood are phosphorescent: they
shine in the dark. The moldering sticks they live
in are ‘‘touchwood.” These fungi do no harm,
but those which grow in living wood have earned
the evil name of “ tree-killers.”’

On the under sides of many toadstools dotting
the forest ground there are great numbers of gills,
and on others there are little soft thorns. Many
of the brackets clinging to the trees have all their
lower surface picked full, as it were, of pin holes.
In late summer the gills and soft thorns are cov-
ered, and the pin holes are lined with fine powder.
The grains of this powder are spores, from which
other fungi will grow.

A spore corresponds to a seed, but is differently
16 Our Field and Forest Trees

made. Inside every seed there is a baby plant,
very tiny and tightly folded up, but perfectly
formed. But the grains of powder which blow
away from a forest fungus have no tiny plants
inside. They have life, however, and the power
to grow. Fungus spores are so light and dry that
they rise into the air like smoke, and so small that
they are carried long distances by the wind.

In late summer and early autumn the fungus
brackets on the sides of the trees are shedding
this dust in enormous quantities. It alights wher-
ever the wind leaves it. Most of the little grains
are cast where they cannot grow at all; but some
are carried to places where the trees have been
cut-or wounded so that the wood is laid bare. If
a fungus spore alights on such a spot it immedi-
ately begins to grow. A woodman’s blaze or the
scrape made by the downfall of a tree-neighbor
gives the spore of a tree-killing fungus a chance to
get in. Boring insects open channels by which
spores can enter. A wound made by gnawing
teeth may afford an opening to the enemy.

But no wounds are so injurious to the trees as
those made by the breaking of boughs. Paths of
windstorms can often be traced through the forest
by streaks of punky timber. Wind-breaks have
allowed spores of a tree-killing fungus to reach
the wood of trunks and boughs.

A fungus spore blown to a stump finds a large
surface of raw wood — just the home it has been
Some Troubles of the Trees 17

seeking. There it settles down and grows into
a mature plant, launching millions of spores into
the forest. If the trunk had been cut as close as
possible to the ground, the stump would soon have
become covered with earth and moss and thus
have been protected from the wandering spores
of tree-killers. So we see that tall stumps left by
careless lumbermen are not merely wasted timber.
They are nurseries for enemies which will soon
fly forth, carrying disease into the healthy forest.
CHAPTER III

IN THE MIDWINTER FOREST

i oes winter trees, stripped of their leaves,
show beauties which are hidden in the sum-
mer, and they differ so one from another that we
can easily tell them apart, and learn to recognize
them all.

Now we see the graceful shape of the meadow
elm, like a spraying fountain, and the sturdy
arms of the oak, thrust out as if to do battle with
his enemies, the storms. Now we see the alligator-
like scaliness and writhings of the black locust and
the beautiful form of the silvery beeches. Now,
too, we see the homes of many friends and foes
of the trees. On the bare boughs of some large
forest tree, generally pressed close against the
trunk, we may see a rounded ragged-looking mass
of sticks and leaves —the summer home of a
squirrel. He moved out of it in autumn, and is now
living in a warmer and safer place — some deep
hole inside a tree or stump.

On many trees we notice thick clusters of little
slender twigs. In olden times, when people really
believed in good and bad fairies, queer scary

18
In the Midwinter Forest 19

tales used to be told about them. In Germany
they are called “‘ thunder besoms,” while in Eng-
land and in our own country they are known as
‘“‘witch’s brooms” (Fig. 8).

The witch who makes them has been caught in
the act. She is a tiny fly, taught by nature to
pierce the twig, and to put her eggs into the pith.
The warmth of spring hatches these into gnats
—a hungry host. They live and feast inside the
branch, and distort and deform its growth so that
it puts forth these crowded clusters of twigs.
Every broom is a fly nursery.

On oak branches we may see little smooth
knobs, the color of the dead leaves. These are
one kind of oak gall. In England they are still
known as “‘ oak apples,”’ for the name apple used
to be bestowed upon any fruit or anything that
looked like fruit.

The oak apple, so called, is an ill-treated leaf,
pierced by a mother gall-fly. She put an egg into
its middle vein, and thus turned it into a nursery
for her offspring. By late summer such a nursery
has become a shell filled with a brown spongy
substance. In the center of this is a hard kernel
about as big as a pea, and inside all is a white
grub, one of the insect foes of the oak.

The oak apple falls to the ground in some win-
ter gale, and in spring the grub, now changed
into a gall-fly, eats its way out. On the oaks
there are other galls that will not fall until the
20 Our Field and Forest Trees

branch does, for some mother gall-flies make their
nurseries in the wood.

After a branch has been pierced, and the egg
put in, the wood around it becomes diseased,
changes color, and grows into a queer lump or
knob. In the heart of every such lump there is a
grub, or an empty chamber where a grub used to
live before it took to itself wings and flew away.
Gall-flies of many sorts and sizes attack the oak.
The strongest and sturdiest of the trees is the
one that suffers the most from these stinging
enemies. They pierce the buds, the baby acorns,
the leaves, the bark, and the wood; and on the
much-enduring oak we see galls of many sorts,
shapes, and sizes. Some cradle one grub, living
and feasting in solitude, some are providing food
and shelter for a large family.

On the willows, especially on the low-growing
pussy willow of the swamps, one sees many a
reminder that even the most innocent life may have
its enemies. Some of the twigs are tipped with
black lumps, covered with scales and looking so
much like pine cones that they are called “ pine-
cone willow galls.” These are made by a little
black fly, which visits the bushes in the spring,
when the leaf buds are beginning to unfold. She
chooses the topmost bud of a branch, pierces it,
and puts a single tiny egg into the hole she has
made (Fig. 8).

Soon the spring warmth hatches, from this egg,
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a hungry little orange-colored grub. He begins
at once to feast on the inside of the bud. With
the grub gnawing at its heart the bud’s growth
is checked. Instead of stretching out in a long
rod it swells into a knob, covered with over-
lapping scales, which should have been leaves.
So, instead of a long green spray there is a tiled
house, in which the grub lives a life of gluttony,
month after month, till spring returns again. Then
he eats his way through the wall of his nursery,
and comes forth transformed into a black fly.

On the twigs of apple trees, here and there, we
may see what looks like a band of shellac. These
bands are the work of the apple tree moth. The
microscope would show that each band is com-
posed of hundreds of eggs, laid in a close girdle
completely around the twig, and then covered with
waterproof varnish. Every banded twig plucked
from the branch saves the tree from an unsightly
caterpillar web next summer.

As the leaves fall in autumn from some of the
sweet-sapped trees——sugar maple, birch, and
linden — we may see that the bark has been bored
full of little pits. On one trunk there may be
dozens or even hundreds of them. They are the
‘“honey-pots”’ of the American yellow-bellied
woodpecker, or sapsucker. The bird loves the
sweet sap which oozes out of these holes, and
some insects love it too. As the yellow-bellied
woodpecker feeds upon insects as well as upon
22 Our Field and Forest Trees

sap and bark, many students of birds and their
ways believe that he digs these holes mainly to
get bait. We read: ‘As soon as the sweet sap
flows into the honey-pots, insects gather in swarms
about them and the bird returns again and again
to his tree, gathering the insects that have been
caught in the sticky little cups, or snapping them
from the air” (Fig. 9).

On standing trunks which have been softened
by decay, one may see holes as large as a man’s
two fists, dug into the punky wood. These have
been made by woodpeckers, seeking the grubs
which eat dead timber.

When the trees are bare we may notice that
the trunks of some trees are twisted all the way
up; this is most easily noticed upon trunks that
have lost their bark. A twist like this goes all
through the wood. Such trunks cannot be cut up
into boards, but though they are unfit for the
sawmill, they can be made useful as telegraph
and telephone poles. Lumbermen say that such a
twist in timber is caused by the wind rocking the
tree when it is young and tender.

As the last leaves fall, the buds, where next
year’s leaves and flowers are folded away, show
plainly on otherwise naked branches. Some of
these, alas, will be opened by brute force before
spring comes, and their contents will be eaten.

When the berries are gone, and the seed-laden
weed tops are buried in snow, birds sometimes
In the Midwinter Forest 23

pick out the juicy tender insides of buds —the
little leaves and flowers that are to be. Feasting
on these, they throw away the horny covering
scales, and we may see these scales, in late winter,
strewn over the surface of the snow. Many
buds of forest trees are also eaten by squirrels.
The winter sleep of the gray squirrel is but a
series of naps. He may be seen, on bright days
any time of the winter, stretching his legs in long
leaps, and looking eagerly about him for some-
thing to nibble. But the loss of a few buds is a
slight matter; the trees owe at least these buds to
the birds, who have devoured so many of their
insect enemies, and to the squirrels who have
planted more oaks and nut trees than many schools
could plant in many arbor days. The squirrel
buries a choice morsel as a dog buries a bone,
intending to dig it up later. Sometimes he for-
gets the hidden treasure, or returns too late to
enjoy it. It sprouts and becomes a seedling tree.
It might never have sprouted at all but for him,
for acorns and nuts will soon decay if they remain
on the surface of the ground.

Here and there, overhead, are dead branches
attached to living trees. Many of them will be
taken off by what is termed “ natural pruning.”

The farmer cuts or prunes some branches off
his orchard trees, in order that the branches which
he spares may grow stronger and bear more fruit.
Wild trees get pruned too — by circumstances.
24 Our Field and Forest Trees

In a close wood many of the under branches die
for want of air and light, and we can see all the
trunks marked by scars where boughs have fallen,
and disfigured by dead branches which still cling
to their hold.

The old trees of a dense wood can lift their
heads so far to find the sunshine because they have
lost most of their side branches by natural prun-
ing, and so all their force is spent in growing
upward.

Let us see how nature prunes. When spring
comes and the trees wake to active life, a new
layer of young wood is spread over the living
trunk and branches, but none is being made on
the dead bough (Fig. 10). So there is a hole in
the new live wood with the dead bough sticking
through it. The edges of this hole make a sort
of collar around the base of the dead branch, and
as spring follows spring, and a new layer of wood
is added each year, the collar grows tighter and
tighter. At last the pressure of the young wood
becomes so strong, and the old dead wood is
pinched so hard, that it is just ready to snap. A
gust of wind, an ice storm, or even the pull of its
own dead weight may break the branch away
from the trunk. There is left the stub of the
cast-off branch, a disc of dead wood surrounded
by a ring of young living wood. If the tree thrives,
new wood and new bark are made each spring all
around the inside of the ring until the place
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In the Midwinter Forest 25

which was bare is covered. For awhile there is
a scar where the inner edges of the ring grew
together, but in the course of years, if the tree is
young and healthy, even this will vanish and no
exterior sign of the lost branch will remain. But
the lumbermen will find signs of it when the tree
is felled and chopped to pieces. The new wood
covering the scar did not grow fast to the surface,
as new skin does to the raw surface of an animal
wound. It is only a cover or cap. When wood-
cutters get to work at the tree this cover may come
off, like the lid of a box, and the dead stub may
drop out like a loose cork. Knotholes in boards
are places where such stubs of dead branches have
fallen out of the lumber.

If a living bough is cut from a tree, or if a
piece of the living trunk is chopped away, part of
the surface dies before the new wood and bark
can grow over the wound and cover it. New
wood can never attach itself firmly to the dead
wood, and so sometimes, when timber is being
chopped up, old blazes come to light. When the
trunk of a Canadian beech tree was being cut into
sections, a billet fell apart revealing a blaze which
had been completely covered by the growth of
seventy years. There were the letters, “J. C.,”
and below them the letter “ F”’ and a crowned
heart —the symbol of the Franciscans.

About the time when these letters were carved
into the young trunk, the Franciscan missionary,
26 Our Field and Forest Trees

Father Hennepin, used to travel through these
very woods, carrying the crucifix and its story
from one Indian village to another, and he says
in his journal that he ‘‘ was in the habit of making
blazes on the trees.” This may have been one
of them.

On leafless trees we may see traces of severe
wounds made without knife or axe (Fig. 11).
There may be long scars, running up and down
the trunk, where, after some freezing night, the
wood split open. Such splits are most likely to
occur in early spring, when there are sudden and
violent changes in temperature. Warm sunshine
thaws all the fluid in the wood, and starts the
upward movement of the sap; then winter comes
howling back with twilight and freezes the timber
with all its watery contents. These splits are seen
generally on the southwest side of the trunks
where sunshine has warmed the wood late in the
day. Innorthern countries frost-splits often occur
in earliest spring, even in the deep woods. The
rending apart of a frozen trunk shatters the forest
silence like a gun-shot. If the tree is young and
healthy the crack closes up during the spring, and
after awhile new wood and bark grow over the
wound. But there will be a scar, running down
the trunk, and marring its perfection of form, and
if the tree is neither young nor vigorous, or if the
crack goes very deep, it may become an open
wound — a point of attack and a way of entrance
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In the Midwinter Forest 27

to tree enemies. The trees most likely to be split
with frost are those with a great difference of
weight between their inner or “ heart’? wood and
their outer or “‘ sap” wood.

Another woe which weather works upon trees
is what lumbermen call “ sun-scald.” The scars
made by this misfortune (Fig. 12) are most often
observed upon smooth-barked trees, such as the
beech, pear, or linden. A sun-scald is, like a frost-
crack, a lengthwise wound, and like a frost-crack
it is most often found on the southwest side of
the trunk. But we can almost always tell whether
a tree has been scarred by heat or cold. A frost-
crack was once a clean straight split, and the re-
sulting scar is long, straight, and narrow. The
sun-scald was a great bursting of the bark, an
irregular spreading wound.

The trees which stand alone in the fields, with
light and air all about them, spread their branches
as they will. They are not lopped and shorn by
“natural pruning,” as their forest (Fig. 13)
sisters are; they may have beautiful side branches
and keep them. Such trees bear fruit abundantly.
Every country boy knows that the meadow trees
are the ones best worth visiting for nuts in the
autumn; for nuts grow near the tips of the
boughs, so that the more a tree branches the more
it bears.

But such meadow trees, although they do not
suffer the severe natural pruning which forest
28 Our Field and Forest Trees

trees undergo, are peculiarly subjected to a calam-
ity of which we have not yet spoken. They may
be struck with lightning. Such maimed trees show
their injuries plainly in winter, when the leaves
which clothed the yet living boughs are gone.

Poor trees! Many dangers menace them,
and divers troubles come upon them. Minute
punctures are made by insects, hailstorms break
the young twigs and lacerate the bark, winds tear
off twigs and branches, and parch the tender
leaves. Frosts and sun split, scald and kill por-
tions of the bark, and lightning may rend the bole
to the very heart. In addition to all these tor-
mentors, men and animals inflict wounds and
amputate limbs.

After a life of misfortune, a tree may be so
twisted by wind and so maimed by accident that
we can see no beauty in its distorted limbs. But
there are buds upon it, ready for next spring. It
is doing its work in the world in spite of difficul-
ties; and so, though it has perhaps no beauty
left, we can admire in it what is better than beauty
— its bravery.
CHAPTER IV

A STUDY OF WINTER BRANCHES

N the markets of Quebec and of Montreal,
French Canadian farm folk sell baskets made
of interwoven twigs, still wrapped in their own
bark. Seeing these pretty baskets, we notice,
perhaps for the first time, how much beauty there
is in the colors of leafless branches. In the woven
strands there are many hues — brown, olive,
yellow, dull purple, dark leaf-green, and old rose.
When we look at leafless woodlands, all these
colors blend into a soft purplish gray. But if we
walk through winter fields, with open eyes, we will
notice all manner of pretty tints in the bark of
bare branches.

Low-growing willow clumps, seen against the
snow, are tawny gold. Blackberry tangles are
purple. Beech trunks are of a beautiful silver
gray. Many of the canoe birches look as if they
wore a white, semi-transparent robe over an
under-dress of bright orange or deep pink.
Under the tall trees, the moosewood maple and
the sassafras may show their bright-green stems.

There are many charming colors, too, in the

29
30 Our Field and Forest Trees

winter buds dotting these leafless boughs. Those
of the red maple are as red as the blossoms will
be, while those of the ash tree are as black as
soot. Those of the bitternut are orange yellow,
and from other trees and shrubs, common every-
where east of the great plains, one could gather
winter buds in many shades of brown and purple
— in dull-red and olive and golden-green.

The winter buds differ not only in color but in
shape and size, and in many other points. They
may be smooth, downy, sticky, or rough; they
may be naked, or covered with many rows of
scales.

The bark is a great help in recognizing leafless
trees.

The trunk and limbs of the waterside hornbeam
look as if they were made of iron. The trunk
of the shagbark hickory has loose flaps of bark
peeling away as shingles do from a weather-worn
roof. The branches of the sweet gum and of the
cork elm can be known at once by the rough,
corky ridges running along them.

We can make sure of some trees by the taste
and odor of their bark — the black cherry by its
bitterness, the slippery elm by its gumminess, the
mockernut hickory by its peculiar spicy smell.
Stems and twigs vary, too, from the lightest
sprays to the most clumsy ones. One can soon
know all the common trees, even in midwinter.

When we look at a bare bough, we can tell
A Study of Winter Branches 31

at a glance where last summer’s leaves grew, for
each leaf, when it fell, left a scar on the bark.
These scars, too, differ widely in different trees.
They may be flat on the stem, or raised on a little
hump, or sunk below the level of the bark. They
may be heart-shaped, triangular, round, oval, or
horseshoe-shaped, according to the kind of tree.

Just above these scars, or partly surrounded by
them, are the buds in which next year’s leaves are
folded and sleeping. As each leaf-bud can grow
into a branch, the boughs of the future will spring
from the places where last summer’s leaves used
to grow. If the buds are scattered singly along
the boughs, the branches that are to be will have
no opposite branch neighbors. If the leaves stood
in pairs along the stem, the buds will be in pairs
likewise, and shoots will start in pairs along the
boughs next spring. When these shoots are sev-
eral years old, they will be boughs themselves.
So any tree or shrub which bears opposite leaves,
as the maples and the lilacs, will have many pairs
of boughs.

But here and there on the lilac bushes there is
a spray without a mate. Opposite this lone in-
dividual, if we look with care, we shall probably
find a bud which has failed to grow.

There are always a few such undeveloped
buds on every branch. We find them at once
if the branching is opposite, because there will be
one spray in the place where a pair should arise.
82 Our Field and Forest Trees

We can find them, too, if the buds grow singly
along the stem, so that the branching is what
botanists call ‘‘ alternate,” for the buds which
stand one by one along the stem are not scattered
anyhow, but are always arranged in some fixed
plan. When we see what the plan is, we find
that, here and there, a spray is missing, because,
here and there, a bud has never awakened.

These undeveloped buds on the living boughs
are not dead: they are only what botanists call
“latent.”

If next summer’s leaves are eaten by a plague
of caterpillars, or if a light forest fire shrivels
the foliage but spares the life of the tree, these
latent buds will wake up and give first aid to the
injured.

Thanks to such buds as these, the woods can
leaf again in later summer, after the spring’s
leaves have all been killed by sad misfortune.
Mother Nature seems to have stretched a point
and given a second robe this time, though the
ladies of the wood generally receive one new dress
apiece in spring, and are expected to make it do
all summer.

Buds formed, perhaps several seasons ago,
have the whole branch to themselves, plenty of
air and light, and plenty of roots below ground
to gather food for them —and they take this
good chance to grow.

Let us look again at the bare branches where
A Study of Winter Branches 33

we have noticed last summer’s leaf scars. The
baby leaves or blossoms, inside winter buds, are
often protected, we remember, by horny scales.
Some buds have several rows of these, one outside
another. When the young leaves awaken and
expand in spring, these protecting scales will fall
off (Fig. 14) or shrivel away,
leaving scars to show where
they grew.

The traces left by bud scales
of past years look as if a
strong thread or fine wire had
been wound very tightly around
the branch, and had cut a little
way into the bark.

By counting these marks one
can tell the age of a small
branch; but we cannottracethe *
record far back on larger 8,*4, Agpcimesio
boughs, because after awhile (™™ = saying by 5. G
the outermost layers of the bark peel away, marks
and all. The branch tips, which grew out last
spring and are now less than a year old, are always
smoother than the more mature parts of the trunk,
and generally they are of a different color.

Where the bark changes its color, look for the
scars showing where the winter bud scales fell
away last spring.

When the bud scales are few or very small,
their slight marks are difficult to find. The two

 
34 Our Field and Forest Trees

scales which protect the willow buds leave scarcely
a trace behind them. But if we look at the apple
branches, we cannot fail to find bud-scale marks
of vanished springs. Maple boughs, too, show
their age plainly, and horse-chestnuts are the best
record-keepers of all.

The space between two rings of scars is always
the growth of one summer, but these spaces vary
greatly in length, even on the same branch.

One season, perhaps, plentiful showers alter-
nated with hot sunshine, and the young spray,
just out of the bud, stretched itself vigorously. In
the following year, May and June may have been
unseasonably cold, or unusually dry, so that tender
branches could make but little growth.

The orchard boughs made plenty of new wood
one comfortable season, when the farmer gave
the trees extra care and dug in plenty of ferti-
lizer about their roots. But the next year found
the farmhouse deserted and the orchard left to its
fate. That summer very little new wood was
added to the branches.

We can read the history of the apple tree be-
tween the lines left by its bud scales — can guess
out its good and evil fortunes, its hungry and its
prosperous years.

Even on the same tree and in the same season
some branches make much more new wood than
others do. Those which grow the most are prob-
ably those which receive most air and light, for
A Study of Winter Branches 35

the topmost buds almost always greatly outdo
their fellows.

Besides latent buds, which “hang fire,’”’ so to
speak, and come forth only when they are sorely
needed, many trees can produce extra buds to
meet the want caused by some sudden misfortune.

Some trees supply the place of a lost branch by
a group of new buds, which grow out at once
into vigorous sprays. And some trees, when their
heads get cut off, are so far from being killed
that the maimed trunks put forth new crowns of
long, strong shoots. A number of these, prob-
ably, came from buds made long ago, which have
awaited such a chance as this for years. But
many of them grow from “adventitious buds”
specially made to meet the needs of the occasion.

Several familiar trees can produce such buds
in great numbers, when losses are to be retrieved
or damage repaired.

The pasture haws, nibbled down by sheep, put
forth sturdy clusters of strong young shoots. And
when a willow is beheaded, or pollarded, long
rods spring out of its maimed trunk.

On some sorts of willow these ‘‘ withes,” or
‘osiers,” are so strong and supple that they are
suitable for weaving into baskets and crates —
“ willow ware.”

The cultivation of the basket willow, and the
weaving of it, began far back in history.

The ancient Romans thought the willow was
36 Our Field and Forest Trees

the most useful of trees, and they used its shoots
in the making of beehives and baskets. In war-
fare they carried shields of woven willow,
covered with hides and bossed with brass. These
were both light and strong.

Pliny, the great Roman naturalist, has told the
world what willows were used for the woven
basket-work of his time — and they are the same
willows which we weave today.

The four kinds which Pliny mentions as most
useful can all be grown in the United States.
About the middle of the last century, immigrant
German basket-makers tried to ply their trade
in western New York, among the wild willows,
native to the land. These, however, did not do.
They were not supple enough for basket-work,
and they were too brittle.

So the willows of the European basket-makers
were brought to America, and planted in the river
valleys of the middle West.

But although osier-growing was begun so long
ago, it is still true that most of our willow ware
is imported, and even when the weaving is done
on this continent most of the osiers used come
from abroad.

There is, however, no reason why “ willow
holts”’ should not pay well on many American
farms. Willows thrive on soil which produces
nothing else save grass — and grass of very poor
quality at that; and they can be grown on stream
 

 

 

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S. Forest Service.
Fig. 315.

Cutting and bundling basket willow

 
A Study of Winter Branches 37

banks which are likely to be overflowed every
spring.

There is a low moist tract on the Potomac
River where the United States Forest Service has
been raising and testing osiers, finding out the
best ways of growing them, the cost of growing
them, and the surest means for ridding them of
destructive insects (Fig. 15).

The result of all these experiments has been
published in pamphlets, which are supplied free.
From these one can learn what willows to plant,
when and how to plant them, and how to care
for them.

Osier-weaving might fill spare time — as osier-
growing might use waste land. The making of
willow ware is a winter industry. The shoots are
cut once a year, at any time between the fall of
the leaf in autumn and the rise of the sap in
spring. So this is a handicraft which might give
employment to many of the farm hands, dock
workers, and river men, who find their work and
wages gone after the last crops have been gathered
in, and when inland waters freeze. There are
many farmers, too, who might engage in osier
work during their dull season.

There are no trees more lovely and pleasant
than the osier-willows of the western valley
streams. Thanks to them, the owner of the land
can get a useful crop from soil where nothing else
of value to mankind will grow. Their roots bind
88 Our Field and Forest Trees

together the earth of river margins, and save it
from being washed away down stream when the
floods of early spring go tearing by.

And the outdoor world can show few prettier
sights than a double row of pollard willows, with
their great crowns of slender, shining osiers, be-
tween which, as breezes come and go, we see the
sparkle of flowing water.
CHAPTER V

THE WOODS, THE RIVER, AND THE RAIN

Js the wild forest, under the large trees, there

is generally an undergrowth of young trees
and of shade-loving bushes. Beneath these are
tender herbs, ferns, and vines. Under these again
in deep woods is a mat of moss, ankle deep, rooted
among the moldering leaves of bygone summers,
and beneath all is soft, black leaf mold. In the
wild forest this layer of mold, mixed with decay-
ing leaves, may be two feet deep.

A forest floor like this is a great sponge. Winter
snows, in such a wood, melt slowly, because the
branches above screen them from the sun. The
sponge of moss and leaf-mold can soak up more
than twice its own weight of water, and so it can
generally absorb all that runs from the snow dur-
ing a day’s thawing. Then all through the night
the mineral layers of soil, deeper down, slowly
drain the leaf mold, so that it becomes like a
squeezed-out sponge, ready to absorb once more.

The many roots which penetrate the soil help
to drain the land by opening up cracks in it. So in
a forest the heaviest rainfall will not cause a flood.

39
40 Our Field and Forest Trees

When rain has streamed down all day, one may
go, toward evening, through the deep wood and
see no puddles and no place where rushing water
has torn the carpet of moss and mold. The rain
has all been soaked up by the forest sponge, and
will be gradually yielded to the springs which
feed the rivers.

But if we look at cleared land after a day’s
downpour, we see in many places that the earth
has been channeled out, or washed away. Streams
which run through fields are often clouded after
heavy rains, because so much earth is being car-
ried away by the running water. Forest streams
meantime are clear, or, at most, slightly stained
by vegetable matter, so that one can often tell
by the look of a river what sort of a country it
drains.

Moreover, the carpet of leaves and sticks on
the forest floor helps to keep the ground from
freezing. It acts like the winter covering of straw
which the gardener spreads above his charges.
Trees and shrubs also prevent the snow from
thawing or blowing away; and snow helps to keep
the earth from freezing. So it is not uncommon
to find the ground in a deep wood entirely free
from. frost, even after many weeks of freezing
weather.

But when the wood is cut down, and the carpet
of moss, mold, and withered leaves is plowed
under, the snow blows away or half thaws several
The Woods, the River, and the Rain 41

times during the winter. Toward spring the
plowed land is deeply frozen and the earth there
is mixed with frozen water from half-thawed
snow. Freshets are caused by spring downpours,
or by deep snow melting quickly upon such land
as this. There is no sponge of moss and mold
to soak up water from the melting snows and the
spring rains. It rushes over the ground, and as
it goes it carries with it a little of the surface soil.
These grains of earth and sand scraping along
the ground soon scour up more soil, and perhaps
some tiny stones. These help the earth and water
to dig still deeper.

After rain has fallen heavily on cleared and
sloping land, we can see a number of channels,
joining together as they go down. Along these
the rain runs quickly into the nearest brook or
river, instead of soaking gently through the earth
to nourish the roots of plants and to feed the
springs. It may be that twenty-four hours after
rain has ceased to fall nearly all the water has
run into the rivers, leaving the fields almost as
thirsty and the springs as low as before.

But the trouble is not only that the rain water
leaves places where it would do good, but it goes
to places where it does harm.

When so much water is added to the rivers
suddenly, they rise and overflow their banks.
Cities on the banks of the Ohio River, for in-
stance, sometimes suffer great trouble and expense
42 Our Field and Forest Trees

caused by the sudden rising of the water in early
spring. Water comes into cellars of houses near
the river, and sometimes into the lower rooms.
Carpets, wall paper, and plastering are ruined.
Fences and outbuildings are upset or washed
away. Pavements are destroyed and sewers are
put out of repair. Factories near the river edge
have to stop work because the rising water puts
out their furnace fires, and their workmen are
forced to become idle. Along the river front,
roads, landing places, and car tracks are under
water. River boats cannot take in or discharge
cargoes. So the men whose business it is to load
and unload along the water front are out of work,
also, and, like the factory workmen, are in need
of wages that they cannot earn.

Nor is that all. The earth and sand carried
down by swollen rivers are dropped where the
current, flowing seaward, meets the ocean tide.
Here shoals and bars are formed and these injure
the harbors at the mouths of great rivers. The
United States Government has to spend large
sums of money in deepening river mouths and
channels.

We must remember, too, that this earth,
brought down by the streams and dropped into
the harbors, is often very fertile. It is an obstruc-
tion in the harbors, and it was a great loss to
the farms up-river, from whence it came. For
the surface soil most likely to wash away is the
The Woods, the River, and the Rain 48

best soil. In it are the remnants of the vegetation
of the other summers, containing materials which
Nature can use again to build up other forms of
plant life.

It has been calculated that the rivers of the
United States carry away two hundred square
miles of fertile land each year, and deposit it in
the ocean harbors.

When the first settlers came into the country,
they built towns in the river valleys. In such val-
leys the land is apt to be level or gently sloping,
so that even after it is cleared, streamlets do not
cause much destruction as they run to join the
rivers. But now the lumbermen are beginning to
remove the forest from the Appalachian Moun-
tains. The peaks of these mountains receive the
great rainfall of summer and the heavy snow of
winter. There all the great rivers of the Atlantic
States take their rise. All over the tops of these
mountains, for hundreds of years, a cool, dark
forest has shadowed the ground, and has piled on
the earth’s surface a deep spongy covering of
vegetable mold. ‘This absorbs the water from
mountain showers or from melting snows, and
thus prevents it from rushing violently down the
slopes into the valley streams. Instead, it soaks
slowly and gently through moss, vegetable mold,
and earth to feed the springs and rivulets which,
in their turn, feed the rivers. Among such moun-
tain woods the Hudson and the Delaware, the
44 Our Field and Forest Trees

Susquehanna and the James, the Savannah and the
Roanoke, take their rise. If these woods fall,
water from the clouds will rush down the steep
mountain slopes into the stream-beds, just as it
pours down a steep roof into a gutter. Furious
torrents will rage along the channels every spring,
carrying destruction all down the river valleys.
Then in times of drought the rivers will become
too shallow to float large boats. And thus the
river traffic of cities like Albany and Pittsburg
will be injured, and perhaps ended.

In the West, as in the East, mountain forests
are the birthplaces and nurseries of rivers. The
evergreen woods of the Rocky Mountains give
rise to the streams which feed the irrigation
ditches watering the valley ranches.

The ranchman’s crops and his cattle are de-
pendent for their lives upon this water.

All the prosperity of the country in many parts
of the West depends upon a certain and steady
flow of water from the mountain forests. And
both East and West the falling headwaters of
mountain streams mean — or they might mean —
power. So the prosperity, and indeed the life,
of the nation seem to depend at last upon the
woods which clothe the heights.

The forests of the cloud-land are almost en-
tirely composed of fir and spruce.

On the mountain tops of the East, firs and
spruces live together, close to the “‘ timber line,”
 

          

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The Woods, the River, and the Rain 45

where all forest growth comes to an end. Up
there they are low twisted shrubs clinging to the
rocks, with crooked branches, all crotches and
elbows, spreading sidewise over the ground.
Twisted in with them, on Eastern mountain tops,
are valiant alpine willows and courageous dwarf
birches.

All are so closely matted together that it is im-
possible to penetrate among them except where
paths have been cut. At the uppermost limits of
the forest they lie flat on the ground, so stunted
that the reindeer moss may be seen overtopping
them.

In the mountain regions farther west a forest
of spruce and fir clothes the great heights where
no broad-leaved trees can get their living.

These mountain evergreens are doing great
things for their country. They hold down the
earth and moss upon the highest and steepest
slopes. Their roots and the mountain mosses,
all matted together, drink in the rain and the
melted snow.

This mat of moss would soon be torn up and
washed away were it not for the roots of the
trees binding it together.

Now it is a great sponge soaking in the rain or
the melted snow, and then letting it trickle gently
into the springs that feed the rivers.

If these slopes were stripped, the water would
rush down them, tearing the mosses and mountain
46 Our Field and Forest Trees

grasses up by the roots, and washing the earth
from the mountain side.

But, thanks to the brave, stunted trees, doing
their work at the timber line, the rain is a blessing
and not a danger to the valley.
CHAPTER VI
IS THERE A WOOD FAMINE COMING?

T is hard for us to believe that until the time
of Columbus, and even later, the world got on
very well without coal. When Shakespeare was a
boy, wood or peat made all the household fires
of England. Coal was used only sparingly by
smiths and manufacturers.

Old English books call coal ‘‘ sea coal,” because
when it was first burned, long before the days of
railroads, it used to be brought by sea from remote
parts of England, where it was mined, to the cities
where it was wanted.

In Shakespeare’s day, English forests were al-
ready vanishing before the axe. MHhlinshed, a
writer of the time, laments ‘‘ that if woods go so
fast to decay in the next hundred years as they
have done in this, it is to be feared that broom,
turf, straw, sedge, and also sea coal will be good
merchandise, even in the city of London itself.”

About a hundred years after Holinshed be-
wailed the forest destruction which he saw, all the
statesmen of England became anxious about the
vanishing of the English woods. ‘They did not

47
48 Our Field and Forest Trees

know that forests are the nurseries of rivers. They
did not understand that when trees are ruthlessly
chopped down wells dry up. They only feared
that there would be no timber left in the country
for the building of ships, and without battle ships
England could not defend herself against Spain,
her fierce and strong enemy. Huge oaks were
cut down to make ribs and keels for the battle
ships of that time, and in countries which became
sea powers, ship building used immense quantities
of lumber.

Today our battle ships are made of steel. We
are warmed by coal or gas. Many a cook of
today, whose grandmother prepared dinner over
a wood fire, uses a coal stove or a gas range, or
even it may be an alcohol lamp or an electric
cooker. Wire is taking the place of the old-
fashioned rail fencing. Cement has replaced the
board walk.

In many respects this may be styled an age
of steel and cement. And yet wood has never
been more necessary than now. We need it con-
stantly for purposes of which our forefathers never
dreamed.

Countless trees have fallen because their trunks
were needed for railroad ties. About three thou-
sand are wanted for every mile of track. Damp-
ness rots the ties and a fungus destroys them, so
that every few years they must be replaced. There
are a few people yet living who can remember the
Is There a Wood Famine Coming? 49

first railroad. So here is one modern use of wood
which every year costs the lives of countless trees.

Iron sleepers, or ties, have been tried, especially
in countries where wood is quickly destroyed by the
climate or by insects. But such ties are not satis-
factory. They are expensive, and because the ma-
terial in them is costly they must be made thin.
Then because they are thin they get bent out of
shape. Also, they rust.

Years ago stone ties were tried and given up.
They were too hard and unyielding. The pas-
sengers and the freight that traveled over them
got terribly jolted and jarred.

So experience has proven that wooden ties are
the best. Often nowadays the wood is treated
with chemicals, to protect it from insects, and, in
a measure, from damp. But after awhile these
chemicals soak out of the timber and then decay
begins.

The railroads have a problem to solve: they
must have wood. Some of them are trying to
meet the difficulty by owning and managing plan-
tations. Here young trees, especially catalpa
trees, are set out and cared for, so that there may
be plenty of logs for railroad ties in the years to
come.

There is another great industry, mining, which
depends on the forests for its prosperity, if not for
its life. Yet the miner has been one of the worst
enemies to the woods. He cared only for the
50 Our Field and Forest Trees

metal he was after. His sole interest was in the
little spot where he had found ore and staked his
claim. He looked upon the forest as a hindrance
to be cleared away as soon as possible, and so he
set fire to the beautiful evergreens which covered
the mountain slopes and darkened the valleys. He
had not time to check the spread of the flames,
and so the fire burned on until mile after mile of
forest had been destroyed.

Now the miner knows that trees are his best
friends, for logs are used in great quantities to
support the roofs of mines after coal or ore has
been removed. Indeed, one very important ques-
tion in deciding the value of a mine is this ques-
tion of timber. The mining engineer wants to
know where timber can be obtained, how far it
must be brought, and what sort it is; for in the
mine-damp some woods decay sooner than others.
Red cedar is a favorite tree with mining engineers,
and next come the bald cypress, larch, and pine.
The trunks of these trees are straight, and the
resin in their wood helps to preserve it from decay.

Many trees are cut every year for the mine
workings of the United States. Though coal
mines have been the means of sparing firewood,
and thus, in one way, have saved the lives of trees,
they are none the less devourers of the forests, for
in the damp of a coal mine timbers last but a very
short time (Fig. 17).

Nowadays logs to be used in mines or for tele-
Is There a Wood Famine Coming? 51

graph poles can be saved from quick decay by
what is called the ‘‘ creosote process.” When a
fragment of very thin shaving is seen by the aid
of a microscope we learn that wood is like a hon-
eycomb: it is a mass of little cells. In freshly
hewn timber these cells are filled with air and sap.

 

From U. S. Forest Circular No, 111.

Fig. 17. View in a Pee con rime, SHOWInE the great amount of
By the creosote process the air and moisture are
drawn out of the wood cells, and then creosote
is forced into them. But after awhile, in the mine-
damp, this creosote soaks out of the wood, and
then decay begins and new timber must replace the
old.

In some cases mine roofs have been supported
by iron girders, or by broken rock. One great
52 Our Field and Forest Trees

western mine has made sureof getting trees
enough by keeping its own forest, cared for by its
own foresters. Recently it has been discovered
that the dead trunks left standing where forest
fires have raged “‘ fire-killed ’’ wood, can be used
in mines to great advantage. Engineers prefer it
to freshly cut timber because it is light to handle or
ship and it does not readily decay. And as the
sap is already out of it, any preserving chemicals
which may be used soon sink deep into the wood.

Quantities of “ fire-killed”” timbers are used in
the mines of Colorado. In the Pike national for-
est “‘fire-killed”’ logs are being cut for railroad
ties, and the trunks of “ fire-killed”’ trees are also
being used for telephone and telegraph poles —
which is another use for trees of which our fore-
fathers knew nothing. Every year the country
needs more than a million poles for telegraph and
telephone lines and electric car cables.

One new use of wood causes terrible destruction
in the forests, and that is the making of paper out
of wood pulp. Before this process was invented,
spruce trees five or six inches thick used to be safe
from the lumbermen. But now these youngsters,
too, are worth money. Quaking asp trees, which
used to live in peace because their wood was worth
so little, are good enough to be turned into wall
paper, or into bulky Sunday newspapers. Yet
these quaking asps do great things for their coun-
try, for their roots bind together barren gravelly
Is There a Wood Famine Coming? 58

slopes where nothing else will grow, and thus pre-
vent many a landslip.

The destruction of trees goes on in our day
faster than ever, and wood has never been more
necessary than it is today. So here we have per-
plexing us the old questions which puzzled Eng-
lish statesmen centuries ago: What will become
of us if the woods are destroyed?

As timber must be used so fast, and nature re-
places it so slowly, it is most important that we
waste as little as possible. Some waste cannot
be prevented.

About thirteen per cent of a log is lost in the
bark, and more goes into sawdust. Too often this
is left in heaps to decay, yet most of the wood al-
cohol and acetate of lime used in the country
might be extracted from the sawdust of the birch,
beech, and maple cut up into boards in northern
mills, and most of the turpentine which we need
could be obtained from the pine mill waste of the
southern states. As it is, living trees are felled
in the northern forests for the sake of their wood
alcohol, and sturdy standing pines are tapped and
bled for their turpentine. Already we are begin-
ning to make use of the chemical treasures in saw-
dust, and if we can go on in this thrifty practice,
the lives of many trees will be saved.

In making boards, about eight per cent of the
lumber is cut away in what are called “ slabs’? —
little pieces sawed off to bring the boards down to
54 Our Field and Forest Trees

trade measurements. Beautiful trees are now
being felled that their wood may be made into
small articles — toothpicks, matches, spools,
clothes-pins, and pegs. Slabs and other waste of
the lumber mills might be used in making these
things.

If the timber which we have already cut is
thriftily used fewer trees will have to fall next
year.

So, in order to prevent the waste of wood, the
Government of the United States has lately
started what is called the ‘‘ Bureau of Wood
Utilization.” It is doing great work for the
country in teaching lumbermen how to use the
whole of a felled tree, and thus saving the lives of
standing trees.

When the office began its work, letters of in-
quiry were written to every manufacturer using
wood — to the makers of furniture, brushes, toys,
boxes, musical instruments, boats, doors, and win-
dow sashes and frames. Thus the Bureau found
out what sorts of wood were needed in special
industries, and what factories would use small
pieces and odds and ends of lumber.

All that was learned in the many replies re-
ceived was brought together in a report, and this
was printed and distributed to thousands of lum-
bermen and manufacturers. Thanks to this re-
port, many dollars and hundreds of trees have
been saved. People have been enabled to sell
Is There a Wood Famine Coming? 55

what they formerly threw away, and thus get
profit from the whole of a felled tree instead of
wasting part of it.

A maker of brush-backs informed the office that
he could use only the heartwood of the birch tree,
and a spool-maker said he could use only the
sapwood. Their factories were less than a hun-
dred miles apart, and yet each had been wasting
what the, other needed.

The office of Wood Utilization corresponded
with these men, and as a result each uses the
other’s waste.

A manufacturer wrote asking, ‘“‘ Where can I
find a market for scraps of cypress which are of
various widths and from one to four feet long?”
The office told him where to sell them, and they
now are made into boxes for plug tobacco.

A maker of veneer asked what he could do with
the cores which remained after the outer wood of
his logs had been pared off to be used in his fac-
tory. He was advised to sell them for rollers to
carry cable in coal mines. The cores fortunately
happened to be of the same length and thickness
as the regulation mine-roller, so it was only neces-
sary to bore a hole in the center of each for a
metal rod to go through. And now the most
profitable part of that man’s business is, not the
manufacture of veneers, but the sale of mine-
rollers. The Bureau was founded in 1909, so its
career of usefulness is just begun. It has been
56 Our Field and Forest Trees

sorely needed, for our nation is using more wood
material than any other nation ever did before.
Leaving firewood out of the question, we use in
proportion to the population eight or ten times
as much wood as Germany with all her manu-
factures did in times of peace.

We have been, indeed, as reckless as the people
of old France. About the time of the French
Revolution, it was said that a peasant would cut
down two trees to make himself a pair of shoes.
And in consequence, wood in France is so scarce
and dear that our greatest humorist made its
preciousness the subject of a joke.

Mark Twain had promised to send as a wed-
ding present the most expensive thing he could
get in all Paris. He selected two small logs of
firewood, tied them together with red-white-and-
blue ribbon, and laid them with the other gifts as
something rich and rare.
CHAPTER VII

FOREST FIRES

A PARTY of boys and girls, spending vacation

on the shore of a pretty lake, made supper
out-of-doors, and lit a fire to boil the kettle. When
they had gone home, the darkness, gathering over
lake and shore, was lit in one spot by an angry
glare, the beginning of a forest fire which burned
for forty-eight hours till heavy rain put it out.
If the wind had shifted a few points while the fire
was at its height, several charming summer homes
would have been reduced to ashes. As it was,
many fine trees were destroyed, and what had been
a valuable and beautiful building site became an
ugly sun-baked desolation. All this trouble fol-
lowed for want of a little thought, a little care,
and perhaps five minutes’ work in stamping out
sparks and embers.

It is best never to leave a camp fire without
making thoroughly sure that it is out. Clear away
a space for several feet around the fire, and
remove rotten wood, dead leaves, bits of bark,
and everything that can burn easily. Would you
set fire to anyone’s home? Good timber is quite

57
58 Our Field and Forest Trees

as valuable to its owner as a house would be, and
far more valuable to the public. A house is soon
built, but it takes many, many years to grow a
forest.

Over one of the loveliest valleys in New Eng-
land towers a height which is still known in the
neighborhood as “Green Hill.” Visitors and
strangers wonder whether this name was given
in joke, for the hilltop now is a sun-baked dome
of rock. But the older people in the valley re-
member it as a green hill indeed, covered with
luxuriant woods. Then came a fire so fierce that
it burned not only the trees but their roots, and
it also consumed the soft black mold of humus
upon the hilltop.

It is calculated that nature takes ten thousand
years to make one foot in depth of this forest
humus. But it can burn up like the peat under an
Irishman’s potato pot, leaving only sand and
gravel. With no roots left to bind it together,
this sand or gravel washes down steep slopes,
leaving only bare rock where not a sapling or a
bush can grow. See how lasting may be the effects
of a few hours’ blaze! (Fig. 18).

In the woods, especially in late summer when
the earth and fallen leaves are dry, any spark
may start an awful conflagration, destroying prop-
erty and life. Fires are often kindled by sparks
from trains. A railroad engine is by nature a fire
fiend. It spits live coals along the edges of for-
Forest Fires 59

ests, and it shoots sparks far up the steepest
grades where the fire can begin at once to climb.

“In a recent dry season,” says a Boston news-
paper, “ one engine, on a trip from Provincetown
to Boston, set over twenty fires; there was just a
little gap in the spark arrester.” ‘ But,” con-
tinues the same paper, “‘ be the past what it may,
the railroads are doing better. They are adopt-
ing more effective patterns of spark arrester and
of ash-pan. They urge the need of carefulness
upon their employees, not only upon the fire pa-
trols, ordinary and extra, but also upon station
agents and trainmen. ‘The Boston and Maine
Railroad now maps every fire, and blackmarks the
engines reported in mischief.”

Though locomotive engines ignite most of the
fires which rage beside railway tracks, the sparks
which begin the trouble sometimes come from the
cars. Many blazes are started by lighted matches,
cigars, or cigarettes thrown out by careless pas-
sengers. Warnings are now posted in many rail-
way coaches. They should be made commands,
with penalties for people who disobey.

The owners of land bordering on railroad
tracks are often surprisingly slow to aid in pre-
venting fire. Sometimes they invite it. They
allow dead grass to thicken into tinder beds close
beside the rails, or, in cutting timber, they leave
the tops to dry within range of wind-blown sparks.

Sometimes, when railroad companies offer to
60 Our Field and Forest Trees

clear the grounds within the danger line, the
owners of the land refuse to grant permission.
So the railroads are not altogether to blame for
the fires which start close to the rails and burn
back over thousands of acres.

In the remoter woods, blazes are sometimes
started by sparks from engines in lumber camps,
Sometimes fire is set to the woods by huckleberry
pickers, who know that the berry bushes grow and
bear well in burned spots. Sometimes the forest
is burned by cattle men or sheep herders, so that
sweet grass may grow next spring above the ashes.
But very bad fires arise from sheer carelessness.
Settlers clearing land burn thickets or brush, and
allow the fire to escape into the tall woods. Or
someone may drop a half-burned match or the
glowing tobacco from a pipe or cigar among dead
leaves. Or perhaps a hunter or fisherman may
neglect to make sure that his camp fire is entirely
out.

A spark burrows into the leaf mold, smolders
there for days, and breaks out into a destructive
fire. Hunters are to blame for many very bad
fires. Government forest rangers have orders to
keep track of all campers, sportsmen, and tourists.

Canada is completing a system which keeps the
danger of bush fires and the need of care con-
stantly in the minds of ‘people bound for the
woods. ‘The traveler will probably see notices
printed on menu cards in the diners, and hung up
 

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By courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service.

 

18. The result of recurring fires. The forest floor has disap-
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By courtesy of the U. 8. Forest Service.

Fig. 19. A “fire line’? in the Uncompahgre National Forest, Colorado
Forest Fires 61

in the smoking cars, warning people not to throw
cigar or cigarette butts from windows or rear
platforms of trains.

Very many forest fires have been started by
campers. Today nearly every tent made in
Canada has a fire-warning notice sewn into it.
When its occupant wakes in the morning this
reminder stares him in the face.

When he lights his camp fire to prepare his
breakfast he gets another reminder. The match
companies of Canada, at the request of the
Dominion Government, have put a fire warning
on the outside of each box: ‘Do not throw
away burning matches — especially in the woods.”

Acting on another request of their Govern-
ment two of the largest ammunition companies’ of
Canada enclose a fire warning in every box of
shells, and it is so worded as to convince the
hunter that he has a real personal interest in
helping to protect the forest.

On both sides of the international boundary, in
places where fires are likely to start, or where,
once started, they are peculiarly hard to check,
“fre lines’ are often made. A fire line is a strip
of land in which all the trees have been felled, and
all the brush (Fig. 19), stumps, and indeed
everything that can burn has been cleared away.
After the fire line is made, some work must be
done on it every year to keep the woods from
growing over it again. A line like this may
62 Our Field and Forest Trees

border a railroad so that the sparks from the
engine can do no mischief. Or such a line may
surround a township or a piece of land full of
valuable timber.

A fire which goes through the tree-tops — what
foresters call a ‘‘ crown fire’? —is a fearsome
thing. It makes its own draft, and often it
travels faster than a man can run. Crown fires
almost always start from surface fires, and occur
when the woods are very dry and there is a strong
wind blowing. Close behind the blaze in the
tree-tops, comes a surface fire, also moving on-
ward very fast. The strong, upward draft of
heated air carries with it an immense quantity
of burning cinders and bits of bark all aflame.
The wind blows these far in advance of the great
conflagration, and they drop into the ‘forest and
start new fires.

When leaf mold is very deep, sparks can feed
through it as they do in punk. Fire may burn
in this way for weeks beneath the surface of the
ground, sometimes sending up a little smoke,
sometimes showing no sign of its presence. Heavy
rain may fail to quench such a fire as this, and its
flames may break out long after all danger is
thought to be over.

Ground fires like these can sometimes be checked
only by digging a trench across their path, deep
enough to go through dead leaves, moss, and
mold into the mineral soil beneath.
Forest Fires 63

The most dangerous and destructive forest fires
can sometimes be put out only by what is called
back-firing. ‘This is done by starting a smaller
fire some distance ahead of the great one. The
second fire must be allowed to burn only against
the wind and toward the main blaze. When the
two fires meet, both must die for want of fuel.
To prevent the back fire from moving with the
wind it should be started on the windward side
of a road or a plowed field, or some other bound-
ary which it can be kept from crossing. Back-
firing is a desperate remedy, and should never be
tried except by a person who knows just what to
do and how to do it. Excited or frightened peo-
ple are apt to start a back fire in the wrong place,
and make a second blaze almost as dangerous as
the first.

The strength and speed of a fire depends so
much upon the wind that the first thing fire-fighters
must do is to notice which way the wind blows.
Then let them put their efforts into the path the
flame must take. If it runs along the ground,
rake away from before it the dead leaves and
sticks and dig away the moss and leaf mold. If
no water is near, surface flame can bé beaten out
with green boughs, or with spades and pitchforks.
Dirt or sand thrown into the fire is one of the
best means of quenching it. Sometimes when fire
runs along the ground it spares the big trees, kill-
ing outright only the small ones. But such a fire
64 Our Field and Forest Trees

injures big trees too, by burning great holes into
their trunks. Then they are apt to be blown down,
and where their bark has been burned away their
wood is exposed, unprotected, to wood-eating in-
sects and tree-killing fungi (Fig. 20).

The loss and ruin caused by forest fire is both
direct and indirect. Let us think first of the direct
loss. Many human lives have been destroyed.
More than two thousand people perished during
the last century in forest fires raging in the United
States. In one month— August, 1910 — sev-
enty-seven fire-fighters lost their lives.

Towns, homes, farms, factories, and railroad
bridges have been destroyed by flames fed to fury
in the standing woods.

The great fire of 1910 in Idaho, Oregon, and
Montana is said to have eaten up six hundred and
fifty million dollars’ worth of property. Towns
were entirely wiped out and the inhabitants left
destitute.

After such a conflagration has come and gone,
the people and the land begin to suffer in many
ways the indirect evil consequences. Nearly every-
one has lost heavily, and some people have lost
all they owned. Taxable property has been de-
stroyed, and no one can afford to pay high taxes.
There is not enough money forthcoming to pay
for good roads or for good schools. All sorts of
lumber and timber become dear; wood can no
longer be cut near at hand, but must be brought
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Forest Fires 65

from a distance. This makes it expensive and
checks the construction of new buildings.

In mountain country the injury to the land is
often worse than the loss of the timber. If the
fire has been very fierce, all the nourishment is
baked out of the soil so that plants cannot grow
in the places left by the poor destroyed trees.
There is nothing remaining on the steep slopes but
sand, stones, and gravel, and the rain or melting
snow rushes headlong into the valleys. There it
fills the river beds and streams too full, washing
away bridges, undermining banks, and doing mis-
chief to irrigation ditches and water power plants.

‘“‘ An ounce of prevention,” says the old prov-
erb, “is worth a pound of cure,” and so now-
adays science, time, and effort are spent in looking
out for the first beginnings of fire.

In Maine and New York, which are well-
wooded states, stations have been built on hilltops
and on mountain peaks, and there, all summer,
fire rangers are posted to watch for smoke and to
put out fires before they have done much damage.
The man living in the station has a telescope, so
that he can see even a small or distant smoke, and
a telephone, so that he can at once call the superin-
tendent of the district.

In the national forests, a number of men are em-
ployed by the United States Government to patrol
the woods, constantly on the lookout for fire. In-
deed, fire patrol, as it is called, is one of the most
66 Our Field and Forest Trees

important duties of the Forest Service. In trying
to do this work, the Service is badly hampered by
lack of men. Furthermore, it is hindered by the
need for more roads, more trails, and more tele-
phone lines. There are places in the national for-
ests where it is difficult to get through the tangled
growth and over the uneven ground on foot, even
when no hurrying is necessary. How then can a
man get through at full speed, bringing with him
the tools needed to fight a fire? Sometimes this
need for more trails becomes the cause of a ter-
rible conflagration. A fire in Montana, for in-
stance, was noticed and located by a forest ranger
an hour after the first smoke arose. His way to
it, however, was so difficult that he spent two days
struggling to reach the fire, carrying his supplies
on his back. Meantime the flames had grown
beyond his control. He had to go over a difficult
country for help, and that took two days more.
Another day passed while a fire-fighting crew —
which now must be a large one — gathered to-
gether. The fire-fighters were obliged to cut a
rough trail before they could bring their equip-
ment through the woods, and this work took four
days more. So nine days intervened between the
rising of the first smoke and the time when the
real fight with fire could begin. With good trails,
the ranger could have reached the fire eight or
ten hours after it started —in time perhaps to
conquer it single-handed.
Forest Fires 67

The golden rule in fire-fighting is to attack the
fire when it is starting. So the ranger or forest
guard, riding his line, is ever on the watch for
smoke, and his routes of patrol are so laid out that
a wide landscape can be observed from them.

Suppose he sees a thin column of smoke rising
through the tree-tops. The first thing he must
do is to determine by the aid of his compass the
exact location of the fire. Then if there is a tele-
phone within reach he gets into communication
with some other ranger who is near enough to
give prompt help. Here and there in the national
forests are boxes containing the tools which fire-
fighters need — shovels for throwing earth on the
flame (Fig. 21), rakes with which to draw leaves
and sticks out of the fire’s path, axes and saws to
fell trees, which will become fuel if left standing,
and canteens for the men. Here and there on
high places in the national forests watch towers
have been built overlooking the tree-tops. Each
national forest has been carefully mapped, and
these maps show the location of tool boxes and
telephone lines, as well as the exact position of
lookout towers, roads, trails, and ranger stations.

Year by year, the mischief done by fires grows
less, and this betterment is largely owing to the
watchfulness and energy of forest officers. In the
effort to master flames, men have forgotten their
own need of food and sleep and have undergone
dangers as great as ever were faced by troops on
68 Our Field and Forest Trees

the battlefield. Some fire-fighters have worked
on without rest for seventy-two consecutive hours.

While the men of the Forest Service thus val-
iantly do their part, we, the public, must do ours.
More men are néeded, more tools, more trails,
more telephone lines. In the national forests, at
least, destruction by fire might be wholly pre-
vented. Of course this would cost money, and
the public will have to pay the bills. But the ex-
pense would be but small compared to the cost of
the fire which such carefulness prevents.
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CHAPTER VIII

UNITED STATES NATIONAL FORESTS

CCE upon a time, all that is now the United
States, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great
Plains, was one vast, unbroken forest. The first
explorers and the first missionaries to the Indians,
coming, as they did, from the East, found the
woods, the woods, and evermore the woods.

But the settler entering the country found this
forest-cover a hindrance and a trouble. It was in
his way in prospecting, in mining, and in farming,
and he used the quickest means of getting rid of
it— the fire. The railroads that crossed the
Rocky Mountains cleared their right of way by
fire, and let the flames spread beyond control,
taking no thought of the tremendous damage done
to the country. The forest trees had been at work
for a century or more, building valuable timber.
The forest floor beneath the trees had been gath-
ering little by little a quantity of plant nourish-
ment left in it by decaying twigs and leaves, by
moldering leaves and stumps. In the spongy black
soil was the stored richness of a thousand years.
All this was destroyed in a few hours.

69
70 Our Field and Forest Trees

An eye-witness gives this account of the slaugh-
ter done in the forests of the Pacific coast:

‘“ Splendid trees, five or six feet in diameter and
hundreds of years old, were being destroyed.
Auger holes were bored in the trees near the
ground, coal oil was poured into the holes, a
match applied, and the trees burned down. Dur-
ing the dry season these fires were permitted to
escape and pass through the forest, covering the
whole earth with a cloud of smoke, and rapidly
working in this new field the same useless de-
struction that has followed in man’s footsteps all
over the continent.”

Nor was the East guiltless of wasting the coun-
try’s forest treasures.

A veteran woodsman says that in New Hamp-
shire woods, fifty years ago, sturdy spruces, which
would fetch a good price could they be sold today,
were felled simply that their prostrate boughs
might serve as a sort of mattress to break the
fall of doomed pines. Woodcutters in those days
cared only for the pine lumber, and left the tangle
of fallen spruce to rot upon the forest floor.

Meantime, as the country grew, more and more
wood was being needed, and the need for it grow-
ing more and more urgent. Mile after mile of
railroad was being built, and for every mile about
three thousand ties were required. Mines were
being opened, and needing great quantities of
timber to support their ceilings and walls. Farms
United States National Forests 71

were being made in what were once the prairies
and the desert, and everywhere wood was in de-
mand for building material. From year to year
the demand for wood increased — and it is still
increasing.

We must therefore try to increase the supply,
and also to protect the standing woods from fire
and from decay. For it will not be easy to import
wood if we allow our forests to be used up.

Other countries have been equally shortsighted
and wasteful in managing their forests, and as
most of them are older, and have had more time
in which to waste, they are worse off than we are.
They are buying wood — not selling it.

Siberia, Canada, and Brazil are the only coun-
tries exporting wood in quantity, and soon they
too will need all they grow for their own use.

Twenty years ago we realized that because the
demand for timber was so great, and the methods
of clearing the land for settlement were so waste-
ful, forests were being cut three times as fast as
they grew. It was necessary to save the forests
lest the timber supply should fail. It was neces-
sary also to take care of the forests because they
are nurseries of the rivers. West of the great
plains, streams are few and precious. After they
leave their birthplaces in the mountain woods they
cross great stretches of wind-swept valley or plain,
where the summer sunlight is almost tropical in
its fierce splendor. There is little rainfall in the
72 Our Field and Forest Trees

country beyond the Great Divide, and the ranches
depend for their crops upon water from the moun-
tains. How necessary it becomes for the pros-
perity of the West to save the mountain forests
which shelter the infancy of the western water-
courses!

So Government, providing for the best interests
of the whole people, has set aside a number of
tracts of forest land. These are the property
of the nation, managed by the nation for the
good of the nation, and are called National
Forests (Fig. 22).

The first ‘‘ Forest Reserve,” as it was then
called, was the “ Yellowstone,” established by
President Harrison in 1891. Five years later,
President Cleveland, acting upon the advice of the
National Academy of Sciences, set aside thirteen
additional Forest Reserves. The movement grew
so fast that in 1899 the country’s Forest Reserves
numbered thirty-six, and succeeding Presidents
and Congresses have felt the need of saving more
and more woodland, till now (1916) there are
one hundred and fifty-three national forests.
There are also sixteen ‘‘ purchase areas”? in
the White Mountains and in the southern
Appalachians where the Federal Government
is buying land for the establishment of more
forests.

At first, people did not quite understand the
need of these forests, nor the purpose of the
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United States National Forests 73

Government in reserving them. There was there-
fore much opposition to them.

At first, also, there was not enough money forth-
coming to pay for a proper survey of the land,
and so the first national forests were made without
knowing exactly where their boundary lines should
run. Some good farming land was taken in, much
good timber land was left out.

Later, men and money were found for careful
and accurate field work, so that the old carelessly
made forests have been re-surveyed and re-
mapped, and the land which should not have been
included has been put back into the public domain.

The plan in setting aside land for a national
forest is to make and keep that land as useful as
it can be to the nation and for all time. National
forest lands are seldom such as farmers or ranch-
men would desire. They contain much ground
impossible to cultivate, and many of them are so
high above sea level that snow lies deep in them
for three-quarters of the year. But these bleak
highlands can grow woods to ensure a timber
supply and to keep the rivers full and strong.

When, as sometimes happens, little bits of tilla-
ble land are included in a forest so that it is im-
possible to cut them out, such lands are opened
for settlement under what is known as the “ Forest
Homestead Act.”

A home-seeker may travel through the forest,
pick out the tillable land he wants, apply for it,
4 Our Field and Forest Trees

have it listed, settle upon it, and end his days
there. But he must obey the law, and use the
land for a home.

A prospector is free to look for metals and min-
erals in a national forest. If his search prove
successful, he may stake and record and develop
as many claims as he chooses, subject to the same
laws which regulate mining claims on public lands
outside the forest boundaries. Indeed, the forest
helps the miner instead of hindering him. It gives
him free timber for his mine and for his buildings.

The national forests of the Rocky Mountain
region are summer grazing grounds or ranges for
thousands of cattle. In autumn, when snow comes
to cover the mountain grass, the cattle drift or
are driven downward to the warmer valleys, where
summer has brought the buffalo grass of the win-
ter ranges to ripeness.

A cattle man pays so much a head for grazing
privileges to the United States Department of
Forestry. If cattle were not permitted to feed in
the national forests of the West during part of
the year, there would not be enough food for them
in that ‘‘land of little rain,’ and hence the stock
industry of the West would suffer.

Each national forest has what is called its
“allotment of stock’? —that is to say, only a
certain number of grazing animals may be let
loose in it. When the cattle or sheep are thus
kept down in number they are a real protection
United States National Forests 75

to the trees, for they eat the dry grass which
might become fuel.

Thus the forest is benefited, and so is the stock-
raiser. Cattle which graze in the national forests
are so well fed that they bring from two to five
dollars a head more than others. They are sure
of sufficient water too, for the streams are shad-
owed, in many places, from the parching sun,
and forest officers look to the condition of the
watering places where stock go down to drink.

Each year a quantity of timber from the na-
tional forests is cut and sold. A young and vig-
orous tree puts on wood very rapidly. Then comes
a period when growth is much slower, and after
that a time when there is almost no increase in the
size of the trunk from spring to spring. The tree
is now at the beginning of old age and is peculiarly
subject to the attacks of fungus or insect enemies
which may spread from it to its neighbor. This
is the time to cut it down.

Such a tree when it stands in a national forest
is marked “ U. S.” by a forest officer and sold.
The purchaser is required to cut every marked
tree, and to spare all trees which are not marked.

Some trees are left standing to sow their seeds
round about on the cleared land, and whoever has
bought the timber is required to cut thriftily, not
wastefully, and to leave no piles of dry branches
to become nurseries for forest fires.

When land is cut over in this way, and the little
76 Our Field and Forest Trees

trees, coming up between the larger ones are not
broken, nor buried under piles of waste, a second
timber crop will after a while be ready for the
woodcutters.

Indeed, by wise care the timber stand can be
improved as years go on; the better and more
useful trees can be spared long enough to sow
many seeds in successive springs, and the cheaper
timber can be cleared away and sold as soon as it
becomes marketable.

In the German National Forests, which are
models to the world, the timber land is divided
into sections, and the trees are graded like school
children. All those growing in one section are
of the same age, and they are all ready for the
lumbermen together. They fall together, and
when their timber is removed there are not a
number of young trees growing between the older
ones to be crushed and trampled, or to be spared
by the exercise of much delay and difficulty.
The land is completely cleared, and then sown or
planted with trees which again will all mature
together.

Our National Forests, like the Dominion Re-
serves of Canada, were taken over from Nature
just as they were planted by her. Most of them,
when they were adopted by the nation, were a
mixture of old trees, trees in the prime of life,
young saplings, and little seedlings. In such woods
it is dificult to cut down and remove timber with-
United States National Forests 77

out crushing and mutilating the little trees growing
among the large ones. And it takes many years
to change a wild forest into one after the German
plan, yielding successive crops which, like the oats
in a farmer’s field, stand and fall together.

The science of forest-crop production is called
* silviculture.”

There are what are called weed trees, which
provide shade, but do little else for their country,
and are almost worthless as lumber. In the na-
tional forests there is a constant effort to get rid,
by degrees, of these comparatively worthless trees.
As they die, or are cut down, they are replaced
by valuable timber. So, in time, we may rival
the thrifty silviculture of little Wurttemburg,
where the state forests return annually to their
government treasury as much as all our national
forests return to ours.

Some of the wood from our national forests
is free to the people. Officers in charge of a
forest may give timber to settlers, farmers, or
prospectors, provided they will promise to use it
themselves, and not to sell it.

The needs of the people near the forest are
considered before its timber is sent away to be
sold in more distant places. The neighborhood
gets the first chance. The money raised by the
sale of timber from the national forests, and the
money paid in by cattlemen for the use of the
range, becomes part of the income of Uncle Sam.
78 Our Field and Forest Trees

One-quarter of it goes to the county in which the
forest lies, to pay for schools and for roads.

Some of the national forests are within reach
of growing cities, and these become great play-
grounds for the people. Campers, hunters, and
fishermen picnic in them and spend their vaca-
tions there.

Several national forests of the West contain
wonders of the land—strange geological for-
mations, great canyons, or crumbling walls erected,
no one knows when, by vanished and forgotten
people. By including these in forest boundaries,
the Government has saved them from destruc-
tion by vandal hands, and given them forever an
appropriate and beautiful setting.

Before Uncle Sam takes a tract of woodland
and turns it into a national forest, the land is
carefully surveyed, and two detailed maps are
made. One shows who owns or claims the land,
the other shows what is growing on it.

The men who make these maps must not only
be trained surveyors, but they must also know the
neighboring country and its needs. They study
the effects of the forest upon the streams and
rivers, and the value of the timber standing upon
it. They consider the needs of the people round
about — how local industries would be affected
by turning the land into a national forest.

So before any new national forest is made,
experts know just where a tract of woods should
United States National Forests 79

stand, forever safe from the settler’s axe, just why
the forest should cover that particular place, and
just how it will prove a blessing to the surround-
ing country and to the nation in the coming years.

Like the Federal Government individual States
have realized the necessity of saving their woods.
There are, therefore, a number of State Reserves,
set aside by state legislatures, and provided with
trails, telephone lines, and fire protection out of
the state taxes.

As one might expect, most of these are in New
England, New York, and Pennsylvania, where
the forest primeval vanished long ago, and where
people have been carrying on industries, and
needing wood, for several generations. In these
states, too, are the forest nurseries of important
rivers which carry many tons of shipping to the
sea.

Many of the western states are now following
the example of their eastern sisters, and even bet-
tering it. Wisconsin issues a fire circular addressed
to school children, which has been copied and
adopted by several older states.

Indeed, the great majority of the forty-eight
states are now taking practical action in forestry
— setting aside reserves, protecting them, patrol-
ling them, guarding them from fire, and fighting
the insect pests which destroy our precious trees.

With the exception of a great forest reserve in
Florida all the national forests hitherto set aside
80 Our Field and Forest Trees

are in the West. They surround the river-heads
of the Coast Range, or lie along the ‘‘ Great
Divide”? where the waters which flow toward
the Mississippi basin part from the waters which
turn toward the Pacific. These forests protect
the rivers west of the Mississippi.

Now, we feel that the nation must also protect
the Appalachian forest, which shelters the infancy
of eastern rivers. The “ Weeks law,” passed by
Congress in 1911, created a ‘‘ National Forest
Reservation Commission,’ whose members are the
Secretary of War, the Secretary of Agriculture,
the Secretary of the Interior, and two members
of the House of Representatives, to be selected
by the Speaker.

The Secretary of Agriculture is to examine
lands on the watersheds of navigable streams, and
to recommend to the Commission, for purchase,
such lands as, in his judgment, must remain forest
clad if the streams are to remain full.

Before the nation buys such lands, however,
the Reservation Commission must approve of the
purchase, and so must the legislature of the state
wherein the proposed national forest lies.

Also, before a tract is purchased it is examined
by men of the Forest Service. They carefully
estimate the value of the standing timber. They
also examine the soil, to find out whether it is
fitter for timber than for other crops, and they
observe the “lay of the land” to see how the
United States National Forests 81

forest affects the flow and volume of neighboring
rivers.

Seven states have already taken advantage
of the Weeks law and set aside part of their wood-
land to be national property and forest forever.

Some of these forests are in the White Moun-
tains, and some are in Virginia, Georgia, and the
Carolinas.

The rivers which they nurture into power give
life to the logging industry of the eastern coast
states, carry seaward the waste of many factories,
and keep the water deep in sea harbors, where
ocean-going vessels make their ports and receive
or discharge their cargoes.

If these rivers should dwindle, and their har-
bors should ‘shoal up,” serious inconvenience
and heavy loss would result in all the Atlantic
seaport cities.
CHAPTER IX
DOMINION FOREST RESERVES

ANADA and the United States, being next
door neighbors as well as near of kin, have
experienced many of the same trials, toils, and
blessings. Their International Boundary is, in
many places, a man-made line, with soil, climate,
vegetation, and wild life the same on both sides.
Along the northern limits of New England a
clearing fifteen feet wide goes, up hill and down
dale, through the woods, and serves as a prop-
erty line between the two nations.

Their histories, as white men’s countries, begin
together. But the great tides of immigration
turned first to the United States. Hence, ques-
tions which Washington was forced to consider
a score of years ago are just confronting Ottawa
today. Uncle Sam has been sometimes an exam-
ple to Miss Canada, and sometimes a warning.
In Forest Conservation he has set her a good
example which she is now diligently following.

The eastern provinces of Canada, which are
just a little older than New England, have been
taught by experience to value trees. They have

82
Dominion Forest Reserves 83

their own forest reserves, controlled by their own
provincial governments. Those of the Province
of Quebec are very large and a source of just
pride to its people.

But the urgent need for conservation has not
been felt all over Canada till recently. The
nation awoke to it when immigrants from the Old
World began to cover the lands beyond Winnipeg
with farms and wheatfields, and when civilization
pushed into the Northwest.

On the plains and prairies of western Canada
there are no trees save those which border the
few water courses and those which have been
planted around the settlers’ homes. In north-
ernmost Canada lie the great tundras, where sub-
Arctic cold permits no trees to live, and the land
is clothed with a low growth of reindeer moss,
sedges, grasses, and little short-lived flowers, the
sub-soil being permanently frozen.

But eastern Canada, into which the first settlers
came, was densely wooded, and there the forest
was so thick and vast that it seemed as if there
could never be a scarcity of timber.

So the earliest settler, here as elsewhere,
cleared his land with fire, and did not distress
himself if the fire ran wild, carrying destruction
far beyond the limits of his claim.

Now Canada is the home of a rapidly growing
population, who are making houses, mines, and
railroads, and needing wood in great and constant
84 Our Field and Forest Trees

supplies. And settlers are making towns and
farms in the great plains where wood is scarce.

So the need of setting aside lands, to be used
as Forest Reserves, is now fully realized by the
Canadian Government. ‘‘ The Dominion Forest
Reserves,” says their Inspector, ‘‘ are intended to
preserve and produce a perpetual supply of timber
for the people of the prairie. They are not
intended to furnish wood for the lumber trade.
The purpose of the Parliament in the creation of
the reserves is chiefly to meet the homesteader’s
needs.”

Canadian law-makers are not unmindful of
other blessings of the forest: ‘‘ They are well
aware that forests feed springs, prevent floods,
keep earth from being washed down the hillsides,
shelter from storms, give health and delight, pro-
tect game and fish, and beautify the land.”

But the Dominion forest laws seem devised
chiefly and especially to make sure that in years
to come the country shall be well supplied with
lumber and timber.

The Dominion foresters, trying to insure the
nation’s supply of wood, have no easy problem
and no light task. Dr. Fernow, Dean of the
Faculty of Forestry in the University of Toronto,
warns Canada that her timber supply, far from
being inexhaustible, is very limited. Great areas
of the country can never grow large trees. Growth
in Canada’s northern climate and thin soils, with
Dominion Forest Reserves 85

the exception of portions of British Columbia, is
slow, and nature unassisted will probably not
furnish enough timber for the needs of the future.

The Dominion forest reserves, owned by the
Canadian people and controlled by the Ottawa
Parliament, are all situated in the northwestern
provinces: Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta,
and British Columbia.

When this century began, Canada had nine of
these Dominion reserves; now, if we include the
parks, whose timber is managed in precisely the
same way as that of the Dominion forests, there
are thirty-nine.

All the forest reserves in eastern Canada are
under provincial administration and, therefore,
out of the present discussion.

The most important of the Dominion forests is
the great reserve covering the whole eastern slope
of the Rockies. This is a beautiful vast tract of
more than twenty thousand square miles. It is
divided, for administrative convenience, into five
forests —the Athabaska, Brazeau, Clearwater,
Bow River, and Crowsnest — and it is the birth-
place of all the rivers which water the prairie
country.

These Dominion reserves, ample now, will one
day become insufficient to the needs of the nation,
and no doubt the Canadian Government will add
to their number as a growing population requires
more timber and more reliable water power.
86 Our Field and Forest Trees

Our northern neighbors try to put into these
forest reserves only land that is unfit for farms or
pastures. ‘“‘ We ask,” says Mr. Campbell, the
Dominion Superintendent of Forestry, ‘‘ only the
waste places, the rocks, the sand, and the broken
hills.”

But in Canada, as in the United States, there
are some small areas of good grass land so
enclosed by forest that when the boundaries are
made they cannot be left out; and so in Canada,
as in the United States, cattle and horses are
allowed to graze in the reserves if their owners
pay the forest officers a small monthly fee; and
settlers living near reserves are allowed to pur-
chase hay for use on their own farms.

‘““ The reserves,” says one of the Forestry Bul-
letins, ‘‘ are for the use of the people — then why
should good grass be allowed to go to waste?
The grazing may be desirable also as a protection
to the woods.

“In some places the ground is covered with a
dense growth of long grass and pea vine. This,
when dry, offers much fuel for fire, and when fire
once gets in it is almost impossible to check the
flame. Moreover, cattle on the range have much
the same habits as the buffalo. On going to water
they follow one another and make deeply trodden
paths. These paths are fire lines, small, to be
sure, but there are many of them, and they give
lines from which to back-fire.”
 

 

 

By courtesy of the Dominion Forest Service.

Fig. 23. ‘‘ Muskeg” fringing Mitishto river.

 

  

pee
poe <<
Nw tad aN
By courtesy of the Dominion Forest Service.

Fig. 24. Packing across Muskeg Brulé.
Dominion Forest Reserves 87

The most difficult problem in Canada is pro-
tecting the forests from fire.

In the Northwest, where the Dominion reserves
lie, winds are high, summers are bright, and rainy
days are few. The trees are nearly all cone-bear-
ers, full of inflammable gum and resin. The
living trees are loaded with dry dead branches,
shrouded in moss. The forest floor is covered
with prostrate decaying timber, through which fire
can creep as it does through punk. There are
large areas of burned forest, called by the French-
Canadian name brulé, where the ground is piled
with fallen charred wood as dry as tinder. Few
of the streams or lakes are large enough to stop
a raging fire, and except these there are no natural
barriers to check a conflagration.

In many places, along the banks of ponds and
streams or on level ground, there is what the
Canadians call muskeg (Fig. 23) —- deep swamp
land upgrown with big bushes. When this dries
out, in the northwestern land of bright sunshine
and little rain, there is exposed a thick mat of dead
vegetation (Fig. 24). In this, fire is hatched and
cherished, so that it has been known to live and
smolder all through the winter, and break forth
with the return of spring.

The young growth which follows a fire is also
very inflammable, so that great tracts in the Can-
ada woods have been burned over again and again.

In the pioneer period of the Canadian West,
88 Our Field and Forest Trees

fires once started ran wild through thick woods
where there were no men to fight them, and were
so destructive that nearly three-quarters of the
forest covering the eastern Rockies is composed
of young trees. Engineers prospecting along the
line of the new Hudson Bay Railroad have found
that all the woods in that region are young. Most
of the burning was done before the railroads came.
The fires were started by settlers clearing land or
by campers, hunters, prospectors, and surveyors.

And no doubt the clouds which had cherished
the forest helped to destroy it, for in close woods
some fires are started each year by lightning.

In Canada the fire-ranging service, so arduous
and so important, is a department by itself. It
was organized in 1900, one year after Canada
appointed her first Inspector of Timber and For-
estry for the Dominion.

The forest areas of the Dominion are divided
into large districts, and each district is in charge of
a chief fire ranger. These rangers are under an
“Inspector of Fire Ranging,” and under the ran-
gers are a number of men hired to patrol the
woods.

The inspector, in addition to his other duties,
looks to the lines of railways, and determines
whether the regulations controlling them are being
obeyed or not. He must see that the rails are
bordered by cleared spaces free from bushes, trees,
dead branches, or long grass. He must make sure
Dominion Forest Reserves 89

that the locomotives are provided with spark
arresters as the law enjoins. Canada has a rail-
way law requiring railroad companies to keep a
patrol on the parts of their lines which run through
forest, and the inspector must see that these
patrolmen are appointed and that they attend to
their duty.

During the special danger period toward
the end of summer, the rangers lay aside other
duties and watch day and night for smoke or
glare.

Prevention is thought of also. In early spring
cleared land becomes bare and its grass dry, before
the snow is all melted in the woods. At this time
the rangers burn the meadows all along the forest
boundaries, keeping careful watch that the fire
does not get away into the woods. When fires
coming from the prairie reach this burned belt
they die for lack of fuel. Some of the reserves
are completely surrounded by a broad strip of
plowed land called a fire guard.

Canadian rangers have posted up thousands of
notices giving warning against the danger of fire
and laying down the laws concerning it. These
have a good stiff penalty attached, and are in
places where human beings, red or white, are
likely to see them — at steamer landings, port-
ages, fur posts, and traders’ stores. They are
printed, to impress the minds of all manner of
folk, in French, German, Icelandic, Galician,
90 Our Field and Forest Trees

Indian (Cree and Chipewayan), Norwegian, Rus-
sian, Hungarian, Hindu, Japanese, and Chinese.

The department has also published a little
pamphlet explaining the dangers of fire, setting
forth the laws concerning it and telling how to
fight it. This is issued in many languages, and
more than two hundred thousand copies have been
distributed.

It is estimated that more than half the eastern
slope of the Canadian Rockies has been fire-swept
within the past sixty years.

The department is now trying to reforestize
some of the land where fire has left desolation.
In a spirit of serene hopefulness, a few seeds, with
a handful of sand over them, were put down where
a forest tree was wanted, but the only ones which
sprouted were those which lay safely hidden in long
grass. Elsewhere the sowing merely provided
free lunches for hungry vegetarians of the wilds.

So Canada has instituted two forest nurseries,
one at Indian Head, Saskatchewan, and one at a
place called Sutherland, about five miles from
Saskatoon. In these, baby trees are well started
in life before being transplanted to their perma-
nent homes. These nurseries are in charge of a
separate department of the Dominion Forestry
Service known technically as the “ Division of
Tree Planting.” The trees propagated here are
for distribution to farmers living on the prairie.
Young trees needed for renewing the Dominion
 

 

 

Ty courtesy of the Dominion Forest Service.

Fig. 25. An average prairie homestead just after settlement. Near
Pense, Saskatchewan.

 

   

By courtesy of the Dominion Forest Service.

Fig. 26. The same place two years after planting. The little trees in
the foreground are maple, cottonwood, and some willov

 
Dominion Forest Reserves 91

forests are grown elsewhere, in small nurseries on
the reserves (Figs. 25 and 26).

The Division of Tree Planting, in the words of
its chief, is organized “‘ to encourage farmers, liv-
ing on the prairies, to plant shelter belts around
their buildings and gardens,” and also ‘to get
them started in growing such small quantities of
fuel and fencing material as may be required in
later years.”

The Dominion nursery at Sutherland is just
beginning its good work.

The older nursery station at Indian Head prop-
agates trees in very large numbers, and dis-
tributes them to applicants who get in their plea
before the first of March. There is a rule that
no one applicant may have more than eight hun-
dred trees, but it is rumored that exceptions may
be made at the discretion of the authorities.

Deciduous trees are given outright. Cone-bear-
ers, being harder to raise, and therefore more
expensive to the Department, are sold at the
nominal price of one dollar a hundred. In all
cases the applicant pays the cost of freighting the
trees from the nursery to his farm. Last spring
(1915), three million seven hundred thousand
little trees went out from Indian Head to new
prairie homes.

During the summer, inspectors go from farm
to farm seeing that the trees are in suitable ground
and receiving intelligent care.
92 Our Field and Forest Trees

Only those who have lived on the plains long
enough to feel their deadly monotony can fully
appreciate the work that the Division of Tree
Planting is doing for the West. These oases of
woodland redeem country which, without them,
shows the emptiness and the uniformity of the
ocean without the life of the waves.

The Inspector of Forest Reserves devotes some
time each year to lecturing about trees and forests
in the towns and cities of Canada. These lectures
are illustrated by lantern slides, colored as nearly
like life as it is possible to make them. They help
to make people realize the usefulness and win-
someness of trees. In the prairie towns the lecturer
talks about the pleasantness of trees in the streets.
Thanks partly to these lectures, the farmers of
the Northwest are planting groves and shelter
belts, and the homes of the Canadian West are
becoming little oases of green trees and shade on
the wide featureless prairie.

When this century began Canada had no forest
schools. The University of Toronto was the first
to organize a faculty of forestry, with Dr. Fernow
as its Dean. Now the old French University of
Laval at Quebec has its forest school also, and
there is a third at Fredericton in New Brunswick.

While these schools are training men to manage
the forests with scientific knowledge and business
efficiency, the work of making roads, trails,
bridges, and fire lines goes rapidly on.
Dominion Forest Reserves 93

In many parts of the Canadian woods the
ground is covered with fallen fir and spruce trees,
which bristle all over with dead boughs, tough to
the last. Young growth springs up between them,
the living crowns rising through the meshes of the
dead branches.

Between the fallen trees are, in many places,
brown forest pools, and a mat of moss ankle-deep
hides the character of the footing beneath it. One
cannot travel fast across such country as this, nor
can one travel far without the utmost fatigue,
unless trails are cut. The making of roads and
trails through forest such as this is difficult; the
making of trails across muskeg is more difficult
still. Nevertheless, without roads and trails fire
can never be controlled, so the work of making
them is being pushed vigorously.

The service is also cutting fire lines on the
reserves. Cabins for the rangers are rising, tele-
phone lines are being threaded through the woods,
and lookout stations are being established on
prominent points whence men can watch for fires.

In the Rocky Mountain Reserves there are high
bare spots whence one can gaze over mile after
mile of tree tops. There lookouts can be made
with no expense except that of breaking the trails
which lead to them.

But in level forests, especially in the prairie
provinces, towers must be built. Nearly all these
are of wood, and cost the Dominion practically
94 Our Field and Forest Trees

nothing except the nails which hold them together
and the time of the rangers who build them. But
steel towers are thought preferable and are
advised for the future.

The densely wooded banks of western rivers
are safeguarded in Canada by power patrol boats.
These carry fire-fighters and fire-fighting apparatus
into parts of the forest which could only with
great difficulty be reached by land. ‘There are
now (1916) ten of these boats safeguarding the
Dominion forests from flames.

Next to the problem of reducing the waste of
the forest itself comes that of reducing the waste
of forest products.

If the wood used for timbering mines is of a
sort able to endure strain, and if it is so treated
by chemicals that it can resist damp, there will be
a longer interval before the mine-props must be
renewed.

If the chemicals extracted from wood or from
wood ashes can be obtained from sawdust, slabs,
and shavings, which now too often go to waste,
trees need not fall on purpose that these things
be made.

In recent years Canadians have been realizing
that the timber resources of their country are by
no means unlimited. On the contrary, they must
manage thriftily to make their forests meet the
growing demand for wood within the bounds of
their country. So, in 1913, the Forest Products
Dominion Forest Reserves 95

Laboratories of Canada were established in Mon-
treal. There the Forestry Branch of the Depart-
ment of the Interior, in cooperation with McGill
University, is doing work similar to that done in
the United States Forest Products Laboratories at
Madison, Wisconsin.

In these laboratories trained men, aided by
accurate instruments, test the strength, durability,
toughness, and hardness of different woods. They
find out the best ways to treat telephone poles,
mine timbers, railway ties, and pavement blocks so
that they will resist damp and decay, and need not
be speedily renewed.

They find out the best and least wasteful way
to make wood-pulp paper, and wood alcohol, and
they think out and test means of using what the
lumber mills have been wasting. The work in
Montreal has started in a fine old dwelling house
placed at the disposal of the Laboratory, for four
years, by McGill University. Indirectly such work
keeps the forests alive.

The Canadian fire rangers and forest service
men, penetrating as they do into the depths of
wild woods, are required to report the number of
game animals which they see on the reserves.

Big game was once very abundant in the Cana-
dian Rockies, but in recent years the animals have
been hunted so ruthlessly that there seems to be
danger of their becoming extinct. So some Cana-
dian forest reserves are now game preserves also.
96 Our Field and Forest Trees

All shooting and trapping is unlawful in them, and
creatures of the wild live safely there.

Hence it is hoped that as years go by the
rangers’ reports will show an increase in the num-
ber of big game. And it may be said of the elk
in the shade of the Rocky Mountain Reserve, as
was said of the tall deer in the Royal Forests of
medieval England: ‘‘ when he is in the forest he
is in a very sanctuary of peace.”
CHAPTER X

THE FORESTER AND HIS WORK

j% the Europe of our forefathers, and in the

days of old, a forest was a hunting ground. In
England, Germany, and France, there were num-
bers of Royal Forests, where the King rode
a-hunting; and there were also many private for-
ests, homes for tall deer, which were kept there
to be chased by the rich and great. No one cared
for the trees — they were just a shelter or covert
for the game.

No one cared for the poor cultivators of the
land, who had to put up with many privations in
order that princes and noble lords might enjoy the
pleasures of the chase.

The ‘‘meene man” had much ado to get a
living, because his crops were apt to be eaten, as
soon as they were out of the ground, by straying
deer. There were cruel punishments, even to
death itself, for any man who killed or wounded
a deer out of the forest. A poor man dared not
call his dog to help chase the robber out of his
little vegetable patch. He dared not even snare
a rabbit in the forest of king or noble, though

97
98 Our Field and Forest Trees

““meene man’s”

game abounded there, and the
children cried with hunger.

The forester in those days was the servant of
the king, or of a great lord, and his business was to
make sure that his master’s land should abound
in game. He was to be ever on the watch for
trespassers, and for people who cut down branches,
or who trapped or chased game — for all offend-
ers, either in vert or in venison — and to bring
any of these culprits whom he could catch to the
forest courts, where people who broke the burden-
some forest laws were tried and sentenced. He
had one thing in mind — the game. His business
was simply and solely to see that his lord and mas-
ter got good hunting.

Nowadays, the forest officer is the servant of
the nation, and the laws which he enforces are
devised, not to keep good things from the people,
but to give them good things in fullest measure.

When we read what a Royal Forest was, and
then think what a National Forest is, we begin to
realize the progress of the world from the days
of Robin Hood to ours.

Our national forests give employment to a num-
ber of men whose work is the “‘ Forest Service.”
The forest officer of the day has many cares and
duties. He, too, must concern himself about the
wild life of the woods, for part of his business is
to destroy the animals which rob the farmer,
stock man, and shepherd. In a single year
The Forester and His Work 99

(1911), forest officers killed nearly eight thou-
sand beasts of prey — mountain lions, wolves,
wildcats, bears, coyotes, and lynxes.

In some parts of the Rocky Mountain states
it has been calculated that a single timber wolf
destroys about one thousand dollars’ worth of
stock in a year, and that the value annually saved
to stockmen by forest service hunters amounts to
more than the grazing fees.

In all the national forests, especially during the
summer months, there is a constant and careful
lookout for the beginnings of fire. Men ride,
like Lancelot of old, overthwart and endwise,
patroling the woods, and men are stationed here
and there, on high open spots, looking over miles
of tree tops for rising smoke.

Another work of the service is tree planting.
It has been demonstrated that if the country is to
be saved from a bad lumber famine, fifty-six mil-
lion acres of land, once covered with forest, must
become forest land again. About one-fifth of this
will grow trees of its own accord. All the rest
must be reforestized; man must start trees there
because nature cannot or will not.

The Forest Service has tried many experiments
to find the best and cheapest method of reforest-
izing.

When seeds of trees are sown broadcast over
the ground, a feast is spread for birds, squirrels,
chipmunks, and field mice, who flock to dinner
100 Our Field and Forest Trees

without waiting for invitations. So direct seeding,
though it is easy and cheap, has serious disad-
vantages.

It is found better to sow seeds where they will
be safe from frost, drought, floods, scorching
sun, and hungry mouths, and transplant the little
trees when they have grown strong enough to
endure hardships. When this method is followed,
however, government must provide nurseries,
labor, and irrigation.

The trees raised in Uncle Sam’s nurseries are
sown in beds where soil, moisture, and light are
carefully fitted to the needs of the sprouting seed.
After the seedlings come up, the beds in which
they grow are watered and kept free from weeds.
Artificial shade is provided, since very young trees
will not thrive where light is too strong. After
two years in seed beds the young trees are moved
into transplant beds, where they form long, strong
roots, and grow hardy. They remain one year
in the transplant bed, and are then ready to be
put into their permanent home.

There are now (1916) twenty-nine nurseries
conducted by the forest service, and in these mil-
lions of seedlings can be raised each year, so inex-
pensively that sturdy little yellow pine trees, two
years old, cost the nation rather less than five cents
a pair.

Most of the national forests are on high moun-
tain land, where only evergreens can endure the
 

  
  

By courtesy of the U. S. Forest Service.

Fig. 27. Yellow pine cones spread to dry on canvas sheets. Uncompahgre
National Forest.

 

 

By courtesy of the U. S. Forest Service.

Fig. 28. Extracting yellow pine seed from the cones.
The Forester and His Work 101

cold winters, the rough winds, and the heavy
snows. Partly for this reason, partly because
Pine lumber is so useful, the seeds sown in the
forest nurseries are mostly seeds of pine trees.

The cones are picked directly from the trees,
and they must be gathered before the middle of
October, because later they open on the trees and
their seeds drop out. So they are picked while
they are still closed, and spread on a canvas sheet
(Figs. 27 and 28), to open there in the warmth of
the autumn sunshine. After a day or two many
seeds fall out onto the canvas. These are gath-
ered, and then the partly empty cones go into a
machine called a cone-shaker which extracts all
seeds that have not fallen out already. Empty
cones come out of one end of this machine, and
seeds out of the other.

The first duty of the forest service is to protect
the standing woods, and to provide that there shall
be enough forests for the needs of the future. But
because Congress has decided that the resources
of the national forests are to be used, and because
the forage produced is one of the resources, for-
esters take charge of the grazing within the forest
boundaries. The service has to manage so that
forage may be used without resulting harm to
the forest.

Officers must see that range regulations are
enforced, that the forest in their charge has its
allotment of stock and no more, and that the drift
102 Our Field and Forest Trees

fences which keep cattle from straying in or out
are in repair.

The service also cuts fire lines through the
woods, makes roads and trails, and puts up tele-
phone lines, for there must be quick and easy
methods of communication and travel if fire is to
be kept down.

Of course duties so many and various could
never be undertaken, still less done, without organ-
ization. The work of the forest service is graded
like that of an army.

At the head of every national forest is the Super-
visor. He takes charge of all the business of that
particular forest. He manages, in fact, a public
estate worth millions of dollars. Hence, he must
have business ability. Moreover, he must be
familiar with the country around his own forest,
and he must know the men under him, their char-
acter, and the sort of work they are doing. He
must be able to manage men and to deal with all
sorts of people. He must have a good working
knowledge of timber and lumbering, must know
the best near markets for lumber, and the mining
and land laws of the state in which his forest lies.
He must be sound in body, and fit to endure a
strenuous outdoor life. It is thought desirable
that he should be a college graduate, and, further-
more, he must have taken a special course of train-
ing devised to fit men for the forest service.

Immediately under the supervisor, each forest
The Forester and His Work 108

has a Deputy Supervisor and a Forest Assistant.
The assistant is occupied almost exclusively with
technical matters. He concerns himself with the
experiments in tree-growing which are so import-
ant in the service work.

Many trees mature so slowly and attain such
great age that the lifetime of one generation
of men is not long enough for useful experiments
with them. Such tests must be carried on by the
nation.

Next in rank below the supervisor, his deputy,
and his assistant, come the Rangers. These men
live in the forests, usually in lonely spots far from
any town or village. A ranger’s work is not a
soft snap—§it is the hardest kind of physical
labor. He must be able to care for himself and
his horse under all sorts of trying conditions, and
to ride over rough country all day, and perhaps
all night too. He must know how to build cabins
and put up telephone lines, how to pack, shoot,
and fight fire without losing his head. He must
be familiar with lumbering, sawmilling, the han-
dling of live stock, the mining laws, the land laws.
He has to buy his own outfit, and this means the
outlay of about five hundred dollars. It must
include three or four horses, a saddle for his own
use, a pack saddle, and a number of other neces-
saries. The government, however, builds him his
forest cabin, and provides fences and pasture for
his stock.
104 Our Field and Forest Trees

It has been suggested from time to time that
the position of ranger would be a pleasant oppor-
tunity for men not quite strong enough or diligent
enough to succeed in town or city. Therefore
civil service literature informs all whom it may
concern that ‘individuals seeking light, outdoor
employment” need not apply for the position of
forest ranger. And some member of the service
has jokingly said that a ranger must be proficient
in not less than thirty-eight trades and professions.
He should be, we are told, ‘‘ axeman, sawmill man,
broncho-buster, geologist, surveyor, entomologist,
lumberman, cow-puncher, metallurgist, irrigation
engineer, cook, veterinarian, cattleman, fisherman,
botanist, police officer, fire warden, patent attor-
ney, chemist, lawyer, sheepman, draftsman, guide,
game warden, deputy United States marshal,
blacksmith, stenographer, saddle-maker, dam-
builder, diplomat, athlete, trained nurse, packer,
bridge builder, carpenter, farmer, hunter, and tele-
phone lineman” —and so no ordinary person
can fill a ranger’s position.

Under the rangers are the guards, usually tem-
porary men, employed during the summer months,
to help in fire patrol, or in road-making and con-
struction work.

All forest officers except the guards must pass
the Civil Service examination before they can
receive a permanent appointment. They must be
residents of the state or territory in which the
The Forester and His Work 105

national forest lies, and between twenty-one and
forty years of age.

The examinations for forest officers are held
once a year. Some of the tests are thoroughly
practical. Men have to show how quickly they
can mount, how speedily they can saddle and bri-
dle a horse, how fast they can pack an outfit upon
his back.

Besides convincing the examiners of their moral
character, physical soundness, and ability to cope
with the difficulties of a rough, outdoor life, the
applicants for higher positions in the forest service
should have taken a special course in some of the
schools of forestry.

“Preparation for Forestry as a profession,”
says Forestry Circular number 23, ‘‘ should begin
with a college or university course, in which the
student should choose the subjects helpful in for-
estry work — mineralogy, geology, chemistry, and
botany. He will need mathematics, to be used
later in estimating distances, locating fires or
boundary lines, and measuring timber.”

After graduation at a high school or university
comes a full course at some school of professional
forestry. The first foresters in the United States
were obliged to go abroad for their training, but
in 1898 two forestry schools were established, one
at Cornell University, and one at Biltmore among
the mountains of North Carolina. These were
followed two years later by the Yale forest school.
106 Our Field and Forest Trees

Within the past fifteen years forestry education
has so developed in the United States that today
the student can choose among many and various
courses, long or short, specialized or compre-
hensive.

He can devote four years to laboratory and
microscopic work, learning to diagnose and cure
tree diseases, and acquiring knowledge of the
chemistry of plant life; or he can take a ten-days’
course of outdoor tree study in a summer school;
and, looking down the long list of institutions
offering some training in forestry, he can choose
or refuse almost any variant between these
extremes.

The student who is working for a higher posi-
tion in the forest service, and hence taking a full
course in forestry, is advised to spend his vaca-
tions, as far as possible, in the woods. He should
see all he can of lumbering, for that is the trade
which most closely touches his profession.

A young forester, with his spurs to win, may
begin work as forest assistant —if he can pass
the service technical examination under the United
States Civil Service Commission. As forest assist-
ant he gets a salary of eleven hundred dollars a
year, and, while he is doing actual field work, his
traveling and living expenses are paid. For two
years he is on probation and is assigned much
work out in the open with the rangers. After
these test years, if he “makes good,” he may
The Forester and His Work 107

become forest examiner, at a much higher salary,
or may even be promoted to the position of
supervisor.

It is not always possible for the service to give
employment at home to the men who train and
study to pass the required examinations; but an
increasing number of foresters are required by
holders of great estates, by railroad companies
and lumber companies, and by manufacturing con-
cerns which require and use large quantities of
wood.

The Forestry Bureau in the Philippine Islands
offers, just now, fine opportunities to trained men.
“Nevertheless,” says Circular number 23, “ it is
evident that the conditions prevailing in all the
other professions must soon exist in Forestry.
Rewards will come only to the men best fitted to
receive them — fitted by education, character, and
ability.”

To make the work of management easier, the
national forests of the West have been grouped
into seven districts. A district forester is in
charge of each, and his headquarters are in the
city most conveniently reached from the country
under his care.

The forest service now has nine experiment
stations, where trained men seek answers to the
many problems suggested by forest work. One of
these stations is in cooperation with the University
of Michigan, and the other eight are on national
108 Our Field and Forest Trees

forests. Besides these there is a government
experimental farm at Rosslyn, Virginia, in charge
of the Bureau of Plant Industry, where Uncle
Sam is finding out how to raise basket-willows for
profit.

Each station puts its best energies to work at
the problems which urgently concern its own dis-
trict. In the district which includes Arizona and
New Mexico, for instance, the most important
questions concern yellow pine, because it is the
most reliable and valuable timber tree of that
region.

In District number Two — Colorado and Wyo-
ming — lodge-pole pine, Douglas fir, and Engel-
mann’s spruce form the bulk of the forest. There
the question of most importance is how to per-
petuate this type of forest, and foresters seek to
know the best and most economical way of col-
lecting the cones of these trees, and of extracting,
cleaning, and storing their seed.

European foresters have studied seed too, and
some of the knowledge which they have gained is
useful to us. But they have had no experience
with these evergreens, peculiar to the American
continent and precious to its people.

Some problems of forestry concern the entire
land, and these are studied at all the experiment
stations simultaneously. Some concern only one
section of the country, and these are studied at
the station in that section.
The Forester and His Work 109

The Review of Forest Service Investigations,
issued from time to time at Washington, keeps
the entire force of investigators informed as to
what is being done at all the stations. Thus new
knowledge soon becomes common property, and
men do not waste time and money working over
problems which have already been solved else-
where.

In the stations, experts study the growing forest
and the living tree, and in the Forest Products
Laboratory at Madison, Wisconsin, they study
the dead tree and its products. All manner of
tests are tried, in this laboratory, on different
woods, to ascertain their dry weight, their bending
power, their hardness, toughness, and durability.
Many things are learned of vital interest to archi-
tects and engineers, and to all captains of industry
who work with wood or with wood pulp.

In manufacturing wooden articles, much time
and money are spent in seasoning, and often there
is loss to the manufacturer or annoyance to his
customers because the seasoning, after all, is not
well done.

The government laboratory tries to find out the
surest and most economical way of preserving
wood. Their experts carry on tests to see
whether cheaper woods can be used, where until
now we have wastefully used more valuable tim-
ber, and whether trees which are, as yet, little
known to manufacturers will not do, in many cases,
110 Our Field and Forest Trees

instead of trees now in danger of extermination.
They try to find out how the useful things ex-
tracted from wood — turpentine, pitch, resin, and
alcohol — can be extracted from material that
now goes to waste — the stumps the slabs and the
sawdust.

These are but a few examples of the problems
which the service expert encounters, or which his
work suggests. The program of 1912 included
953 subjects to be investigated.

As part of its work the forest service publishes
a number of pamphlets about trees — what sorts
will probably thrive in certain soils and situations;
how they should be planted and cared for; and
how their diseases can be cured.

Farmers in the West have been planting trees
ever since the country was settled, not for the sake
of the timber, but to protect buildings and crops
from the wind. On the prairies the winds are
almost as constant as they are on the sea. In
spring they blow from the southeast, and bring
the rain with them. In summer they come from
the south, and may be hot and scorching. In win-
ter the prairie winds blow from the north and
west, and sometimes are very swift and cold.
When they drive the snow before them, terrible
blizzards may result.

On the prairies and plains there are few hills,
and the first settlers found no trees except along
the water courses; so there was nothing to check
The Forester and His Work 111

these constant and often mischievous winds. The
best thing to do was to plant trees.

Now the railroads have begun the same prac-
tice. Everyone who has crossed this continent
remembers the long lines of ugly snow fencing
which border the track shutting out beautiful
views.

Railroad companies love it no better than
tourists do: it represents many dollars spent for
lumber, labor, and the moving of workmen and
materials. This fencing is portable; its sections
have to be laboriously distributed along the wind-
swept parts of the road every fall and collected
again in the spring. It rots, and a new set of
panels must be forthcoming every five years if
not oftener.

Now it is suggested that railway tracks can be
kept clear by means of “live snow fences” —
lines of trees planted beside the track, just where
they will intercept the winter wind as it comes
howling across a plain or through a gorge laden
with snow.

The “live fences’ are pretty and cheap, and
one railway at least, after thirty years trial finds
that they do their work thoroughly.

“While other roads have been laboring with
the snow fence, the Omaha has been sitting back
and letting the trees do the work.”

Almost every dwelling on the plains, with its
barns and outbuildings, is protected by a grove,
112 Our Field and Forest Trees

and in buying a farm one of the first questions
asked is, Has it a grove? Out there, a good
grove or wood-lot is said to increase the value of
the farm to the extent of about a thousand dollars
for every acre planted with trees. Its uses are
many.

Tall trees near buildings are protection from
lightning. A grove, sheltering the barnyard, will
make the live stock much more comfortable in
winter, and it will help to save the farmer’s grain,
as animals protected from the cold require less
food. In summer, a small plot fenced off the
wood-lot will be a pleasant place in which farm
animals may rest. A belt of trees, called a wind-
break, planted on the north side of an orchard,
often saves the buds from being nipped by spring
frosts; and the grove might supply the farmer
with posts and fuel. The farmer can have a
grove not only lovely and pleasant in its life, but
valuable when the time for its downfall arrives —
as timber. His trees can be a source of profit, like
his other crops, and can be raised, moreover,
where nothing else will prosper.

Tree planting in the West has been too often
done unwisely — this is the reason so few planta-
tions have been satisfactory. In places where
fence posts had to be brought a great distance,
and therefore cost a great price, yards have been
filled with trees which did not produce strong,
straight branches for post timber. Trees that
The Forester and His Work 113

thrive best close together have been planted far
apart; trees that thrive in light, sandy soil have
been planted in clay. No wonder that farmers do
not realize what profit can be made from trees —
the poor trees have never had a fair trial.

Now the farmer can obtain from the Forester
at Washington a number of little pamphlets sug-
gesting what to plant in the wood-lot, and how to
care for it. Most of them are sent free to who-
ever asks for them; some are for sale, but these
cost only a few cents.

The Forester, with his office at the national
capital, is the head of all the working body. And
its heart is the Bureau of Forestry, under the
Department of Agriculture.
CHAPTER XI
THE DELVERS IN DARKNESS

Peieaer fallen snow is like the white page
of a hotel register: every comer leaves his
record there.

A clever woodsman, looking at the footprints
in country snow, can tell us every traveler’s name.
There are delicate marks left by a bird’s light
feet. There, perhaps, is the track of a fox, much
like that of a dog, but with sweeps of the brush
among the footprints. Little field mice, creeping
over the snow, leave lines like the rows of double
stitching in old fashioned bedspreads.

Pairs of paw-prints show which way the squirrel
ran. Four foot-marks together making a fan-
shaped print, then a space, and then four more:
Br’er Rabbit leaped along here. And in wild
woods one may see tracks, like the marks of baby
hands, left by a raccoon.

A crow flaps heavily overhead, and we hear a
woodpecker hammering away, digging out the
grubs that, as he knows, are living deep in the
wood of trunks and branches. How much life is
astir, above the snow, in the winter forest.

114
The Delvers in Darkness 115

There are many living things under the snow
also. Down there are wood-ants, torpid in their
nests, chipmunks napping in their burrows, and
moles asleep in their underground homes.

Down there are grubs, and cocoons, and insect
eggs, and earth-worms, wriggled away below the
reach of frost. Still farther down are the tip
ends of tree roots, resting till spring. Many of
these root-tips live in earth which never freezes,
even in the coldest winters.

Freezing does not go very far down. Engineers
have to find out just how far it does go, because
water pipes and sewers must be beyond the reach
of frost. In New York, pipes are thought safe
if they have five feet of earth above them, while
in Buffalo or Cleveland they must be six or seven
feet below the pavement.

Even in the most northern parts of the country
the tip ends of long roots are always quite out of
Jack Frost’s reach. They need not suspend busi-
ness because of the cold. But the root-tips are
part of the tree, and so they stop working and
growing, just as all the rest of the tree does, when
heavy frost comes.

The tip ends of the tree roots collect water
from the earth — drinking is their special business.
All the water which the tree needs and uses is
gathered out of the soil by the slenderest, smallest
rootlets, and by the very ends of larger roots.
And all that part of the tree’s food which comes
116 Our Field and Forest Trees

from the earth—the mineral part — comes in
by way of the rootlets, in this earth water. The
thicker roots merely fasten the tree to the ground.

If the rootlets which live deep down were to
gather water from the earth about them in the
winter season, this water would do the trees no
good. It could not rise through the cold wood to
the branches and the buds. The branches do not
want food or drink — they are all
asleep. So in winter the rootlets,
busy little providers, needs must
take a long holiday.

When spring draws near, the
root-tips down below the frozen
ground prepare for action. Their
busy season is coming, and nature
gives to each of them a set of tools.
Out of every root-end grow a num-
ber of short cobwebby threads,
(Fig. 29). All together they look
like a narrow band of
short white fur Fig, 29. A, Seedling maple of the

natural size, growing the ee hairs;
wrapped about every 3, ,A,bit of the end of the root

fine root, just above
its tip.

A plant gets a set of tools like these in its
earliest youth, so that a good way to see the little
threads is to sow seeds of radish or squash in
damp moss. Though each thread is finer than a
hair (they are called “root hairs”), each of

 
The Delvers in Darkness 117

them is a tube. As the life of the plant goes on,
the older root-hairs nearer to the upper end of
the root fall away, and young ones grow out
nearer to the root-tip to carry on the work.

Roots grow as bank accounts and strings of
beads do, by getting more and more added to
them; and the part that was added last is always
at the end. In growing time the tip of every root-
let is quite new and very
tender, yet it is just this
tender part which must
dig onward through the
earth,

The root-tip would
be sadly bruised if it
were not protected. So
on its very tip every
root wears a tough little

: thimble, called the root-

Fig. 30. The tip of a root much
seared teniek the root hairs cap (Fig. 30).

The root-hairs
which are tubes, reach in between the grains of
earth after water, and find it even in dry places;
for when the soil has been drained of all the water
that will run out of it, there is still a wet film
clinging about every single grain.

Down where the root-hairs live there is gen-
erally enough water, in spring, to fill all the spaces
between the earth grains. In fine earth there are
more grains to be wrapped around with water

      
 

 

i;
118 Our Field and Forest Trees

films, and so garden soil holds water which would
run quickly through sand or gravel.

The little root-hairs act as if they were able
to understand their work and think about it. They
feel after the earth-water, hunt for it through
crooked places, and get enough for their needs in
soil which looks and feels quite dry. In groping
after this earth-water between sharp grains of
soil and sand the root-hairs, which were straight
at first, get bent, twisted, and flattened.

The water that they absorb has in it some min-
eral matter, about as much as there is in ordinary
well-water. Besides this mineral matter, which
is already dissolved in the water films around the
grains of soil, the plant collects some for itself.

Root-hairs can get a little food off the hard sur-
faces of rocks or pebbles. This was proved by
an experiment. A layer of sand was spread over
a slab of porphyry, and seeds of several different
kinds were sown in the sand. Then slab, sand,
seeds and all were put into a shallow dish, just
big enough to hold them and the sand-garden was
well supplied with water. In a short time the
seeds sprouted, and their little roots struck down
through the sand till they reached the porphyry.
They could go no farther in that direction. So
they turned sidewise and spread over the slab.
When the seedlings were turned out of their home,
and the porphyry was washed, lo and behold!
each finest rootlet had eaten off a little of the por-
The Delvers in Darkness 119

phyry and thus had etched upon the polished sur-
face a full length portrait of itself.

How far do a tree’s roots go down into the
earth?

Of course this depends partly upon the depth
of soil in the place where the tree happens to grow.
It depends much more upon the family habits of
that sort of tree.

Oaks and ashes put forth what are called “ tap-
roots,” which go far down into the earth. The
tap-root of an oak may be as long as its trunk.

A tree that grows like this, sending long strong
roots deep down, gets its food and drink from
layers of soil far below the surface.

Pines, hemlocks, and spruces get their living in
quite a different way. They throw their roots out
sidewise and gather most of their nourishment
from the surface earth.

So in a wood where oaks have been growing
for many years, nourishment may have been taken
from the earth deep down till trees with long tap-
roots can no longer get a living there. But in the
same wood, there may be plenty of nourishment
in the surface earth — enough to feed a forest of
pines.

In land where pines have lived and fed for
many years, the earth near the top has lost much
of its richness. But there are layers of soil below
from which nothing has been taken, and oaks,
with their long tap-roots, can reach down to this
120 Our Field and Forest Trees

richer soil. So through most of the eastern United
States, when the pine forest is felled, an oak for-
est grows.

Roots sometimes follow the water in a wonder-
ful way. Ifa tree stands near the edge of a pond,
its roots are apt to grow toward the moister soil,
so that those on one side of the tree will be much
larger than those on the other.

In the arid lands of the far Southwest there is
a bush called the mesquite, which turns its roots
so accurately toward underground water that it
shows the Mexican farmer where to dig for a
well. He follows these roots as a guide, and
sometimes, in their quest for water, they reach out
for sixty feet or more.

Our native trees, though they live where water
is less precious, feel after it and find it with like
perseverance (Fig. 31).

If a tree grows close to a pond or stream, so
that part of its roots reach out into the water,
they develop into what are called water roots.
These have no root-hairs. They need no special
arrangements for taking in water — their whole
surface drinks. They are smooth whitish threads
like those which dangle from hyacinth bulbs when
they are grown in water. Sometimes when a tree-
root enters a drain it puts forth such threads in
great numbers, so that the drain becomes filled
up and choked.

Stumps left by the woodcutters often sprout
 

aba gee ee. ts
me wo oe p

a

on stony

 

 

 

 

Photograph by C. B. Going.

was a seed, fell
€ seeking water.

it
See how far its roots go ou

sweet birch, which, when
ground.

iN

Tig. 31.
The Delvers in Darkness 121

forth again, and their shoots generally bear
leaves much larger than those which grew on the
tree. In the ground below the stump there are
still the many rootlets which used to take up
enough earth-water to feed the tree, with all its
countless leaves. Now all this nourishment is
being given to a few sprays. There is no other
way in which the maimed tree can use it. No won-
der that the sprays lengthen quickly and that the
leaves spread wide. Leaves, as we shall see, are
laboratories where the earth-water gathered by
roots is worked over into living plant substance.

This stump once had a full working force of
leaves. Now it has but a few, and they are trying
to make up in size what they lack in number. It
is necessary that they should be as large as pos-
sible, and they have been helped to grow by
abundant nourishment.
CHAPTER XII
THE ASCENT OF SAP

HE water from the mains, down under the

streets, goes up through standing pipes to

places where it is wanted in the top stories of tall
buildings.

The water which the root-hairs take in from the
soil is upward-bound also. This water finds no
pipes ready to carry it up and on through roots,
trunk, and branches — but it makes the journey
nothwithstanding.

The microscope shows that the root-tip is like
a honeycomb — all made of cells. So, indeed, is
every part of a tree —its wood, its leaves, its
flowers, its fruit, its seed (Fig. 32).

The root-hair is one narrow cell, or tube, and a
very thin wall separates its upper end from the
cell just beside it (see Fig. 30). This second cell
is full of sap, in which so many things are dis-
solved that it is much denser than the earth-water
in the root-hairs. The cell wall—like many
other membranes in animal and plant bodies — is
so made that gases or liquids can pass gradually
through it.

122
The Ascent of Sap 123

Anybody who has bought one of the toy bal-
loons made of colored bladder and filled with gas
has had a chance to learn that gases pass through
membrane. After a day or two, the balloon can
no longer fly up to the ceiling. There is not a split
nor a prick in it — yet it has lost all its bounce.
The gas has passed out and air has come in
through the thin bladder of which the balloon is
made. This happened because the air
on the outside of the bladder was much
denser than the gas on the inside.

In the same way, and in obedience to
the same natural law, a denser and a
lighter liquid will mingle slowly through
the delicate wall of a plant cell.

So the earth-water in the root-hair
oozes slowly through the thin wall which
separates it from the sap in the next cell.
Soon this second cell becomes From Farmer's Bulletin
swollen to many times its orig- 6. Wood of
inal size, and its wall gets spruce showing its
stretched till it can stretch no
more. Then in the same slow way water is drawn
through this wall into the third cell — and so it
mounts on up to the top of the tree.

We may say that the living cells pass the water
on from one to another all the way up to the
highest twig. This is the “ vital movement” of
the sap, and it has been called “the greatest
wonder of the spring.”

 
124 Our Field and Forest Trees

There is another movement of sap, which is
far better understood. This is called the ‘‘ mechan-
ical movement,” and it may begin while snow-
drifts are still deep in the fields. Anyone passing
through a birch grove, when the sun is shining
warmly after an ice storm, may find that drops are
falling from boughs which have had their ends
snapped off by the wind.

This dripping of the broken branches is called
“‘ bleeding.”” When the sunset chill comes, icicles
form, and they may be seen next morning hanging
from the broken boughs. These icicles are never
very long, because the ‘ bleeding” does not go
on all night. The twilight chill undoes the work
of the sunshine, and drives the juices of the tree
back into winter quarters.

Let us see where they go. The little cells which
compose the wood of trunk and branches are not
fitted together in neat straight rows, like the boxes
in a post ofice. Here and there among them are
spaces and crannies.

In growing time, the cells of the youngest wood
are filled, or partly filled, with a living jelly, much
like the white of a fresh and raw egg. This is
“protoplasm ’?—a word which means “ first
jelly.” Every living body, whether of plant or
animal, is largely built of this substance.

Plant-protoplasm, in growing time, contains a
very large proportion of water. But when cold
weather arrives a quantity of this water separates
The Ascent of Sap 125

itself from the protoplasm and withdraws into the
little spaces between the wood-cells. There it
freezes, making tiny crystals of ice. A winter
bough, broken across, will be found full of them.
They sparkle in a strong light like diamond dust.

The protoplasm, having parted with so much
water, is much denser in winter than it was in
summer. It becomes a stiff jelly, and in this dry
state it can live on through bitter weather.

There are some gases in living wood, and these
are contracted by the cold. The whole contents
of the bough have gone into winter quarters.

If we cut off a spray of sugar maple when the
thermometer is at zero, or thereabouts, the cut
end, examined out of doors, will appear quite dry.
But if the twig is taken into a warm room and
kept there for a quarter of an hour, the little ice
needles between the cells thaw out. Then the
gases expand in the warmth, and by their expan-
sion help to push fluid out of the wood and the
broken end of the twig begins to drip. The heat
of the house has done for the broken twig indoors
just what the warm sunshine did for the broken
branches out of doors.

When spring draws near, “the vital move-
ment ”’ of the sap begins. The root-tips, far below
the frost line, awaken. They grow a new work-
ing outfit of root-hairs, and begin to drink earth-
water from lower layers of soil, though perhaps
the surface of the ground is still frozen. Mean-
126 Our Field and Forest Trees

time the trunks and boughs, living out in the cold,
give no sign of awakening.

In the time of leaves, the water which comes
into the tree by way of the root-hairs finds its way
at last into the leaves. There some of it is sep-
arated into the substances and gases which have
been blended to make it — separated, sorted, made
over new into tree food — some of it is perspired
away through countless tiny pores in the leaves.

But in earliest spring, when the root-hairs begin
their work the buds on the branches above are
still sleeping. There are no leaf-laboratories
where the earth-water can be used in making food
for the tree, and no leaf-pores through which it
can pass out into the air.

Soon all the outer part of the trunk gets filled
with water; the youngest cells of the wood are
swollen with it. As the earth-water creeps
upward, it finds its way into many cells in which
starches and other plant foods are stored. These
provisions were gathered by the tree last summer,
and were laid away in some cells of the wood to
feed the buds of spring in their first growth.

When sunlight bathes the boughs and life stirs
at the roots, these stored-up starch grains become
changed into glucose, which is a sort of sugar.
This mixes with the earth-water coming up from
the roots, and the result is a sweet fluid creeping
on towards the branch tips. As old farmers say
“the sap is stirring.”
The Ascent of Sap 127

A sudden frost when the sap is moving freezes
all the fluid in the wood. When this happens the
trunk cracks open, and if the split goes deep, the
tree dies. Many Florida orange trees have thus
been killed by a return of winter after spring had
come, apparently to stay. If the frost crack is but
shallow, nature, after awhile, heals the wound,
but the trunk will bear always a lengthwise scar.

When the upward streaming has fairly begun
the lumbering season is over, for wood cut “in
the sap” will soon decay.

The mounting fluid contains some mineral sub-
stances taken up by the root-hairs, but it consists
mainly of water, mucilage, and glucose.

In early spring some trees are so full of sap
that it oozes slowly from any deep cut made in the
bark. The maple, beech, birch, and butternut all
“bleed” in this way if they are wounded early
in the season before their leaves unfold.

The sap of all these trees contains so much
sugar that it can be fermented. ‘‘ When I was a
schoolboy,” says an English writer of sixty years
ago, ‘‘ wine used to be made every year from the
birch woods near my home. This wine was sweet
and pleasant to the taste.”

In early spring a sweet sap flows from wounds
made in the trunk of the canoe-birch, and this
supplies the Indians with a pleasant, cooling drink.
By boiling, it can be made into syrup.

Sugar has been made from the Norway maple,
128 Our Field and Forest Trees

the ash-leaved maple, and the red maple, but the
sap of all these trees is thin and watery. A large
quantity of it boils down to make a disappoint-
ingly small measure of syrup.

The sugar maple is prized for the richness, as
well as for the abundance, of its sap. While the
snow is still lying on the ground the tree shows
that spring has awakened it by the ceaseless drip
of its watery blood into a tin pail, hung at its side.
When the sun warms the tree, in the middle of the
day, so that the sap ‘‘ runs well,” about seventy
drops fall into the pail every minute. It is a slow
business, but it goes on every day for about three
weeks. By that time the tree has parted with
twenty-five gallons or so of its life-blood. But
this boils down to rather less than five pounds of
sugar.

As soon as the maple leaves begin to unfold
the sap becomes less sweet, and the sugar made
from it is darker and has less of the peculiar
maple flavor, while the flow from the birch stops
altogether as soon as the flower-chains cast off
their winter nightcaps-and begin to lengthen. In
later spring, the best of the maple sap, and all of
the birch sap, is used as fast as it rises, to nourish
the waking flower-buds, to start young leaves to
life, and to help new shoots to grow.

So the sugar-maker’s season is a short one. It
begins when spring stirs among the roots, and it
ends when buds awaken and unfold.
The Ascent of Sap 129

Maple sap used to be boiled down in a large
caldron swung gipsy-fashion over an open-air fire.
Warm, flickering lights played over the snow, the
lilac-gray trunks of the maple trees, and the busy
workers stirring the pot and feeding the flames.
But today, on many farms, a patent evaporator
takes the place of the gipsy kettle, and a bricked-
in oven does the work of the leaping fire. The
new way is more economical — and far less pic-
turesque.

The Indians were the first makers of maple
sugar. Indeed, before the white man came, bring-
ing the sugar-cane and the honey-bee, this was
the richest sweet the red man knew. It came, too,
when the poor Indian had just gone through his
hungry time, the scanty fare, or perhaps the star-
vation, of the cold and cruel winter.

The Iroquois used to hold a public festival
every spring to celebrate the tapping of the
maples. ‘It consists,’ says a Government report,
written thirty years ago, “of a war dance which
will, it is hoped, bring on warmer weather and
cause the sap to flow. At the close of the sugar
season, follows the maple-sugar festival, the
soups of which are all seasoned with the new-made
delicacy. This festival, in which a number of
dances are introduced, lasts but one day.”

Now that cane sugar can be bought so easily
and cheaply, even at traders’ stores in the wilder-
ness, the Indians boil less sugar than they did,
130 Our Field and Forest Trees

and some of them are forgetting how to boil it at
all. But fifty years ago the Menomini used to
make many tons of maple sugar every spring.

The sugar-boiling season was opened by the
arrival of the first crows, flying back from the
South. It was eagerly expected, and became a
holiday for everybody. Each house-mother had
her own sugar hut, built in a grove of maple trees,
and she returned to the self-same spot each season.
She had provided herself with a number of sap
pans and buckets, made of four-cornered sheets
of birch-bark, with their edges turned up and their
corners folded in. ‘They were tightly stitched
into shape with threads of basswood, or with
strings obtained by splitting the fine rootlets of
the cedar. An Indian woman might have from
twelve to fifteen hundred of the birch-bark ves-
sels. Wooden sap-troughs were also at hand,
made from time to time in the summer season.

When the crows appeared, everyone was on the
lookout. As soon as the necessary camp outfit and
sugar-making utensils could be gathered together
each family moved to its own sugar grove. There
wigwams were put up for sleeping quarters, and a
wooden hut, with a roof of bark or mats, to
shelter the sugar-makers.

Sometimes we hear the Indians called lazy,
but there is a Menomini story of the maple and
the sap, which shows how well the red man knows
that work is good for the soul.
The Ascent of Sap 131

The first maker of maple sugar — so runs this
story — was Nokomis, the earth, grandmother of
Manabush, who was the hero of many Indian
fairy tales.

When Nokomis had cut holes in the trees, one
for each vessel she had made, Manabush looked
into the vessels, and saw that they were filling
with thick syrup.

“My grandmother,” said he, “it will not do
to have these trees produce syrup in this manner.
The people will not have any work, if they make
sugar so easily; they must cut wood, and boil the
syrup for several nights to keep them busy, so that
they may not form bad habits.”

Manabush climbed to the tiptop of a maple
and scattered water all over it like rain, so that
the sugar should dissolve and flow from the tree
in the form of sap.

This is why people always have to work hard
when they want to make sugar. Wood must be
cut, vessels must be made, and the sap that is col-
lected must be boiled for a long while, otherwise
the people would spend too much time in idleness.

So, thanks to Manabush’s kind interest in
Indian morals, the sap of maples has nowadays
less than four per cent of sugar.

The sugar-maker is helped by a series of warm,
sunny days, followed by sharp, frosty nights.
March gales help him by swaying the tree. Dar-
win, that great student of life and its laws, caused
182 Our Field and Forest Trees

a twig to drink some water containing a strong dye,
and then he could follow the travels of the sap as
it mounted through the wood. He found that
when he kept bending the twig to and fro with his
fingers the sap was forced to rise much faster.

The tree sways with every breath of wind.
Every time it bends, the wood-cells are squeezed
and the sap is forced out of them. Every time it
straightens again, the little tubes and cells fill with
sap from below.

But no one can really understand or fully ex-
plain the rise of the sap.

From the lowest root-tip to the topmost twig
of a gigantic tree, water may have to travel a
distance of three or four hundred feet. For much
of this distance it must climb straight up, and all
the journey is through tubes as fine as a hair. We
must remember, too, that these tubes are not con-
tinuous, like the water-pipes of a house. The sap
goes up through a long series of wood-cells like
little oblong boxes piled end to end.

Later in the year, when many leaves are spread
wide in the sunshine, water is breathed away from
the upper part of the tree. Some of the cells up
there part with so much moisture that their sap
becomes thickened, and this causes a suction which
draws more watery sap up through the wood from
below.

When summer is here, and growth is active,
there are, furthermore, little bubbles of gas in the
The Ascent of Sap 133

sap, and these, as they rise, help to bring the sap
up with them.

But even when all these things are considered,
we cannot fully understand how or why the sap
rises as it does. Its upward mounting is the great-
est wonder of the spring.
CHAPTER XIII

THE LIVING TRUNK AND BRANCHES

ee years ago, newspapers were telling

about the finding of a wonderful ship, which
had been lying for ten centuries covered by the
coast sands of southern Norway. Some forgot-
ten sea-king had been buried in his ship with its
prow pointed toward the sea, ready to sail forth
again on the day of Resurrection.

The ship was of oak, and though it had lain in
the sand for a thousand years, it was almost per-
fect. The wooden shields of the spearmen, gor-
geously painted, hung all a-row along the gun-
wale. There were the oars, and the holes through
which they were worked. The ship, under way,
must have looked like some many-legged creature
crawling on the surface of the sea.

The rowers’ seats were still strong and firm.
The ship’s water butt — a huge tub of pine staves
— was as perfect as when the crew dipped their
last draught from it.

Historians learned much about the construc-
tion of the ships in which Norse vikings used to
explore strange seas and pillage distant coasts.

134
The Living Trunk and Branches 185

And botanists received one more proof of the
durability of wood.

Wood can last, indeed, much more than a
thousand years. In some of the old cave temples
of India there are logs of teak, still in good con-
dition, though they were placed where they now
stand more than two thousand years ago.

Wood can outlast metals. Sun-bleached wrecks
lie on the coast with their timbers still strong,
while the nails and bolts which once held them
together are almost entirely rusted away.

It is true that logs and stumps, in the deep
woods, rot quickly; but this is because they are
bored by insects and eaten up, so to say, by tiny
but deadly plant enemies.

Timber — so strong, so lasting, and so neces-
sary to our work and life —is made of what?
A large proportion of it is composed of invisible
gases.

When wood is burned in the open air, all those
parts of its make-up which are akin to air pass
into the atmosphere in the form of gas.

There is always, too, a quantity of water in
timber. The closest, dryest logs are more than
half water. This will go off, when they are
burned, as invisible steam.

Only ash is left — made of the substances which
the tree took from the ground. This ash is never
more than one-tenth the weight even of the dryest
timber. All the rest of that mass of wood which
136 Our Field and Forest Trees

made up the trunk and limbs is changed back by
fire into a vapor and a breath.

The watery parts of the wood which pass off
as vapor when it burns have come into the body
of the tree by way of the root-hairs. Most of the
gases which go up and away in smoke and flame
have come in by the same lowly entrance —as
part of the earth-water. Before the gases and
the earthly treasures in this water could be made
over and built into the body of the living tree, the
water had to go into the leaves. Those are the
workshops where the soil water—or “ crude
sap’ — which the root-hairs take in from the
earth, is changed by foliage, air, and sunshine
working together, and made over into “ elab-
orated sap.” This elaborated sap is infant food
for pushing shoots and bursting buds, for length-
ening rootlets and for forming seeds.

There is one regular line of travel inside the
tree for crude sap going toward the leaf labora-
tories, and another line of travel for the elab-
orated sap coming from them.

The earth-water, or crude sap, mounts by way
of the youngest or “‘ sap”? wood. Nothing can be
prettier under the microscope than the cells or
vessels which the crude sap passes through on its
upward journey. The walls of some of them are
curiously pitted, and those of others are beauti-
fully marked with raised rings or corkscrew lines.

Crosswise partitions separate each vessel from
The Living Trunk and Branches 187

the one next above it, and these partitions are
sometimes level and sometimes set slantwise. The
crude sap, seeping slowly through the partitions,
moves through these vessels from the root-hairs
to the leaves.

At home or in the schoolroom we can try a
simple little experiment showing how crude sap
travels upward through a living stem.

‘Color a glass of water with a good quality of
red ink,” says an expert in the United States
Forest Service. ‘‘ Place some cuttings from live
branches of maple or willow in this water over
night. The next day split one of the branches,
and notice how the colored fluid has been drawn
into and up these stems.’ We will then see how
it has traveled upward, through the youngest
wood.

After the crude sap has been into the leaf
laboratories, and has been there made over into
elaborated sap, it moves slowly downward again
through the leaf-stalks and the boughs to some
actively growing point, or to some place where
the tree is putting away food for future use. But
on this return trip it travels always through the
inner bark, or bast.

The elaborated sap, coming down out of the
leaves, travels through the inner bark by means
of slender tubes, ‘‘ bast tubes,”’ having their walls
marked with exceedingly delicate lines and pat-
terns.
188 Our Field and Forest Trees

The wood vessels through which crude sap
moves toward the leaves, and the bast tubes
through which elaborated sap travels away from
the leaves, are clustered together, and with them
are tough fibers to give support and strength.
Botanists call the whole sheaf of vessels, tubes
and fibers a “ fibro-vascular bundle.”

The stem of a very young seedling, cut cross-
Wise, is just a honeycomb tissue of thin-walled
cells, all alike. It is all pith, and nothing else.

The stem of a tree one year old will show a
few bundles, making a dotted circle around the
outside of the young pith.

Next summer more bundles will form, in the
spaces between those of last year, but a very little
nearer to the outside of the stem. By the time the
tree is several years old there is an almost un-
broken ring of fibro-vascular bundles all around
the pith. Wood-vessels and fibers are on the
inside of this ring—pbast-tubes mingled with
fibers are on the outside.

In some shrubs and young trees, the ring of
fibro-vascular bundles is so close and compact that
the stem is like a strong tube filled with soft pith.
This is the case of the elder branches and willow
twigs. Both can easily be emptied of their pith
and whittled into whistles — as all country boys
know. .

As the elder stems grow old, their pith dis-
appears, leaving them hollow. The elder —so
The Living Trunk and Branches 1389

says an old legend — is cursed, and can never
grow into a tree because Judas hanged himself on
it. And the elder, says botany, cannot keep its
pith — and pith has its uses.

All native trees, except palmettos and palms,
retain some pith, though these remnants may be
very small and scattered. Here and there are
little spaces where the edges of two fibro-vascular
bundles do not quite meet, and in these are
squeezed remnants of pith.

We are told that in our own frames every par-
ticle of bone, skin, muscle, or nerve is renewed
over and over again, till in the man’s body there
is no remnant of the substance which helped to
build the body of the child.

But with trees this is not so. Some of the sub-
stance made by the seedling remains in the “ pith-
rays” of the old tree which has weathered a hun-
dred winters.

Lumbermen call this compressed and scattered
pith the “silver grain.” We can see it at the
ends of freshly-cut logs, as light-colored streaks
running from the center toward the bark.

In the cross-section of a young oak it is easy
to see the silver grain, and also the rings, one
outside another, showing the growth made by the
tree year after year. The little white star in the
very center is a remnant of pith (Fig. 33).

The tree uses these pith-rays as larders wherein
to store provisions for next spring’s busy growing
140 Our Field and Forest Trees

days. In autumn or winter, the cells which are
in the pith-rays may contain sugar or oil, and they
are almost certain to contain countless tiny starch
grains saved here to be
made over into nourish-
ing food for growing
shoots next spring.

When wood is cut
down in winter, many of
its cells are found to be
so filled with starch
ae grains that water cannot
Fig. 33. Cross “ection of ayoung P ass through it. So

‘““ winter-hewn lumber,”
as it is called, is greatly preferred for the staves
of barrels which are to hold liquids. ‘“ Summer-
wood” is much more porous, and the contents of
the barrel are liable to evaporate through these
pores.

In April, May, and June the trees are building
new substance. Around every trunk, between the
wood and the inner bark, there is at this season
a sheathing of young cells full of life and ready
to make new wood and new bark. These building
cells are called cambium. They get to work early
in the spring, and after their yearly task is well
under way trees can be easily peeled. As old
farmers say “ the bark will run.”

When we peel a bough we break many cells
of the innermost bark. In winter these cells are

 
The Living Trunk and Branches 141

several months old, and hence somewhat tough.
But when we strip a spring branch we break tender
new bark, and soft young wood, just forming, or
newly formed, and the sap which fills their cells
escapes, wetting our fingers. This newly made
substance is a green, moist layer, just within the
inner bark. Here the cambium is doing its work.

Perhaps we can try a little experiment, and
catch the trees in the act of building.

“ Early in the spring,” says an expert in the
United States Forest Service, “select a young,
vigorously growing tree, from three to four inches
in diameter, with a thin bark which peels easily —
for example, a willow or a box-elder. With a
sharp knife, make a horizontal cut, about one inch
long, through the bark. From each end of this
cut make a vertical slit extending upward for
about an inch and a half. Carefully peel back
the flap of bark thus loosened, being sure to expose
the young wood, and put a thin sheet of tinfoil
beneath the bark, on the exposed surface of the
wood. Turn the bark back into its place, and seal
up the cuts with grafting wax. Then at the close
of the growing season turn the flap back and look
at the tinfoil.

‘We notice that the new wood is on the outside
of the tinfoil. The cambium layer has built it.”

In spring, when growth goes actively forward,
large vessels and large tubes are a-building just
under the bark of all the trees. Cambium is at
142 Our Field and Forest Trees

work underground also at this season, making
large vessels and tubes just below the surfaces of
the big, woody roots.

Later in the year, when life is not quite so
vigorous in the forest, smaller vessels and tubes
are formed. So the difference between “ spring
wood ”’ and ‘‘ summer wood ”’ is easily seen, often
with unaided eye, and always with a pocket lens.

We may notice this difference on the top of any
stump. Spring wood often
looks as if it were full of
pin-pricks, because we see
in it so many round holes,
which are the ends of
large vessels and tubes —
now all empty. The sum-
mer wood is much closer
eee and more compact, and
Fig. 94. Top of a stump show- often it is darker in color.

So rings run around the
top of the stump, and by counting these we can get
an idea of the age of the tree, but cannot tell it
exactly (Fig. 34). For it is quite possible, if the
summer is rainy and the autumn warm, that more
than one ring will be formed in one year. Some-
times, too, summer growth is checked by drought
or by unseasonable cold, and begins again when
heavy rains fall, or when warm weather returns.
In such fitful summers, some enterprising young
trees may make half a dozen fresh starts.

 
The Living Trunk and Branches 148

Sometimes the extra or “ sub” rings in a trunk
can be easily detected, for, though several of them
may be made in one single year, the first cells
formed in spring will probably be extra large,
while the last ones, formed in late summer, will
be extra small.

 

Fig. 35. A, The ‘“‘stock” and “scion” prepared for “ approach
grafting”; B, ‘“‘ Approach grafting ” completed.
In like manner the wind grafts trees together in the wild woods.

But sometimes the sub rings are so broad and
so even that they might deceive even a Govern-
ment forester.

The age of a tree cannot be exactly told by its
rings except in a northern latitude, and in an even
climate, where the woods have a time of vigorous
growth, followed by a time of undisturbed repose.
144 Our Field and Forest Trees

In many orchards, when spring returns, we may
see apple trees bearing some boughs white with
blossoms, while other boughs, nourished by the
same root, can show only very small buds — or
perhaps stalks from which the blossoms have all
fallen away. An earlier and a later blooming
apple have been grafted together (Fig. 35); a
living shoot has been fastened to a living tree in
such a way that the two unite and become one
plant body.

If grafting is to be a success, the cambium layer
of the tree, and of the graft, must be close to-
gether in spring when new wood and new bark are
in the making.

While the gardener is busy with his buds and
his slips, the wind is doing some grafting too.
Here and there in the woods two branches chafe
together in the spring gales till all their bark is
rubbed away, and their cambium layers come into
contact. Then if growth is active, and the wind
does not undo its own work by keeping the boughs
in motion, new wood forms between the chafed
surfaces, fastening them together (Fig. 36).

So we may see a union formed between two
branches of one tree or two branches of the same
species; but a wind graft never joins two trees of
different kinds.

The gardener can graft together trees of dif-
ferent kinds, and thus he can outdo the wind. But
he grafts on only a small slip, or perhaps but a
 

 

 

va

Fig. 36. Neighbor beeches grafted together by the wind,

 

Photugraph by C. B. Going.
The Living Trunk and Branches 145

single bud. The wind can graft on a whole branch
— and thus outdoes the gardener. But the result
of the gardener’s surgery is a well-shaped tree,
whereas a wind graft often spoils the symmetry
of two trees.

When branches are united by the wind, their
ends beyond the place where they are joined are
apt to dwindle away and die. There is no cam-
bium now at the place where the boughs are welded
together, so no new wood is made there with the
return of spring. And as the fluids coming up
from the root move only through the new wood,
those parts of the branch which are above the
graft are not getting their full rations. At last
starvation does its work, and all that part of the
bough which is above the graft decays.

The beeches in the picture have been joined by
the wind in two places. There is one union near
the middle of the picture, and another in the upper
right-hand corner. The branch which reaches out
to the right above this union is dead, dried and
brittle (Fig. 36).
CHAPTER XIV
CORK AND BARK

I‘ we take a very thin crosswise slice of any

young woody stem and look at it through a
powerful microscope, we shall see near the edge
a ring of cells which look different from all the
others.

Most of the cells of the wood and pith are
round or oval, but these are square or oblong.
Most of the cells contain life jelly, but these are
empty. Most of the cells have colorless walls,
but these have brown walls. The oblong, empty,
brown-walled cells are cork.

Perhaps we are accustomed to think of cork-
making as a very exceptional accomplishment
among the trees — an exclusive business carried
on by the Spanish branch of the oak family only.

In fact, all trees make cork, all contain it, and
all need it. The little seedling has to begin cork-
making almost as soon as it begins growing.

Cork is just as necessary in the woods as it is
in the medicine chest, and is useful for the same
reason — because no fluids, gases, fumes, or
vapors can get through it.

146
Cork and Bark 147

The stem of a very young seedling tree is cov-
ered with a delicate skin of leaf-like texture. This
is but insufficient protection against parching. The
water which starts from the root-hairs to reach the
leaves must not be dried away and wasted while
it is on its upward journey. As the young stem
lengthens, something waterproof is needed to take
the place of the tender first-skin, and this new want
of the baby tree is supplied by a well-fitting suit
of cork.

A like covering is given to new twigs and sprays.
It appears as a very fine, transparent, brownish
skin.

This skin of cork, like all other parts of the
tree, is made of many cells; but instead of lying
somewhat loosely together, as plant-cells often
do, with a chink here and a space there, these are
arranged in rows, and they look as if they had
been fitted together and joined at the sides and
corners, as pigeon-holes are in a desk, or bricks in
a chimney.

There is some brown coloring matter in the
walls of cork cells, but inside they are generally
empty of everything except air, and perhaps a
few brown crystals of tannin.

So when there are several layers of cork cells,
one behind another, they act as the air space in a
double-walled house. The cork skin is a barrier
to summer heat and also to winter cold.

But also it is often a barrier between life and
148 Our Field and Forest Trees

death. No sap or moisture can get through it.
Any part of the stem or branch which is outside
the cork skin is quite cut off from its source of
supplies, and so it gradually starves, withers, and
dies. All the outer bark of a tree is such dead
substance.

Inside the trunk, earth-water is creeping up to
the leaves, and sap is coming down to feed all
that part of the wood which is inside the cork
barrier. But no sap can get through it to the dry,
cracking outer bark.

There is one particular set of cells in every
growing tree whose business it is to make cork.
Botanists call these cells the ‘‘ cork cambium.” It
gets actively to work in spring, when the leaves
are young.

The trees of the wood differ greatly in the out-
put of their cork factories.

The cork elm and the sweet gum make so much
cork that it forms curious ridges on the branches
and twigs. The beeches, on the contrary, make
but a thin sheet each spring, just enough to re-line
last season’s ragged robe of bark, and so keep
themselves well covered. And the trees differ not
only in the output of their cork factories but in
its situation.

In seedling trees of all sorts, the cork cambium
lies very close to the outside of the young trunk.
The beech carries on its cork-making each spring
near the surface of trunk and bough, and so do
Cork and Bark 149

the birches. The beautiful white robe of the
canoe-birch is just a sheet of cork. It is as thin
and strong as parchment, and is the outermost
covering of trunk and boughs.

But most trees wear their cork as an under-
vest, beneath their cracking, weather-stained outer
bark. And most trees remove the cork-making
business after a while from the outermost surface
of the trunk and boughs. In some trees curved
plates of cork form down beneath the surface, and
as all the wood outside these dies and dries, masses
of bark are gouged out of the living tree.

But if the curving cork plates stand upright in
the wood of the tree, they cut off scale-like slices,
such as we see on the trunks of larches, plane
trees, and old pines. The scales on the pitch pines
are irregular in shape, like the pieces of a puzzle,
and they dovetail and cling together, making what
is known as scale bark.

The outside cork-layers, made in bygone
springs, have quite lost their elasticity. When
they are stretched and strained by growing trunks
and swelling limbs they split in many places, while
the old dead substance outside the cork is deeply
cracked or split through and through.

This dead outside of the tree may contain cells
of many sorts, which in their lifetime served many
uses. Now we speak of them all together as the
“ outer bark.”

The rents in it go through everything till they
150 Our Field and Forest Trees

reach the newest cork, and can go no farther. So
their different ways of wearing their new union-
suits causes a great difference in the appearance
of the trees, even in midwinter.

When we see the deep rifts in the bark of the
common locust and the high, rough ridges between
them, we know that in this tree the newest cork
lies far below the surface of trunk and boughs.

The sugar maples, on the contrary, wear their
new cork robe just beneath their outer bark, and
so likewise do the beeches. So the rents in the
bark of these trees are shallow.

But, shallow or deep, they serve to remove the
outer bark, which cannot stretch, from the living
trunk, which must expand. The skins of animals
can stretch. But the bark, which is the skin of the
tree, cannot stretch, but gets torn off bit by bit. At
the base of pine trees in the woods, and all around
the boles of plane trees, lie flakes of bark which
dropped away from the living trunk.

Initials cut in the outer bark, or blazes which
have not gone deep, will lose their distinctness as
the bark around them drops, little by little, and
will disappear in from ten to twenty years.

The letters cut deep into the young wood dis-
appear also, after awhile, but in a different way,
and for a different reason. They become buried
from sight under many layers of new wood and
bark.

Most of us have had difficulty from time to time
Cork and Bark 151

with brittle corks which come to pieces when we
try to pull them out of bottles. They crumble
because they are full of dark-brown stripes of
powdery substance. These stripes were the
“Tenticels ” of the cork tree.

On the trunks of the birches, especially on the
oldest parts which
are nearest to the
ground, there are
rough black stripes
running part way
around the tree.
These are old len-
ticels.

On the smaller
branches of the
birch, alder, and
wild cherry there
are little humps,
much lighter in
color than the sur-
of tepiiticaréd bucks Coshowinglertices, TOUNding bark.

(From a drawing by J. G. Porter.) These are young
lenticels — and there is much to be said concern-
ing lenticels, both old and young (Fig. 37).

All trees have them on twigs, branches, and
trunks, but sometimes they are sunk in the pits and
channels of rough bark and very difficult to find.
On smooth-barked trees they are much more easily
seen, and they appear plainly on peeled-off sheets

 
152 Our Field and Forest Trees

of white birch-bark as a decorative pattern of
bright brown streaks.

Each lenticel is a lens-shaped opening in the
bark, filled in with cork cells. But instead of being
squared at the corners, and arranged in regular
rows, like the cells which make the trees’ union
undergarment, these are
rounded, and look as if they
were tumbled together in a
loose mass.

Between them are many
chinks and spaces, and through
these air gets into the wood,
while moisture and _ gases
breathed away by the tree find
their way to the outside air
(Fig. 38).

As autumn draws From Farmer’s Bulletin No, 173.

Fig. 38. Cross section of wood
near, seals of cork and atte of the western yellow pine,

grow under these lit- ei" the Botte oF ich
lenticels are placed.

tle vents, so that the

tree’s union undergarment is no longer porous.

These seals help to protect the wood from sudden

and bitter frost.

But their chief purpose, it seems, is to check
the breathing away of the tree’s moisture. The
cold season is vacation time for the rootlets that
were so busy all summer taking up water from the
ground. Water is not coming into the tree in
winter, so water must not go out of it.

  
Cork and Bark 153

When spring returns, a number of new cork
cells form, just beneath the sealed-up lenticel.
These are a light, loose mass, and by their strong
growth they split the seal above them and open
the little vent once more.

Cork can serve the living trees as surgical
plaster. It is often used by vegetation to cover
small raw spots and heal slight wounds. Every
little scar left on the bough by a fallen leaf is a
patch of cork.

Before the hottest August days have passed, a
very thin layer of cork begins to form in many
trees just at the place where the leaf-stalk joins
the bough.

At first this is not an unbroken sheet of cells,
but a very thin plate, incomplete and full of
gaps and holes. It lies across the softer part
of the leaf-stalks, but does not sever the woody
threads which tie the leaf to the branch.

At about the same time, or a little later, another
change takes place in the leaf-stem.

Just outside the forming cork plate there is now
a narrow band of rounded cells, lying together,
and with many empty spaces among them. This
is the “‘ absciss ” or “ cutting-off ” layer. One can
see it in some plants, when autumn is here, as a
pale band in the leaf-stalk. It is most noticeable
on the blackberry vines, where it appears as a
yellowish-green girdle just above the place where
the purple leaf-stalk joins the branch. The most
154 Our Field and Forest Trees

trifling cause will split this cutting-off band. The
weight of the leaf itself helps to tear it away.

By October the corky scale in each leaf-stalk
has gained its full thickness and has separated the
leaf from the branch almost completely. There
are still a few woody threads running from the
larger veins through the leaf-stem to the bough
and lightly tying the leaf to the tree. Frosty
nights and sunny mornings first freeze and then
thaw what little sap remains in these woody
threads, and thus help to break them. At last,
some cold night, a thin plate of ice forms in the
absciss layer. Then the last ties are broken and
the leaf and the branch are entirely separated.
When the morning sun melts the ice, the leaves
shower from the boughs, however calm the air.

And now Nature doctors the place which the
breaking of the leaf-stalk has laid bare.

The broken ends of the woody threads are coy-
ered, in many trees, by a protecting gum. A little
later they are surrounded by the cork, growing
closely around them and over them, and the heal-
ing of the scar is complete.

The falling leaves of the horse-chestnut leave
scars which plainly show the marks of Nature’s
surgery. The cork seal, which is very plainly
seen, has a horseshoe-shaped outline, and the ends
of the woody threads, overlaid by dark glistening
gum, suggest the horseshoe nails.
CHAPTER XV
BUDS

Ween we look up through the trees at the

sky, or down through the bushes at the
snow, we see that there are little knobs all along
the otherwise bare branches.

A forester would call these knobs “ winter
buds.” Every one of them is a little parcel
wrapped up very neatly and tightly by Mother
Nature, and not to be undone until spring comes
from the South to open all the buds of the wood-
lands with her golden sunshine and her silver
showers.

Winter buds are real surprise packages when
they do open (Fig. 39). On the tip of every
vigorous lilac branch there is a pair of green buds,
each rather large as buds go, but not half big
enough to fill a thimble. Yet when they open, in
April, we shall see that each contains four, or per-
haps six, small leaves and a great spire of blos-
soms. Lower down on the branches are buds con-
taining a whole shoot, a little stem, and on it
maybe fourteen or sixteen leaves folded one within

155
156 Our Field and Forest Trees

another. For every leaf bud there is a little
branch —a branch wonderfully tiny, tightly
folded, and fast asleep, and, in many cases, very
snugly wrapped up.

On the orchard trees there are what gardeners
call fruit buds; each of them cradles.a little cluster
of sleeping flowers, besides perhaps a few leaves.
All the white and pink sweetness of a bunch of
apple blossoms is
folded away now
inside a bud no
larger than a grain
of uncooked rice.

We need not be
wizards to see the
leaves and flowers
of the coming spring while the fields are white
with snow. We require only a needle, a little
patience, and a pocket lens.

In December, or even October, we can look for
next April’s willow pussies — and find them, too!

Beside roadside rivulets we may see the
“laurel,” or “shining” willow, easily known,
even in winter, by its smooth dark-brown bark
and glossy orange-colored twigs. At even dis-
tances apart are next spring’s buds, each enclosed,
like all the winter buds borne by the willow family,
in a single wrapping. This wrapping is made by
two leaves joined together by their edges and
grown thick and horny to suit their present busi-

 

Fig. 39. Extending buds of the tulip tree,
birch, and almond. ,
Buds 157

ness. They are protecting the tender- sleeping
things inside the bud from sudden freezing and
from dampness.

We can split the horny wrapping with a needle
and take it off so as to lay bare a small soft thing,
the bud itself. The parts of this bud are folded
together with that saving of space which Nature
practices when she does up a parcel, but it is not
a dificult task to separate them with the needle
so that we can see them all with the pocket lens.

There are five or six next summer leaves, each
quite perfect, with the toothing at its edges and
the branching of its veins. There is a little stem
between each leaf and the one next within the
cluster. This stem lengthens in the spring, sep-
arating the leaves, so that the bud, left to live out
its life, becomes a spray. The inmost leaves of
the bud contain the flower cluster, for on the shin-
ing willow, leaves and flowers appear together.

The upper surface of each leaf is thickly clothed
with hairs white and glistening as spun glass.
They are much longer than the little leaves them-
selves, and, felted together as they lie, in the bud
they are a warm covering against the cold. The
flowers, too, are clothed in ermine, but they are
almost too tiny to be seen clearly even with the
pocket lens.

However, the lens will show next spring’s flow-
ers on another dweller by the brook — the willow
that bears the downy, silky pussies — (Glaucous
158 Our Field and Forest Trees

willow). Its upper buds contain, as a rule, noth-
ing else but blossom clusters. Each is covered with
a united pair of scales, dark purple and leathery.
The fluffy oval which remains, after they have
been taken off, is hidden in its own fur. But split
the soft thing lengthwise, and the pocket lens
shows it to be next spring’s pussy, perfect in every
part. Lower down on the pussy willow bushes are
smaller buds containing only leaves.

On the hazelnut bushes are little green ovals,
clinging to the upper part of the branches, and
lower down on the branches are little green rods
hanging from the tips of the boughs. They are
next year’s pollen shedding calkins full of interest
to whomsoever will pick them to pieces and
examine their tiny perfection. It is hard, at first,
to find any buds at all on the honey or thorny
locust. Is this a shiftless tree, going to be caught
without a costume when all the other ladies of the
woods are putting on their beautiful garments to
welcome the summer?

Indeed, no! Under each of the horseshoe-
shaped scars, which mark the places where last
summer’s leaves grew, there is a little chamber,
hollowed, as it were, out of the wood. Its walls
are thickly upholstered with white fur, and in it
are three or four very small leaf-buds. They
have no wrappings, and they lie cuddled together
like naked birdlings in a down-lined nest.

But most of the buds borne by native trees and
Buds 159

shrubs are well wrapped up against the cold of
the winter and the rotting damp of the late autumn
and early spring. Many buds are protected by a
waterproof covering made of row within row of
horny scales, overlapping one another as shingles
do on a roof.

In some cases these scales are coated on the out-
side with a sort of varnish which prevents wet
from oozing in between them. When the first
warm sunshine of spring has melted the
gummy resin which covers the buds of
the Balm of Gilead (Balsam poplar),
one could find the tree blindfold by its
74 sweet warm fragrance. Even in winter
Fig. 40. <A tip-end bud of a the big brown buds have

hotaecbesmnk bowen. this strong aromatic smell,
so that we may make sure of the Balm of Gilead,
though it has not a leaf to show. Its buds, like
those of the horse-chestnut, are so thickly var-
nished that they feel sticky, and they shed water
like a rubber overcoat.

The tip-end buds on the horse-chestnut boughs
are natural wonders (Fig. 40). By opening one
of them with a knife, we find beneath the coat of
varnish and the many layers of scales a complete
blossom-bearing branch in miniature. The little
leaves, which Lowell compares to baby hands,
are covered with mittens of wool to keep out
the dampness and the cold, and in their turn they
protect the delicate pink spike of flowers. A

 
160 Our Field and Forest Trees

German naturalist once counted sixty-eight flowers
on one of these spikes in the bud!

Many winter buds are provided, like those of
the horse-chestnut, with warm inner coverings, of
down or wool. This fleece may line the bud scales
or clothe them (slippery elm), or fringe them
(beech).

Often the little leaves wear their winter cloth-
ing, instead of having it wrapped like a blanket
about them. When the young leaves of the white
poplar, or abele, make their first appearance in
spring they are covered all over with silky snow-
white down, as if they feared the cold. In sum-
mer the same down covers the tender tips of the
growing sprays and whitens the under surfaces of
the older leaves, and so the tree gets the name
““abele,” from a Dutch word meaning hoary. It
has accompanied the tree westward to England,
and then to the States. The leaves of the moun-
tain ash and those of the black oak come out into
the spring world as downy as chickens which have
just chipped the shell.

The leaf-buds of the beech are fitted out for
winters in the north woods. We can easily recog-
nize a beech tree even when autumn gales have
stripped it bare—its light gray bark is very
smooth, but with a dull surface like that of an
undressed kid glove. The buds, bright brown,
contrast prettily with the silver-colored bark, and
each tapers to a point like a well-sharpened pencil.
Buds 161

The young beech leaves inside these winter buds
are dressed in fur and also wrapped in blanketing.

Anyone who examines the winter leaf-bud of a
beech tree finds a number of small horny scales
around the outside. Within these are larger
scales, each fringed with long silky hairs; all the
outer scales are public guardians of the leaf
family sleeping under the bud.

After pulling off several of the fringed scales,
one finds the first leaf. It is perfectly formed but
is surprisingly small, and it is covered with silky
fur. There are from five to nine leaves in every
foliage bud of the beech. Each leaf has a scale
guardian all to itself, and also shares in the pro-
tection given to the whole family by the outer
scales. The beech, we see, has been prepared by
nature to live through long and hard winters.

In spring the scale of winter buds have finished
their task and their occupation is gone. They
are like guardians whose wards have come of age.
They have stood to their posts of duty through
all the gales and blizzards of winter, and now
they take their leave. For a little while they cling
to the unfolding sprays which they have safe-
guarded, but soon they shrivel and drop from the
boughs. Every spring breeze bears a shower of
winter bud-scales earthward. The down which
clothes the baby leaves in winter drops off as they
unfold, so that the sprays which came into the
world clad in furs are soon naked to April breezes.
162 Our Field and Forest Trees

As a general rule, buds that are well provided
with winter clothing grow on trees and shrubs
native to the northern climate, but the rule has a
few notable exceptions (Fig. 41).

The butternut for instance, and its cousin the
bitternut, or “ pignut,” go through Maine and
Canadian winters without, as it were, either water-
proof, furs, or flannels. The buds of
these trees are not covered even by
scales. A coat of very short rusty-
looking clammy hairs is their only pro-
tection. These hairs have the char-
acteristic butternut smell and taste, so
that we may readily know the buds
even in winter woods.

If branches are brought into the
house, and there cut and Be ais acerca
placed in water, they will fer oy. ave no vegetable
begin to bud as they do ‘
out of doors in early spring. Their growing
time however does not last long. Flowers and
leaves need food, just as animals and children do,
and they need it especially while they are growing
rapidly. While the branches are on the trees the
buds are fed during the growing season by food
which comes from the earth dissolved in water.
The roots, busy little providers, are at work col-
lecting this water from the soil. But the broken
branch, with no roots to forage for it, can only
unfold its leaves and flowers part way.

 
Buds 168

There is some plant food stored in the wood of
the branches, most of it in the form of tiny starch
grains. The leaves and flowers keep on growing
until this is used up, and then they begin to wither.

If a broken branch is taken into the warm,
moist air of a greenhouse it will live longer and
bud forth more freely than it would in the drier
atmosphere of a house. The dampness in the
air about it seems to make up in a measure for the
lack of what its roots, if it had any, would supply.
In early spring, florists’ windows are gay with
long sprays of garden shrubs in flower. These
have bloomed in the greenhouses, stuck in pots of
moist earth. The flowers are smaller and paler
than those which grow in their proper season
out in the gardens; but here they are — three
months ahead of time!

At home, or in the schoolroom, branches will
not do such great things for one. They may live
only long enough to get their bud wrappings
loosened and let us see how the little leaves have
been folded and protected. But that, after all,
is what we want. .
CHAPTER XVI
EXPLORING THE WOODPILE

LoS neatly stacked in the shed, with their

ends turned toward the public, show many
things which were hidden under the bark while
yet the trees stood erect in the forest.

Almost all the sound logs show a marked dif-
ference between their outer and their inner wood.
The outer wood is often lighter in color than the
inner — generally also it is lighter in weight, and
yields more readily to axe or saw. This is “ sap-
wood,” so called because its cells formed the
pathway of the moving sap while the tree was
standing and alive.

Toward the middle of most logs, the wood is
different in color, heavier, and harder. This is
“heartwood.” No sap moved through it, either
upward or downward when life was astir in the
woods last spring. No sap has traveled through
the heartwood of some of these logs for many
years.

For even the living and healthy tree has a dead
part as well as a living part. The dead part is the

164
Exploring the Woodpile 165

old wood toward the middle of the trunk, larger
roots and branches. This is completely sheathed
by the living part, and is of little use to the tree.
Heartwood has lost all power of growth, and
retired from active service. In it there is a large
proportion of mineral matter which the living
part of the tree is done with. Hence, when heart-
wood is burned it gives a larger proportion of ash
than does the sapwood.

The hearts of some tropical trees furnish the
very close, richly-tinted woods so precious to the
cabinet-maker. Others contain substances which
the living sapwood has rejected as useless to the
tree, but which are useful and pleasant to humanity
— oils, like that which gives fragrance to sandal-
wood; dyes, like that in logwood; or aromatic
gums, like camphor.

The heartwood of some tropical trees, indeed,
is so heavy and solid that it would sink in water
like stone. Hence the precious logs have to be
enclosed in cages of bamboo, that they may be
floated down Asian or South American rivers to
the coast.

But heartwood is of little use to trees, except
that it gives them support. The trees which crash
down before gales are often found to be diseased
at heart, though, on the other hand, we have all
seen forest giants rearing their heads aloft and
spreading their arms abroad when their trunks
were mere hollow shells.
166 Our Field and Forest Trees

Though the loss of heartwood is not a fatal
misfortune, the loss of sapwood is disaster indeed.
An oak, or other broad-leaved tree, deeply girdled,
is marked for slow but sure death.

The trunk of any growing tree is a tube of sap-
wood around a cylinder of dead heartwood. Every
year a little of the sapwood on the inside of the
tube turns to heartwood, and retires from active
life.

Meantime, on the outside of the girdled tree,
where all the inner bark has been cut away, the
tubes and vessels of the sapwood are being dried
and shriveled by sun and wind, so that the fluids
can no longer move through them. When the
death, by old age, traveling outward meets the
death by parching, traveling inward, there is a
cylinder of dead wood in the trunk. Fluids
cannot pass this dead cylinder at all either way,
and so the whole tree dies of hunger and thirst.

Though heartwood is dead, it will not molder
away unless it is attacked by insect or fungus
enemies. The sapwood covering it everywhere
is its armor of defense. Wounds made in this
live part of the tree are soon covered with gum
or resin—a sort of surgical plaster, which pro-
tects the injured place till nature heals it. But
any cut or wound, however small, if it goes deep,
may open a way for some fungus enemy to enter
in and devour. Heartwood has no vitality, and
cannot defend itself against its foes.
Exploring the Woodpile 167

Some of the logs in the woodpile show no cut
or break in their bark, yet all their interior has
been eaten by some destructive fungus. Now
there is only a mass of diseased substance in the
heart of the log — or perhaps the log is hollow,
because its good timber has been turned into
worthless powder, which has fallen out. The
enemy that did this was a tree-killing fungus.

The minute spore from which this destroyer
grew found its way into the wood, perhaps,
through some very small wound. This wound
may have been near the base of the trunk, or high
above ground. Bark or moss may have grown
over it and hidden it. The log may show no ex-
ternal break, and yet be a mass of disease within.

Most of the insects which make holes in timber
come from eggs which have been laid in the bark.
Little worms with big appetites hatch from these,
and begin at once to eat long tunnels in the wood.
Many logs in the woodpile are nurseries for grubs,
which some day will become beetles like their
mother who left her eggs in the bark. When
bark is stripped away, these eggs are removed
with it, and so—as every lumberman knows —
barked logs are the more durable.

On the end of every log in the woodpile we see
rings, and generally each ring means one year’s
growth of the branch from which the log was cut.
The age of the tree is shown by the number of
rings in its trunk, at the ground.
168 Our Ficld and Forest Trees

On the ends of the largest logs, the outermost
rings are smaller than those nearer the center, for
as a tree grows older, the layers of new wood
made each spring under its bark are thinner and
thinner. A Douglas spruce a thousand years old
has outer rings no thicker than tissue paper. In-
deed, some very old trees form rings so small that
one cannot count them without a hand-lens. Dur-
ing its last years a tree has scarcely strength enough
to build new tissue.

The timber diseases which foresters fight attack
the sickly and the aged trees. So lumbermen say
that old wood is undesirable, or actually useless,
for many practical purposes.

If we take from the woodpile an oak stick which
has been sawed lengthwise, and polish it with
sandpaper, we shall see that it has a flaked ap-
pearance. These flakes are the “‘ silver grain ’’—
the little streaks of pith, left among the harder
wood-cells.

We have learned that the living tree uses these
pith-rays as larders, and stores in them nourish-
ing starches to feed the opening buds of spring.
When a fungus spore gets into the wood of a tree,
and begins to grow there, this nourishment gives
aid and comfort to the enemy. The spore, when
it begins to grow, puts out little white threads,
which stretch and feed along the pith-rays first;
thence they penetrate the firmer wood-cells.

If a tree has been chopped up and put into the
Exploring the Woodpile 169

woodpile piecemeal, we may be able to compare
the old bark near the base of its trunk with the
much younger bark near its branch tips.

The bark of some trees, as they grow older,
changes so greatly in appearance that branches and
trunk scarcely seem to belong together.

A yellow or gray birch, when it is young, can
be known at once by the little soft curls of silver
bark which cling to its satiny stem. But as the
tree grows old, the satin coat, with its curly fringes,
is removed by time, so that huge gray birches may
be seen in mountain forests with trunks wrapped
in rough, deeply-channeled bark, as different as
possible from the satin coats still worn by the
younger boughs. There is just as great a differ-
ence between the flaked gray trunks of the old
apple trees and their smooth, olive-colored
younger branches.

On some sticks of the woodpile we shall prob-
ably find thorns, for they are borne by several
native trees.

The botanist makes a distinction between a
prickle and a thorn. A prickle is attached to the
bark only, and comes off when the branch is
peeled. But a thorn is a fixture. It has a wooden
backbone, and is part of the branch.

Sometimes, indeed, a thorn is a small branch,
stunted and gone wrong, and this has happened
because the plant lived in poor soil, lacked mois-
ture, or otherwise suffered hardship. Apple and
170 Our Field and Forest Trees

pear trees growing on abandoned farms often
bear thorns, and also short, spiky branches, as
sharp and stiff as knitting needles, which bear a
starveling leaf or two.

These thorns and prongs protect the trees
while they remain neglected, but when the or-
chard is cared for, and the ground enriched, they
“are apt to be re-converted,”’ says Darwin,
‘‘into branches.” Some trees, like the honey
locust, always bear thorns, whether they grow in
rich or in barren soil.

Their woody thorns prove themselves akin to
branches, because they appear just where sprays
might be found.

Those of the haws come from buds formed,
after the habit of leaf-buds, in the place where
last year’s leaves grew.

Those of the thorny locust grow beside the
scars left by falling autumn leaves, or they appear
on the trunk in bristling tufts corresponding to the
tufts of leafy sprays on the trunks of willows and
elms (Fig. 42).

And as leaf-buds can grow out into thorns when
the tree is rooted in poor soil and living a hard
life, the thorns which put forth one or two stunted
leaves remind us that under happier conditions
they might have been branches.

Uncared-for trees, living in poor soil, approach
the condition of desert shrubs, which are almost
always thorny. Fig. 43 represents an apple tree
 

 

Photograph by the author.

Fig. 42. An old willow living and leafing with all its heart wood gone.

 

 

 

Photograph by the author.

Fig. 43. An apple tree growing in an abandoned orchard, now used
as a pasture.
Exploring the Woodpile 171

living in an abandoned sandy orchard where cattle
browse. It bristles defiance to a hostile world.

On wild trees, especially those that grow in
pastures, thorns save the branches which bear them
from being eaten by cattle. The haws, which love
to live in open fields where cows and sheep browse,
are armed all over with woody thorns.

In city streets we sometimes see trees that have
been protected from nibbling horses by wooden
boxes which squeezed their trunks. Here in the
woodpile is part of a country tree which has suf-
fered in a similar way — its trunk has been tightly
bound by a fence wire.

In the time of leaves, water from the earth,
with mineral substances dissolved in it, goes up
through trunk and boughs into the foliage, and
there is changed by the help of air and sunshine
into liquid plant-food. Then that part of the
tree’s rations which is to feed the lower part of the
trunk and the roots moves downward through the
inner bark.

But in tightly bandaged trees the inner bark is
squeezed, and all the tiny tubes in it are flattened,
so that very little fluid can slip through them. The
nourishment which should feed the lower part of
the tree is held back. The lower end of the trunk
is not getting enough and its growth is checked.
Its share of food cannot get past the squeeze, but
is forced to stay and over-feed that part of the
trunk which is just above the tree-box or the wire.
172 Our Field and Forest Trees

So when, later, someone takes pity on the poor
tree and cuts its bonds, there is a raised band left
around the trunk.

The swellings which we call ‘‘ tumors” are also
caused by some interference with the natural move-
ment of sap. They are places where the tree was
once wounded or broken or attacked by some fun-
gus or insect enemy, or where, perhaps, some
young branch was torn away. When this happens
to a strong healthy tree a great quantity of sap
flows at once to the injured part, and the result is
a swelling or sometimes a huge lump.

Cabinet-makers call a swollen mass like this a
“ burl,” which is the old English word for a knot
in cloth. The inside of large “ burls”’ is often
found to be very beautiful. The lines of the wood
are twisted all through, and sometimes they will
coil and curve into lovely patterns.

We have said that the bark of trees is unlike the
skin of animals in this, that it does not stretch
when the body beneath it grows, but has to be, by
little and little, torn off. This constant tearing and
stretching has caused the deep furrows which we
see in the bark of the older logs. But sometimes
the bark of garden and orchard trees becomes so
dense and strong that it will not tear, and so the
trunk beneath it cannot expand. A tree in such
case is said to be “ bark-bound.”’ Such trees are
sometimes unable to develop, though they are
rooted in rich earth and getting the best of care.
Exploring the Woodpile 178

Sometimes the younger limbs, with their thinner
bark, can quite outgrow the trunk and the older
branches below them.

The remedy is to soften or split the tight, bind-
ing bark. The farmer tries the effect of washing
the bark-bound parts of the tree with lye, and if
the squeezing bark is not softened and stretched
by this treatment, he thrusts the point of a knife
through to the wood and then draws the blade
down the entire length of the bark-bound portion.
The slit can scarcely be seen at first, but it opens
with the growth of the freed tree and new bark
fills in the opening.

In the woodpile we find a piece of the trunk of
a tree with a bare stub sticking through the bark.
This is the remains of a limb, and nearly as old
as the tree itself, because it starts from near the
center of the trunk. That means the limb began
to grow soon after the tree did.

If the stub had rotted quite away, a squirrel,
woodpecker, or tree-swallow might have set up
housekeeping in the hole.

Wherever the blade has cut across a branch in
sawing a board, there will be a “knot” in the
timber. If the knot is loose it falls out, and the
boards are disfigured by “‘ knotholes.” This is
why the lumbermen prefer the trees which grow
straight up with few side branches. Knotholes
and knots in boards, let us remember, are cross-
sections of branches,
174 Our Field and Forest Trees

Knotholes in the bodies of trees are the cavities
left by dead and decaying limbs.

Sometimes a bough becomes weak because the
sister boughs above it are taking more than their
share of air and light. The plant and insect
enemies that attack the weaklings of the forest
prey upon the starveling branch and it dies. It
rots slowly away, its twigs fall; at last a gale or
an ice storm snaps it off the tree, and a raw scar
is left on the trunk.

The tree makes an effort to cover the scar.
New wood and new bark are made each spring in
a raised ring, which closes slowly over the scar if
it can.

But if a branch is broken or cut away from the
tree so that a long stub is left sticking out, the
ring of new wood and bark cannot rise high
enough to cover the bare place.

Seasons come and go, and the stub does not
“heal in.” If the tree has been pruned, it is a
lasting disgrace to the man who did the pruning.
And the bare surface of the exposed wood, over
which bark cannot grow, is a trap to catch and
hold any stray tree enemies that fly abroad. If
the branch had been cut away close to the trunk,
new wood would have formed each spring over
its surface, and by and by the trunk would have
been smooth and symmetrical, showing no scar.

There are of course differences among the trees
in their power of healing. It varies in different
Exploring the Woodpile 175

kinds of trees, in different trees of the same kind,
and at different seasons. It varies according to
the tree’s age.

We have seen how much narrower the annual
rings are on the outside of large logs. As the
tree ages, its power to heal itself diminishes with
its power to grow.

When logs are sawn into boards, many knots
come to light which have been buried under
growth ring after growth ring. A pile of boards
shows us that Nature is a severe pruner, and that
limbs must be sawn off close to the parent trunk if
wounds are to heal well.

And log-pile, woodpile, and forest all teach us
that the tree as it stands is the remainder of a
long problem in subtraction.
CHAPTER XVII

BLOSSOMING

[HE white-and-pink loveliness of the May
orchards is a delight to us all. Everyone has
noticed the great spires of bloom on the horse-
chestnuts, and the long, sweet clusters of white
bean flowers which hang from the locust trees in
June. The linden blossoms attract attention by
their clover-like fragrance, and by the humming
of the insect throngs which gather about them.

But few of us realize that all the trees blossom.
There are flowers, in their season, on the sturdy,
weather-beaten oaks, flowers on the maples and
the elms, and there is a time in early summer
when all the dark evergreen forest breaks into
bloom.

With the exception of a few tree-ferns growing
in greenhouses or warm garden-spots, every tree
in the United States, native or imported, bears at
some time in the year what a botanist would call
flowers.

Some of these, however, would not look like
flowers to anyone except a botanist, and even he
would describe them as “ imperfect.”

176
Blossoming 177

For among the trees we find flowers of two
sorts: “imperfect” and “‘ perfect.”’

Let us speak of the “‘ perfect’ flowers first.
Some lawn and forest trees bear blossoms as com-
plete and charming as any lily or pansy which the
garden can show.

 

Fig. 44. Cherry blossoms. A, A flower cluster; B, A
aes blossom cut vertically; C, One-half of the ripe
cherry.

The tulip tree, locust, and catalpa all bear per-
fect flowers; so do the ‘‘ Pride of China,” the
linden or lime tree, and the mountain ash.

Fruit blossoms, too, are perfect — that is to
say, they have all the parts which belong to a com-
plete flower (Fig. 44).

In the very center of a cherry blossom there is
a slender upright column, colored a delicate green.

This is the pistil.
178 Our Field and Forest Trees

Its business, like the business of every pistil in
every flower, is to form the seed, and then nourish
and shelter it until it can take care of itself out in
the great world. There is just one pistil in the
cherry blossom, and in it is one single seed — the
cherry stone.

The cherry blossom has just one duty and one
aim in life, and that is to form and develop this
cherry stone.

Indeed, all flowers blow and bloom in order that
their seeds may live, but only a few are so made
that they form but one seed, and so put all their
efforts into one single venture.

Often there are several pistils in a single blos-
som. Often, too, when there is but one pistil, a
number of possible seeds lie hidden within it. If
some of these fail to develop, or to ripen, others,
perhaps, will have better luck.

The pistils of the honey locust and of the Judas
tree are little pea-pods in miniature. Each con-
tains a row of tiny green bodies, which are seeds
“in the making.”

But no one of them can become a perfect seed
without the help of “ pollen.”

This is a dust-like substance, yellow in all our
native trees, and sometimes as fine as the finest
powder known to the cook or the doctor.

Pollen is shed by the “ stamens ” of the flowers.

The stamens of the cherry blossoms are slender
threads tipped by little knobs, which are yellow
Blossoming 179

in young flowers and brown in older ones. These
knobs are double pockets, and soon after the
flower opens, these split lengthwise and let out the
powder which they have held.

The thread-like part of the stamen is a “ fila-
ment.”

The powder pocket at its top is an “‘ anther.”

The pollen which comes from the anthers of
flowers is far more precious than gold-dust, for
without it no seeds would be developed.

Some bee or fly, seeking honey among the
cherry blossoms, and roving from branch to
branch in her search, will brush against a set of
anthers and be dusted with pollen.

When she goes, all powdery, to another cherry
blossom, some of the grains which have been
clinging to her hairy body get rubbed off onto the
pistil of flower number two.

The pistil-tip, or ‘‘ stigma,” is sticky, so that
the pollen which comes to it may be held and kept.

The pollen grain, directly it arrives on this
little gummy place, begins to grow. A slender
tube comes out of it (Fig. 45), and this stretches
downward, inside the pistil, much as the rootlet
of a seedling grows down into a pot of earth.
Hidden away within the base of the pistil, shel-
tered and safe, there is a tiny green thing (ovule),
which can develop into a seed some day.

The tube pierces this half-made seed, and down
the tube passes an exceedingly tiny drop of jelly.
180 Our Field and Forest Trees

Inside the ovule there is a similar speck of jelly.
These two jelly specks meet, join, and melt
together, and from the union of the two, the baby
plant, which sleeps in
every perfect seed, is
formed.

If the speck of jelly in
the forming cherry stone
can become a baby plant
by aid of pollen brought
from another blossom,
the young tree which will
sprout from that cherry stone is more
likely to be strong and hardy. But if the
pistil receives pollen from the ring of
stamens standing around it, the seedling
which will grow from this cherry stone
stands less chance of beginning life with
a good constitution.

The flowers seem

He ae Wiles aeaniecaiting the anxious to do their

best for their children,

the seeds, for each tries in its own way to get

pollen from another flower, and to send its own

pollen away. The messengers which fetch and
carry are breezes and flying insects.

Many flowers can form no seed at all without
the help of their messengers. Some of the chest-
nut blossoms, and some of the maple blossoms,
have stamens and pollen, but no pistils. Some

   
 
Blossoming 181

have pistils but no stamens and no pollen, and
cannot do their work unless insects come to help
them.

No seed can be formed without the ovule and
the pollen, and so the pistil, which shelters the
ovule, and the stamens, which produce and shed
the pollen, are called the “‘ essential organs” of
the flower. The pretty white or colored petals
which catch our eyes, and may seem to us the
flower itself, are merely its garments.

Any flower which relies on insects to fetch and
carry pollen for it must attract the notice of its
little winged friends by color, or whiteness, or
fragrance. And most of the flowers which depend
upon the help of insects pay their messengers with
drops of nectar.

The cherry blossom charms the passing fly or
bee by a pretty show of white flower leaves — the
petals.

Sometimes, as in the apple and cherry blossoms,
petals are separate. Sometimes, as in the catalpa
or trumpet-vine, they are all joined together into
acup or tube. All the petals of a flower together
make up its “ corolla” — or little crown.

Outside the corolla, in a perfect flower, is the
“ calyx ’? — or little cup.

The calyx of the cherry blossom holds the pistil
in its depths, while the petals and the stamens are
arranged in a ring just inside its rim.

The calyx of a flower cradles its tender inner
182 Our Field and Forest Trees

parts while they are in the bud, and, in some
cases, it closes over them and shelters them at
night, or during stormy weather. Sometimes it
joins fast to the base of the pistil, as summer goes
on, and we meet with it in autumn, changed and
grown out of all knowledge, and forming part of
the fruit.

Most of the insects which love nectar and carry
pollen thrive best where summers are long and
warm. And trees which depend upon insects to
carry pollen for them cannot go on living, gen-
eration after generation, where the summers are
too short or too cold to suit their winged mes-
sengers.

The catalpa, buckeye, tulip tree, magnolia, and
rhododendron grow wild only where insect lovers
of the sun are numerous, and the long summers of
the south give the trees plenty of time to enter-
tain their winged friends, and then ripen their
seed.

In the far northern states and Canada, these
trees are seldom found, except in cultivated land.

In northern parks and gardens they bear but
little seed, perhaps none at all. Their blossoms
may appear freshly adorned to receive company
just when a spell of cold, rainy weather has driven
the butterflies, humming-birds, beetles, wasps, and
bumblebees into hiding. Or if the flowers open
in sunshine, and insects visit them, early frost may
prevent the seeds from getting ripe.
Blossoming 183

Where these brightly blossomed trees have not
been able to form or ripen seed, in summers that
are past, they have left no tree children to succeed
them. So north of the latitude of Boston there
are not many wild trees which blossom brightly,
and yield plenty of honey.

The locusts, with their long, dangling clusters
of white bean
flowers, are most
at home in the Ap-
palachian Moun-
tains and in the
Ohio Valley.

The wild bees
of the north
woods have only
one very good
wild honey tree,
and that is the
linden. However
deep in the forest Fig. 46. Hloaets at te eu sopeae linden,
lindens grow, bees
are guided to the dangling, greenish-yellow flow-
ers by their rich odor of nectar (Fig. 46). Who-
ever tramps the woods, in linden blossom time,
might find the murmuring trees blindfold by his
senses of smell and of hearing.

The wild-cherry trees, when they bloom, spread
their table for flies, and pollen is carried from
one wild-cherry blossom to another on the hairy

 
184 Our Field and Forest T'rees

bodies of these insect friends. The invitation
which the wild-cherries send to their messengers
is an odor, not very pleasing to our taste. It is
not meant to please our taste. The wild-cherry
blossoms and the flowers borne by the American
hawthorne are trying to attract their friends, the
flies, by breathing out this heavy scent. It is sweet
when it is blown to us across wide fields, but when
the flowers are brought indoors, their smell sug-
gests something stale or putrid.

The chestnut blossoms offer another feast to
the flies, later, when cherries are nearly ripe, and
they attract their visitors by an odor very unpleas-
ing to many people. The chestnut bears two sorts
of flowers. There are long, creamy spikes on the
chestnut trees, covered with flowers which have
one work in life: to yield abundance of pollen.
After the insects have covered their bodies with
the yellow dust shed by these long blossom spikes,
they will fly, still seeking nectar, to shorter flower
spikes, growing at the ends of the chestnut boughs.
At the base of these short spikes are flowers which
have pistils but no stamens, and these ripen into
the chestnut burrs and their nuts.

Flies can thrive far north, because their lives
are so brief that a very short summer is long
enough for them. So we find some fly-flowers —
haws, wild cherry, and mountain ash — growing
far northward into Canada.

The trees which send their pollen from flower
Blossoming 185

to flower on the wind can form plenty of seed
without the help of insects. Such trees can live
generation after generation in lands too cold and
bleak for butterflies or beetles, for wasps or bees.

And so the evergreens, which depend altogether
upon the wind as a pollen-carrier, can form seed
in the far north, and live there generation after
generation.

A bee goes straight from one cherry blossom
to another. She does not waste her time, and she
seldom mixes her nectars. The grains of cherry-
bloom pollen, clinging to her hairy body, are
almost sure to be taken at once to the place where
they are needed —the pistil of cherry blossom
number two.

But the winds are careless and wasteful mes-
sengers. ‘Trees which rely upon their services
must yield quantities of pollen so that there shall
be enough to meet the needs of the family after
the reckless breezes have spilled all they will.

The long, swaying tassels from the spring
boughs, if brought indoors, will astonish us by
the quantity of yellow powder they shed beneath
and about them. Most of the trees which employ
breezes as carriers bloom in earliest spring.

Leaves would sadly interfere with the flight of
pollen. blowing from flower to flower or from
branch to branch. The precious dust would be
caught by the foliage and wasted there, instead of
finding its way to the pistils which need it.
186 Our Field and Forest Trees

So, many tree flowers come and go before the
leaves expand.

 
   
  

Fig. 47. Blos-
soms of the oak:
A, Pollen - shed-
ding, or staminate;
B, Pistillate.

These flowers are
often very imperfect
indeed. Perhaps only
a botanist would con-
sider them as flowers
atall. One “ flower”
may be just a pistil,
or a little group of
pistils, with a few
scales. And the sta-
| mens with the pollen
for these pistils grow, mingled with scales, in
long, swaying dangles, called ‘“‘ catkins” (Fig.

47).
Blossoming 187

Such pollen is light and dry, so that it can fly
far on the winds of spring. The catkin itself
sways and swings at the lightest breath, so that

 

A, The silvery tassel.

  

C, A pistil with its cov- D, Stamens and fringed
ering scale. scale,

Fig. 48. Willow flowers,

the plentiful pollen is shaken loose. And the
pistil, which must catch it, reaches out for it with
two wide-spread arms, very sticky, and covered
with short hairs.
188 Our Field and Forest Trees

A few of the early-blooming trees get their
pollen carried for them. by flying insects.

We may have noticed the “ swamp” or “ red”
maple, ‘“ crimsoned like a coral reef” to please
the April bees, and pussy willow shows her silvery
and her golden tassels even earlier in the spring.
The silvery tassels are groups of pistils, each cov-
ered by a fringed scale. The golden tassels are
colored by the bright heads of many stamens rais-
ing themselves above the furry scales which have
been sheltering them from the cold (Fig. 48).

These are ‘‘ imperfect” flowers indeed, but the
children and the bees give them a joyous welcome.
They come when the thickets are still gray and
bare, and they make quite a brave show in the
world, even though they have no corollas.

The silvery whiteness of their furry fringes, and
the gold of their stamens, like the rich scarlet
petals of the red maple flowers, attract the first
flying insects of the year.

But the tree flowers of earliest spring, as a rule,
are not brightly colored. They are not trying to
attract the notice of insects, and their old stand-by,
the wind, does not care how they look.

Almost all the first tree blossoms are olive or
brownish or green, or dull, dark red. They are
many of them high overhead, too far above us
to be clearly seen.

They come just when we are looking for the
first foliage, and they are often mistaken for
Blossoming 189

young leaves. And thus it comes about that not
only in the woods but in the city streets, far above
the sidewalks, a million million flowers come and
go almost unobserved.
CHAPTER XVIII
ABOUT GREEN LEAVES

QUMe of us have seen in the tank of an aqua-

rium a white or rosy mass of living coral. All
over its surface there is a quivering, fluttering
movement of something that looks like living
swan’s down.

If the tank is roughly jarred this movement
stops; the quivering swan’s down disappears.
The “coral insects,” as they are called, have
shrunk away into hiding. Their feathery feelers
which generally wave about in search of floating
food, are for the moment tucked out of sight, and
the coral looks like a bare uninteresting stone.
After a moment’s quiet, the countless feelers
spread forth again, and the coral shows that it is
alive.

Years before these coral ‘‘ insects’ were born,
their forefathers and mothers were waving their
plumes, and doing just what this generation is
doing now, gathering mineral substances out of
the sea, taking the mineral into their own bodies
and forming it into solid coral, firm and hard as
rock. So, in generation after generation, the coral

190
About Green Leaves 191

insects, so tiny and so short-lived, have gone on
building, till they have made countless islands in
the purple tropical ocean — islands so large that
villages can be built upon them.

A tree with its million leaves is in some ways
like a bank of living coral. It is a great colony
of workers, each doing its part, during its short
life, to add to a structure which was begun long
ago, and will continue to grow for many years
after the worker is dead. The structure which
all the leaves are helping to build is the woody
part of the tree — its trunk, boughs, and roots.

Each summer’s leaves give up their task at
summer’s close — but the work is taken up again
by a new generation of leaves the next spring.

Each leaf does its own work in its own place,
yet all the little efforts, put together, add to the
size and strength of the tree.

The summer work of the leaves does not begin
at once. For the first few days after they have
cast off the enfolding bud-scales they “‘ just grow,”’
like Topsy. During this growing time they are
fed on supplies gathered and put away last year.

Most of the trees turned these savings into
starch grains—convenient for storing. But
young shoots could not be nourished on such dry
food as this; so the starch is changed, when spring
comes, into fluid ‘‘ glucose,” and this is taken up
by the mounting sap and carried into the opening
buds.
192 Our Field and Forest Trees

The leaves enjoy a butterfly time when they live
on sweet things and do no work, and in this, their
one holiday, many of them wear gay colors.

Little maple leaves are crimson or purple; those
of the willows are golden green; and budding oaks
mist the hillside woods with pink. The green
color is part of the leaves’ working outfit — and
they will not put it on till they get to work.

While leaves are still young, they are full of
folding creases. Now we can see how they have
been packed into those surprising buds, which look
so small in winter, and disclose so much in spring-
time.

The leaves of the cherry and of the oak have
been folded down the middle, so that their sides
come together like the covers of a book. Maple
and currant leaves have been plaited like fans; and
in the buds of the plum tree, each leaf has been
rolled like a scroll.

Soon the rolls and wrinkles which have been
made by tight packing are shaken out, in spring
breezes. Soon, too, the golden, bronze, or rosy
tints are changed to green — which, in the plant
world, is the color of honest work.

The leaves’ work is to prepare the plant’s food.
Each leaf might be called a little kitchen, or a
little factory. In it minerals and water, taken
from the earth by the roots, and gases, taken from
the air by the leaf itself, are made over new into
plant substance.
About Green Leaves 1938

When a tree is stripped of its foliage, no new
wood is formed till new leaves bud forth and
unfold.

With water and air to work on, and sunshine
as a helper, leaves make not only wood but cork,
the tender petals of flowers, the flesh of fruits,
the hard shells of nuts; and also the many vege-
table oils, gums, dyes, and essences which are used
by artists, doctors, manufacturers, and confection-
ers. Leaves are made to do this work well.

Through every leaf there runs a network of
woody threads, which branch and branch again
till they are as fine as cobwebs. We call this net-
work the “ skeleton,” and it does serve one use
of the bones in an animal frame, for it supports
the leaf, giving it shape and strength. But these
woody threads have another use. They are path-
ways for sap, which is always creeping slowly
through them. All the leaf ‘“‘ veins” are joined,
through the leaf stalk, with long lines of vessels
and tubes, fibro-vascular bundles leading up from
the root and down again.

With a magnifying glass we can see that the
green leaf tissue between the veins is made up of
cells, row after row. Those on the upper side of
the leaf are generally long and narrow, and they
stand upright, pressed together as closely as the
stakes in a palisade fence (Fig. 49). Hence this
is called “‘ palisade tissue.” But on the lower side
of the leaf the cells are of different shapes and
194 Our Field and Forest Trees

sizes, and they lie loosely together like the stones
in the rough walls which border New England
lanes. Among these cells are a number of gaps
and chinks — “‘ air spaces.”

Each separate leaf-cell is a little bag of delicate
transparent skin, filled
with colorless jelly.
This jelly has been
named “ protoplasm,”
which means ‘the
first thing molded.”

Every living creature,
fear Ua eee aod pected cine vegetable or animal,

ing a section of the thickness, the fs ‘
difference between the upper and 1S largely built up of

lower tissue, and the breathing pores. 2

protoplasm. Chemists
tell us that it is made up of six substances, and
three of these six are gases. But in the living
jelly which fills the cells of summer leaves, the
proportion of these six substances varies, almost
from moment to moment as work and growth
go on.

The protoplasm in the cell is the important
part. The wall around it is merely to give
strength and support. To a student of nature,
the jelly-like mass of protoplasm is the “ cell.”

Though the protoplasm in the leaf-cells is clear
and colorless, it is full of floating specks of green,
so many and so vivid that they give their tint to the
whole leaf. These are ‘“‘ chlorophyll bodies,” and
they cause the green of summer fields and woods.

 
About Green Leaves 195

The palisade tissue on the upper side of the
leaf contains many cells, and in them all plenty
of green chlorophyll bodies. But on the under side
of the leaf the cells are fewer and farther apart,
and where there are not so many cells there is, of
course, less chlorophyll. This is one reason why
the under surfaces of leaves are often pale.

Chlorophyll is formed only in the sunlight.
Tender young leaves which have been shut up
under bud-scales in the dark have as yet very few
of the useful little grains.

Budding foliage is seldom really green. But
as soon as the leaves come out into the sunshine
chlorophyll bodies form within the cells in count-
less numbers, and their intense color soon over-
powers the tints of early spring.

Over the whole leaf, veins, cells and all, there
is a very delicate transparent skin. This is a sheet
of oddly-shaped cells, fitting into one another,
with tongues and curves, like the pieces of a puz-
zle. Generally these contain no chlorophyll, so
that the leaf skin, or “ epidermis,” is transparent.

Some leaves borne by tropical plants are pro-
tected by a very thick skin — but for this the fierce
sunshine would dry all the juices out of the foli-
age. The India rubber tree, a native of the East
Indies, has leaf skin composed of three layers of
cells.

The green color in a living leaf is a lure to
catch the sunbeams, and when they are caught they
196 Our Field and Forest Trees

are made to help the leaves in their work of food-
making and tree-building.

Several things must be just right before this
work can go on. Sunshine must fall upon the tree,
carbonic acid gas must be mixed in the air sur-
rounding it, the weather must not be too cold, and
water must come up from the roots into the leaves
and green stems.

The first thing which the leaves make is starch.
On a bright summer’s day a large tree can make
more than a pound.

The newly made starch in leaves appears in tiny
grains inside the chlorophyll bodies, or close
beside them. It does not remain there and grow
into larger starch grains, but when the sunlight is
withdrawn it seems to melt away.

It has been changed into glucose, and this trav-
els slowly along, passing through cell after cell,
till it reaches some growing part of the tree, where
it is used at once, or some resting place where it
is turned back into starch again, and stored away
to meet the needs of the future.

In spring all the starch which the leaves make is
changed to glucose and used at once to ‘‘ grow
on.” But in late summer the tree puts it away.
The starch grains may be saved in wood or pith to
feed next spring’s buds and shoots, or they may be
packed into seeds, ready to support the tree’s chil-
dren till they grow big enough to take care of
themselves.
About Green Leaves 197

We have learned that the trees cannot make
starch without water. They need water, too, for
many purposes besides starch-making.

Tiny leaves, just out of the bud, need a large
quantity to fill them out, and still more is required
to swell juicy berries and fruits. Dead leaves and
dried fruits weigh light because they have parted
with most of the water which they once contained.

If the trees are to thrive they must get a num-
ber of mineral and chemical substances out of the
earth. There is but one way for these to enter
the body of the tree — through the root-hairs.

But the root-hairs cannot take in this food from
the ground unless it is dissolved in water, and
earth-water holds but little mineral. A great
quantity of fluid must pass through the tree before
enough mineral substance can be separated out to
meet all the needs of summer growth and autumn
fruiting.

This separation is not done until the water from
the earth gets into the leaves.

Most of the foliage borne by native trees is
so made that moisture passes out of it quickly and
makes room for more earth-water coming up from
the roots. Leaves, broad and thin, spread them-
selves out to the light and air, as the laundress
spreads a sheet when she wishes it to dry quickly.

Often the epidermis is so thin that water can
evaporate through it, and the leaves of all native
trees have their lower surfaces full of little pores,
198 Our Field and Forest Trees

through which air and moisture can pass freely.
Some leaves have such pores on their upper sur-
faces also, and we find similar tiny openings on
green stems, on young fruit, and on branches less
than a year old. These openings are ‘ stomata,”’
or mouths. They open into little spaces among
the green cells of the leaf, and their use is
best described by the
word “‘ transpiration.”
Thanks to them,
leaves can _ breathe
away any moisture
which the plant does
not need.

Each mouth opens
between two cells
(Fig. 50), somewhat

 

Fig. 50. Structure of the epider- ‘ S %
mis of a leaf, showing the stomata, like a pair of lips.

or little mouths,

Like all their neigh-
bor cells, these lips become swollen in moist
weather, when water is rising fast from the roots
into the foliage, and they shrink and droop in
times of drought. When they swell they stand
apart so that the little mouth looks as if its lips
were whistling, and moisture can pass out between
them. Then as soon as the leaf has parted with
the moisture it does not need, all its cells become
somewhat limp, and the stomata lips droop
together so that the mouths are closed (Fig. 51).

If leaves get thoroughly soaked, so that water
‘About Green Leaves 199

chokes the little mouths, transpiration is stopped,
and the tree’s work comes to a standstill.

Hence, most leaves are so made that they can
shed water like new umbrellas. Sometimes the
leaf-skin is so smooth that water runs off it — as
it does from polished tiling. Sometimes it is
waxed, so that it can shed the rain drops, and
often it contains a substance called “ cutin,” which
makes it waterproof.

On many trees, rain drips from leaf-point to
leaf-point, and is
shed as it would
be from the shin-
gles of a roof.
On many low-

rowing plants it
8 &P Fig. 51. Part of the upper surface of a
runs down the leaf, showing one of the stomata with its

lips closed (very much magnified).
leaves, toward
the main stem, and so reaches the roots.

All through a bright summer day leaves and
green twigs are breathing out vapor into the air.
The rate of this slow steaming of the forest
depends upon many things—-the season, the
weather, the temperature, and the nature of the
trees.

It is easy to test in a simple way this evapora-
tion of summer boughs.

Cut a growing, leaf-covered twig from some
broad-leafed tree — such as a maple or cotton-
wood. ‘Put the cut end of the twig through a

 
200 Our Field and Forest Trees

tight-fitting hole in a sheet of cardboard, into a
glass of water. Cover the twig with an inverted
glass, wiped clean and dry. Let it stand for
twelve hours. Notice the moisture which gathers
on the inside of the inverted glass. Then try the
same experiment over — after stripping the leaves
from the twig.” (Jackson: Forestry in Nature
Study.)

Plants of sun-beaten lands are threatened with
a double danger. Their juices may be parched up
by heat — and the intense light, if it beats on the
leaves, may destroy the chlorophyll. The leaves
of such plants are like Robinson Crusoe, who wore
clothes on his hot desert island to protect his skin
from the blazing sun.

The sagebrush of the dry plains is clothed all
over with short hairs, and a like covering protects
the desert willows from the burning light. Many
of the desert plants look hoary, rusty, or silky,
because they are so thickly covered with down
which acts as a sun screen. Willows of the far
north wear coats of down too, but, in their case,
it serves as blanketing. Their spray tips and
young leaves are silvery white with vegetable fur,
which fits them for life in Labrador.

In most plants growing on land, the stomata of
the leaf are in its lower surface, and in many cases
they are all there out of reach of the direct sun.

Beside putting the little mouths on the shad-
owed side of the leaf, nature has covered them a
About Green Leaves 201

little from heat and light, lest moisture should
pass away through them too quickly. Many
leaves which are smooth above are clothed on
their under surfaces with wool, or with silk, or
with a sort of bloom which the microscope shows
to be minute rods or scales of wax.

This is another reason why the under surfaces
of leaves are often pale. The difference in shade
between the upper and lower sides is often so
great that it can be made to serve as a means of
finding one’s way back again through strange
woods. By breaking a twig, here and there, so
that it dangles, and shows the light under sides
of its leaves, one can make what woodsmen call
an “Indian blaze.’ The leaves turned upside
down are easily seen even in a dense forest.

All through the sunlit hours the leaves absorb
a gas which is in the air — “‘ carbonic acid gas.”

Leaves cannot make starch, plants cannot grow
nor develop without this gas; and while the trees
withdraw it from the air for their own good, they
are doing us excellent service. For carbonic acid
gas, in quantities, is poisonous to men and to
animals,

After the leaves have made starch, they give
forth into the air a gas which is a vital necessity
to the animal world — life-giving oxygen, with-
out which no heart can beat. Our lungs take the
oxygen out of the air we inhale, and if they cannot
get enough oxygen we suffer and languish. And
202 Our Field and Forest Trees

when we breathe out, we send into the air carbonic
acid gas.

So we and the trees suit one another like Jack
Spratt and his wife. Each takes from the air what
the other cannot use. Each puts into it what the
other needs. Sunbeams fall into a clear, warm
pool, where pond weeds are growing; little bub-
bles rise in a steady stream from the leaves which
are covered by the water. These bubbles are filled
with oxygen — and when we see how much of it
is made by one pond herb, we can imagine the
quantity which is given forth by a forest under a
bright July sun.

Thus leaves purify the air, and help men and
animals to live.

** Air in which lungs can no longer breathe, nor
candles burn, can be restored to its original con-
dition by the presence in it for a time of vigorous
plants.” (Priestly.)

An acre of forest, with its many boughs one
above another like the floors of a house, gives out
much more oxygen than could come from an acre
of truck farm, or of pasture, and it has tier above
tier of green leaves to devour the carbonic acid
gas, so harmful to animal life.

Hence, the forests, which fill the air with sweet
odors, also rob it of poison and put into it the
essence of life.
CHAPTER XIX

THE MURMURING PINES AND THEIR KINDRED

HEN the new-born pine tree casts off its

seed-coats and lifts its head into the sun-

shine, we see at once that its ways are not the ways
of the oaks and maples.

All the broad-leaved trees except the palms
begin life with two cotyledons.

Sometimes these are so heavy that the stalk is
unable to lift them up, and they remain lying in
the mold. But there are two cotyledons always,
whether the sprouting tree is coming from an
acorn, apple pip, hickory nut, or maple seed.

The sprouting yew, like the baby maple,
appears above ground with two seed-leaves, and
so do the seedling juniper, cedar, and arbor vite.
But most of the pine tree’s kindred have their
own way of doing things from start to finish.

A pine begins life with a circle of cotyledons,
all springing from the top of a slender stalk, and
standing out like the spokes of a wheel (Fig. 52).

Thus at the outset it shows that it is not related
to the oaks and maples. It belongs to a family
which must be mentioned with due ceremony.

203
204 Our Field and Forest Trees

The pine, hemlock, fir, spruce, larch (or tam-
arack), cedar, cypress, arbor vite, and yew are all
called “‘ Gymnosperms.”

There is no easy word which

describes and includes them all.
“ Cone-bearers ” will not do, for
cedars and junipers bear berries
(Fig. 53), and yews have juicy
scarlet fruits.

‘“Evergreens” will not do,
for the larch and the cypress
drop their leaves each autumn,
just as the maples do.

~ Needlé-leaved trees” will 7% 5%, % seedling
not do, for the boughs of the
cedar, juniper, and arbor vite are clothed, not
with needles, but with scales.

We will have
to be technical
for once, and
say that the
wheel of needle-
leaves growing
atop of the seed-
ling pine tree
shows that this
Fig. 53. Spray 288 PES Es OH the red cedar wildwood baby

belongs to the
great family of ‘‘ Gymnosperms.”’

The slippery needles, or close-pressed scale

 
Pines and Their Kindred 205

leaves, of our northern evergreens shed the snows
of northern winters. The flakes fall from the
curved and shining surfaces and sift through the
feathery branches to the ground.

Also the fierce winds of the north, which might
snap the branches of broad-leaved evergreens like
the holly, sigh harmlessly through the
plume-like boughs of pines and firs (Fig.
54).

And thus the needle-bearing and scale-
bearing evergreens have just the sort of
foliage which fits them to endure their
difficulties.

For pines, spruces, firs, hemlocks, and
red cedars inhabit coasts, mountain tops,
and northerly countries. All along the
Atlantic shores, from Labrador to Flor-
ida, pines, cedars, and junipers grow on
rocks and in sea-sand, and shelter the
broad-leaved trees, farther inland, from
the first fury of ocean blasts. In many
places evergreen woods border the Great
Lakes, and brave their gales. eke siecle

As one ascends high mountains, feat Guster ot he
nearly all the broad-leaved trees
are gradually left behind, till at last all the rough
slopes are dark with spruces, pines, and firs.

Spruces and firs are trees of the deep snows.
They grow into spire-like forms, the main stem
going straight upward to the pointed top. There

 
206 Our Field and Forest Trees

is no broad crown to bend under the weight of
gathering snow masses.

In the Canadian forests the spruces point up-
ward ‘as straight as one could set a lance.”

On the high slopes of the Rockies, the mighty
shafts put out only short side-boughs, so short
that the trees look from a distance like poles gar-
landed with green.

The northern snows cannot break such trees
as these.

The wood of gymnosperms is peculiarly tough,
so that their small boughs can be bent nearly dou-
ble without snapping (Fig. 55). Hence, these
trees have been favorites with the makers of
bows. Before the days of gunpowder, English
archers shot their shafts from bows of yew, and
the American Indians made their bows of juniper
wood.

Because the wood is tough and strong, the pine
long ago used to be called the sailor’s tree. Before
steamboats were invented, and when the winds
moved all the ships on all the seas, it furnished
the favorite wood for masts and spars.

But fellowship between the pines and the wind
began long before pine spars carried sails.

The wind causes the gymnosperms to be born.

They all bear their stamens and pistils in sep-
arate flowers, and send pollen from one flower
to another by the wind (Fig. 56).

They carried on their affairs in this way ages
 

 

 

Photograph by the author.

 

Fig. 55. Tamarack or larch twisted into a complete circle.
Pines and Their Kindred 207

ago, when winged honey-seekers, and the trees
which attract them and employ them, were not as
yet in existence.

Now, when the summer fields are full of pollen-
carriers, ready to fly on the tree’s errands, the
gymnosperms
will have none of
them, but go on
in their old way,
depending on the
wind alone.

So gymno-
sperms can_ set
seed abundantly
in lands where the
summers are so
short and cold
that few flying
insects wander

Courtesy of Doubleday, Page and Co. abroad.
Fig. 56. Fl f the Scotch pine. (Pinus

ited, Come eae Pace Bats a8
shedding flower cluster; B, The community of we h ave
carpels; C, The young cone; D, Staminal leaves; ‘.

E, Carpels. seen, winds
are wasteful messengers, and so the gymnosperms
are obliged to yield great quantities of pollen. It
flies from the pine branches in light golden clouds.
It covers the surface of ponds in the neighborhood
of pine forests, and washes up along the shores
in long sulphur-yellow streaks. It fills the air,

and powders everything in or near the pine woods.

 
208 Our Field and Forest Trees

The pollen of the pines can fly up and away,
because each grain is provided with two little
sailing bladders. These curious pollen grains
might give some suggestions to the makers of an
air ship.

They come out of little sacs, borne on the lower
surface of shield-shaped scales. ‘These scales
huddle together in close tufts, and botanists regard
each tuft as a pollen-shedding or “‘ male” flower.

The pollen-shedding flowers of the pine make
quite a show, even in the leafy, blossomy woods
of June. They are massed in clusters at the base
of the green shoots of the year, and are yellow,
orange, or scarlet. We recognize the sort of pine
partly by the color of its flowers.

The pollen-shedding flowers of the hemlock are
not so easily found. They are no larger than
grains of rice, and they grow on the lower sides
of the branches, hidden under the needle-leaves.
The pollen-bearing flowers of the juniper and the
red cedar are so small, and so hidden among the
leaves, that only breezes and botanists can find
them. We know when they come, because they
give a golden tinge to the boughs which bear them.
Says Lowell:

Cedars blossom, though few people know it,
And look all dipped in sunshine — like a poet.

All these flowers we have talked about, let us
remember, are pollen-shedding or ‘“‘ male” flow-
ers of the gymnosperms.
Pines and Their Kindred 209

The companion flowers to them, from which
the seeds develop, are as simple as can be. No
one but a botanist would think of calling them
flowers at all.

What is called the “ female” flower of a gym-
nosperm is just a naked ovule—a tiny oval
bag of jelly fastened to a little scale called a
““earpel.”

In the heart of a pea blossom there is already
a very small but perfectly formed pod.

Suppose we pluck away from the pea flower
its calyx, corolla, and stamens, so that only this
tiny pod is left. Now if we split it we shall find
that it contains several minute peas. If we pick
off all these except two, the thing which remains
—a naked wide-open pod, with two peas — cor-
responds to the carpel of a cedar, yew, or pine.

Because their ovules are not enclosed in pistils,
but borne on the surface of open carpels, the pine
tree’s relations get the hard name of ‘‘ gymno-
sperms”? (naked seeds).

The seeds, naked though they be, are hidden
and protected because the carpels cluster closely
together.

The young cone is a spiral group of carpels,
each having its pair of seeds attached, and all
clinging to a woody axis (Fig. 57). The young
berry of a red cedar or juniper is a close ring of
carpels, with a few seeds in the middle.

Before the pollen comes, the carpels stand a
210 Our Field and Forest Trees

little apart, so that the precious dust can slip down
between them to the ovule.

After the breeze has brought the golden grains,
the carpels close over and pro-
tect the developing seed.
Those of the red cedars and
junipers become plump and
juicy, and grow together so as to a
a berry with the seeds inside.

Those of the cone-bearing trees be-
come woody, and in many cases these
woody scales are glued together with resin,
so that the ripening seeds in- Fig. 57. Young cone of
side are in a measure pro- ce
tected from hungry beaks and prying paws.

The ovule of the yew has no carpel, but after
the pollen grain has united with it a disk which
is around its base begins to grow. By the end of
summer it forms a cup around the seed. In
autumn this cup becomes red and juicy, and holds
the dark seed in its hollow.

The birds find the cup good for food, but the
seed inside is poisonous. They know this, and so
after they have swallowed the sweet pulpy fruits
they spit out the seeds, and thus sow them broad-
cast.

Junipers and red cedars also employ the birds
as sowers. When the seeds of these trees are ripe,
the globes enclosing them become blue, and show
prettily against the dull-green branches. When

  
 
Pines and Their Kindred 211

there is little to eat in the snow-clad fields, these
berries are a blessing to the birds.

Cone-bearing trees send their seeds forth in
care of their old friend, the wind. After the seeds
in the cones have ripened, the resin dries away,
and the scales, in most cases, draw apart. Thus

 

Fig. 58. Cone of a pitch pine.

the wind can find the seeds, which are winged for
a long flight (Fig. 58).

But cones do not open directly their seeds are
ready to fly away. Indeed, cones filled with ripe
seeds may look quite green. The seeds under the
scales are “ laying low ” like Brer Rabbit.

When the little hard seeds which birds are to
sow get ripe, the fruits which contain them make
themselves seen by putting on some conspicuous
color. Their best plan is to get eaten.
212 Our Field and Forest Trees

But when the seeds of cone-bearing trees get
eaten they are destroyed. They had better hide
from the squirrels, and so cones give no sign to
show that the seeds in them are ripe. But pine
squirrels are knowing. They watch for their
chance, and get it when the cones are dry enough
to handle, but before they have opened far enough
to shed their seeds. Then the squirrels cleverly
pick the scales off, one by one, with their little
forepaws, and feast on the seeds beneath.

The cones of the hemlocks, pines, and spruces
gradually turn upside down while they ripen, so
that when their scales separate the seeds are at
once given to the wind (Fig. 59). Fir cones are

 

erect like candles on a Christmas tree, but when
their seeds ripen the scales drop away, leaving
nothing on the bough but a woody backbone or
axis.
Pines and Their Kindred 213

There is a slender little pine, growing high on
the mountain precipices of the West, which bears
tightly sealed cones. Its scales are hard as ivory,
and they remain for years firmly plastered down
with resin. Behind these scales are light seeds
fitted for flight with inch-long wings.

These wings remain idle till fire sweeps up the
mountain slopes. Then the heat melts the resin
which has sealed the cone, the winged seeds take
flight, and the wind sows them broadcast over the
bare and blackened mountains.

All our native gymnosperms except the cypress
and the larch are evergreen, but their leaves are
not.

One by one they fade and fall, till the ground
in evergreen woods is covered with a thick mat of
dropped needles. In the course of a few years
all the needle leaves will be shed. The old leaves,
getting ready to fall, turn brown, a few at a time,
unnoticed by us among their green companions.

All the gymnosperms except the yews have a
plentiful supply of sweet-smelling gum or balsam.
This gum is a mixture of resin and turpentine.

Little glands containing it are found in the scale
leaves of the arbor vite, and the balsam fir of
which fragrant pillows are made has two little
wells of it in each of the needle leaves (Fig. 60).

In the spruce there is so much fragrant gum that
blisters filled with it appear behind the bark.
Often these blisters cover hollow places left by the
214 Our Field and Forest Trees

death of branches, and sometimes they extend
back to the heartwood of the trunk.

   

z Fig. 60. A spray of the balsam fir.

Spruce gum brings a good price, and so it is
gathered in the north woods by “‘ gummers ”’ car-
rying long poles armed with chisels. The blisters
are cut open with these chisels, and the gum which
flows out is caught in cups on the tops of the
poles. It is used by chewing gum makers.

A large proportion of the world’s supply of
resin comes from the flat ‘“‘ piney woods” of
Georgia and the Carolinas.
Pines and Their Kindred 215

There, where the sands will support nothing
else except the saw palmetto, the “ white” and
“slash” pines yield freely of their balm, and
furnish a means of livelihood to some very poor
people.

The cone-bearers, and their kin— pines,
spruces, firs, hemlocks, and cedars—dare our
most important timber trees.

These are called ‘‘ soft woods,” and the timber
yielded by broad-leaved trees is: described as
“hard wood.”

The balms of the soft wood trees are pleasant
and healing, we cannot do without their lumber,
but their services as standing trees are best of all.

When the summer insects are torpid or dead,
and the summer birds have all flown southward,
bird flocks from the North come to the brown
fields.

These autumn arrivals, and the birds that stay
with us all winter, are good friends to the farmers
and to the land. Their food is mainly the seeds
of weeds.

Farms and gardens would be wellnigh covered
each spring with thistles and ragweed, cocklebur,
and burdock, were it not for the brave little win-
ter birds. Weed-tops loaded with seed provide
them with food, and the evergreens give them
lodging. When winter gales whistle through the
fields and there is no shelter to be found on the
bare boughs of broad-leaved trees, the farmer’s
216 Our Field and Forest Trees

feathered assistants take refuge in pine woods and
in cedar clumps.

Where winters are too long, or winds too fierce
for broad-leaved trees, there we find the gymno-
sperms.

Their wood contains a smaller proportion of
water than does the wood of broad-leaved trees,
so that they can live where there is little moisture
at their roots, on steep slopes, on edges of bluffs,
and in crannies of the rocks.

They live where broad-leaved trees cannot and
will not. They save valley lands from landslide
and from flood, “ bind the tottering edge of cleft
and chasm, and fringe with sudden tints of
unhoped-for spring the arctic edges of retreating
desolation.”
INDEX
INDEX

Acorn, 9, 10, II

Almond seed, 9

Apple; and work of apple-tree
moth, 21; history in its bud
scales, 34; seed, 5

Arbor vite, 204

Ash, color of, 30; seeds and
seed saving, 3; taproot, 119

Balm, of the ‘ white” and
“slash” pines, 215

Bark, inner, or bast, 137, 138,
140; and cork, 146-154;
“bark-bound trees,” 172;
changes in, 169

Beech, burrs and nuts, 6; leaf-

buds, 160; seed food, ro
Berries, 5
Birch, canoe, color of, 29;

“honey pots” in, 21
Birds, as seed carriers, 5
Bitternut, color of, 30; winter
buds, 162
Blackberry, 29
Blossoming, 176-189
Branches, color of, 29,
study of winter, 29-38
Brulé, defined, 87
Buds, 155-163; and bud scales
of winter branches, 31-35;
eaten by animals in winter,

30;

23
Bureau of Wood Utilization,

54,55
Butternut, winter buds, 162

Canada, Dominion forest re-
serves, 76, 82-96; forest fires,
87-90

Cashew nuts, 7

Catalpa, flowers of, 177

Cedar, 204; red, 205, 210

Cherry, flowers of, 177, 178,
181; leaves, 192; stone, 9;
taste of bark of black, 30

Chestnut, burrs and nuts, 6;
flowers, 184

Chlorophyll, 194, 195

Coal, 47, 48

Cocoa nuts, 7

Cones, 209-213; pine, care of
for seed, ror

Cork and bark, 146-154

Cotyledons, 9, 11; and the
pines, 203

Cypress, 204

Diseases of trees, 13-17
Dominion forest reserves, 76,
82-96

Elm, seeds and seed sowing,
I, 3; cork, 148; color of
cork, 30; taste of slippery,
30

Evergreens, 204

Fir, 204, 205; a cloud-land
tree, 44, 45; Douglas, 108
Fires, forest, 57-68; preventive
measures, 60-68; losses from,

64, 69, 70; and the forester,
99; in the Canadian forest,
87-90

Flies which injure trees, 19,
20

Flowers of trees, 177-189

219
220

Forest, the carpet of the, 39-41;
fires, 57-68; preventive
measures against fires, 60-
68; losses from fires, 64, 69,

yo; grazing, 74, 75; re-
serves, 72-81; service, 98
Forests, destruction of, 713

and the life of the nation,
44; maintaining and protect-
ing the, 75-77, 79-81; the
midwinter, 18-28; United
States national, 69-81; and
tain, 41, 44; vanishing of
England’s, 47, 48; waste of,
71; reforestation, 90-92

Foresters, the, and their work,
97-113; the Dominion, 84,
95; fire fighting, 65-68;
needful ability of, 102-104;
examinations for, 104-106

Forestry Bureau in the Philip-
pines, 107

Forestry Schools, 105, 106

Fruit, defined and described,
3, 4

Fruits and seeds, 1-11

Fungi tree destroyers, 14-17,
167

Gall-fly, 19, 20

Galls, 19, 20

German national forests, 76

Grafting, 144, 145

Grazing, forest reserve privi-
leges, 74, 75

Growth rings, 167, 168

Gum of pines, 213

Gymnosperms, 204-206;
flowers of the, 208,
value of, 216

the
209;

Hard woods, 215

Haws, thorns of, 170

Heart wood of trees, 164, 165

Hemlock, 204, 205, 208, 212

Hickory, taste of mockernut,
30; color of shagbark, 30

“ Honey pots” in trees, 21, 22

Index

Hornbeam, color of waterside,
30
Horsé-chestnut, buds, 159

Insects and worms injurious to
wood, 167

Juniper, 205, 210

Larch, 204.

Leaf, in the bud, 157; falling
of the, 153, 154

Leaves, in the seed, 9; devel-
opment of, 10; about green,
190-202; and oxygen, 201

Lenticels of the cork tree, 151,

152

Linden, “boney pots” in the,
21

Locust, 183; flowers of the,
177, 178; thorns of the, 170

Logs, waste in working up, 53

Lumbering, wasteful, 12, 13,
17

Mahogany, seeds, 7

Maple, ash-leaved, 128; color
of moosewood, 29; color of
red, 30; “honey pots,” 21;
leaves, 192; red, 128; seeds
and seed sowing, 1, 3, 9

Maple sugar, 128-131

Mines, use of wood in, 70;
use of timber in, 49-51

Moss and mold in the forests,
39, 40; and the rivers, 43,
44; fire in the, 58, 60, 62, 69

Moth, apple-tree, 21

Muskeg, defined, 87

Oak, durability of, 134; leaves,
192; taproot, 119; apple, 19

Osiers, growing and weaving,
35-37

Oxygen, given out by leaves,
201, 202

Peach, fruit and seed, 4, 5, 9
Pear, seed, 5
Index

Pine, wasteful lumbering of,
12; yellow, 108; yellow, re-
foresting with, 100, 101;
flowers of, 208-210

Pines and their kindred, 203-
216

Pith, 138, 139; “silver grain”
in oak, 168

Plant protoplasm, 124, 125

Plum, seed, 5

Pollen, and pollen carriers,
178-188; of the gymno-
sperms, 206-208

Poplar, seed sowing, 1

Prickles and thorns, 169, 170

“Pride of China,” flowers of,

177
Protoplasm, place and func-
tion, 194.
Protection of the forests, 75-
77s, 79-81
Pruning, natural, 23, 24, 27
Purchase areas, 72

Quince, seed, 5

Railroad ties, consumption of
wood for, 48, 49, 70

Reforestation, 90-92

Reserves, forest, 72-81

Resin, 214

Review of Forest Service In-
vestigations, 109

Rings showing tree age, 167,
168

Rivers, and woods, 40; fresh-
ets, 41, 42; earth carriers,
42, 43

Root hairs, service of, 136

Roots, feed the trees, 115; be-
low frost line, 1:5, 116; tips
of, and hairs, and their
work, 116-120, 122, 123, 125;
tap, 119

Sagebrush, 200

Sap, the ascent of, 122-123;
maple, 128-131; crude,
mounting, 136, 137

221

Sapwood of trees, 165, 166

Sassafras, color of, 29

Sawdust, uses for, 53

Seed, germination of, 8; means
of travel, 3-7; protective
coverings, 6, 7; sowing, I-11,
23

Seeds, 1-11; winged, 3; in re-
forestation, roo, ror; of
cone-bearing trees, 212

Snow in the forests, 40, 41;
telling the footprints in the,
114; trees for protecting
railroads from, 111

Soft woods, 215

Spruce, 204-206, 212-214; a
cloud-land tree, 44, 45;
Engelmann’s, 108

Spruce gum, , 214

Squirrels, bud eaters, 23; seed
planters, 23

Starch, made by leaves, 196,

197

Sun scalds, 27

Sweetgum, color of, 30; cork-
making, 148

Teak, durability of, 135

“Thunder besoms,” 19
Trees, ascent of sap, 122-
133; blossoming, 176-189;

branches, a study of winter,
29-38; buds, 155-163; buds
and bud scales in winter,
31-35; building, 141,142;
cork-making of, 146-154;
destruction of, 53, 70; dis-
eases of, 13-17; falling of
the leaves, 153, 154; graft-
ing, 144, 145; green leaves
of, 190-202; heartwood of,
164, 165; knots and scars,
25, 26; meadow, 27; mining
industry use of, 49-51; most
important timber, 215; nat-
ural pruning of, 23, 24, 27;
nurseries, 100; planting,
103; protection of, necessary,
71; railroad ties require
222

countless, 48, 49, 70; refor-
estation, 90, 99-102; roots
feed, 115; roots below frost
line, 115, 116; root uses, 116-
120, 122, 123, 125; seeds
and fruits, 1-11; snow sheds
of, 111; study of, 109; sun
scalds of, 27; taste and odor
of, 30; telegraph pole con-
sumption of, 52; troubles,
some of the, 12-17; trunks
and _ branches, 134-1453
“tumors” in, 1723 twisted by
wind, 22; wasteful destruc-
tion of, 13; wood pulp of, 52
Tulip tree, flowers of, 177
“Tumors” in trees, 172

United States national forests,
69-81

Willow, basket, 35-37, 1083
color of, 29; down on, 200;
galls, 20, 21; laurel or shin-
ing, 156; pussies, 156; seed,
I, 2; ware, 35-37; withes,
osiers of, 35-37

Index

Wind, the pollen carrier for
the gymnosperms, 206, 207

“Witch’s brooms,” 19

Wood, Bureau of Utilization
of, 54, 55

Wood, composition of, 135,
136; durability of, 134, 135;
famine of, is there a, com-
ing? 47-56; growth rings,
142; need of it today, 48-53;
preserving, 109; saving the
waste, 94; waste of, 71

Wood pulp, consumption of
trees for, 52

Woods, and the life of the
nation, 44; carpet of the,
39-41; fire in the, 58, 60,
62; midwinter, 18, 28; river,
and rain, 39-46

Woodpeckers and _ holes
trees, 21, 22

Woodpile, exploring the, 164-
175

in

Yellowstone Forest Reserve, 72
Yew, 204, 206, 210
 

 

 

Sg" Some Leaves of 0

TULIP TREE

 
 

 

 

 

 

our Common Trees:

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WHITE WILLOW

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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SR SET

 

 

 

 

 

 

         

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soa So
a aa a
ae eee
Se ee ee =
= : et eT ee
Se ee ee

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

Sea ee ae me
See ee ee Se
Bo eer eee