Trees Worth Knowing Part 5

The range of the pignut is from Maine to Florida on the Atlantic seaboard, west to the middle of Nebraska and Texas, and from Ontario and Michigan south to the Gulf.

THE BEECH

=The American Beech=

_f.a.gus America.n.u.s_, Sweet.

One of the most widely distributed trees in our country, this is also one of the most useful and most beautiful in any forest. It is the sole representative of its genus in the Western Hemisphere. One species is a valuable timber tree in Europe. Three are natives of Asia. A genus near of kin includes the beech trees of the Southern Hemisphere, twelve species in all. There is closer resemblance, however, between our beeches and their next of kin, the chestnuts and oaks.

From the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, from Florida to Texas, from New England to Wisconsin, beech trees grow; and where they grow they are very likely to form "pure forests," on the slopes of mountains and rich river bottoms. The largest specimens grow in the basin of the lower Ohio River, and on the warm slopes of the Alleghany Mountains.

Standing alone, with room for full development, the beech is a fine, symmetrical tree, with horizontal or slightly drooping branches, numerous, thickly set with slender, flexible twigs. The stout trunk supports a round or conical head of very dense foliage. One hundred and twenty feet is the maximum height, with a trunk diameter of three to four feet. (_See ill.u.s.trations, pages 22, 30._)

The older the trees, the greater the amount of red heart wood in proportion to the white sap-wood, next to the bark. Red and white beech wood are distinguished by lumbermen. Red beech makes superior floors, toolhandles, chairs, and the like, and there is no more perfect fuel than seasoned beech wood.

It is unreasonable to think that any but the blind could live where beech trees grow and not know these trees at a glance. The bark is close, unfurrowed, gray, often almost white, and marked with blotches, often nearly round of paler hue.

The branches are dark and smooth and the twigs polished to the long, pointed winter buds. Throughout, the tree is a model of elegant attire, both in color and texture of the investing bark.

In the growing season the leaves are the tree's chief attraction. They are closely plaited, and covered with silvery down, when the bud scales are pushed off in the spring. In a day, the protective fuzz disappears, and the full-grown leaf is seen, thin, strongly feather-veined, uniformly green, saw-toothed. Summer shows the foliage ma.s.s almost as fresh, and autumn turns its green to pale gold. Still unblemished, it clings, often until the end of winter, lighting the woods with a ghostly glow, as the rain fades the color out. The silky texture is never quite lost.

The delicate flowers of the beech tree are rarely seen, they fade so soon; the stamen ta.s.sels drop off and the forming nuts, with their p.r.i.c.kly burs, are more and more in evidence in the leaf angles near the ends of new shoots. With the first frost the burs open, the four walls part, releasing the two nuts, three-angled, like a grain of buckwheat.

The name of this grain was suggested by its resemblance in form to the beechnut, or "buck mast," sweet, nutritious food of so many dwellers in the forest. Buck mast was the food of man when he lived in caves and under the forest cover. We know that beechnuts have a rich, delicate flavor that offsets the disadvantages of their small size and the difficulty of opening their thin but leathery sh.e.l.ls. All along the centuries European peoples have counted on this nut, and oil expressed from it, for their own food and the dried leaves for forage for their cattle in winter.

The American pioneer turned his hogs into the beech woods to fatten on the beech-mast, and Thanksgiving turkeys were always finer if they competed with the wild turkey on the same fare.

Birds and lesser mammals do much to plant trees when they carry away, for immediate or future use, seeds that are not winged for flight.

Beechnuts are light enough to profit, to some extent, by a high wind.

And beech trees in their infancy do well under the shade of other trees. So each fruiting tree is the mother of many young ones. But the seedling trees are not so numerous and important as the sapling growth that rises from the roots of parent trees. By these alone, a few isolated beeches will manage to take possession of the ground around them and to clothe it with so dense a foliage screen that all young growth, except certain ferns and gra.s.ses, dies for lack of sun. Before we can realize what is going on, the tract is a pure forest of beech, rapidly enlarging on all sides by the same campaign of extension.

THE CHESTNUTS

=Chestnut and Chinquapin=

_Castanea dentata_, Borh., and _C. pumila_, Mill.

Our native chestnut and its little brother, the chinquapin, are the American cousins of the sweet chestnut of southern Europe. j.a.pan has contributed to American horticulture a native species which bears large but not very sweet nuts, that are good when cooked. Our two trees bear sweet nuts, of a flavor that no mode of cooking improves.

In truth, there is no finer nut; and the time to enjoy it to the highest degree is a few weeks after the frost opens the burs and lets the nuts fall. "Along about Thanksgiving," they have lost some of their moisture and are prime.

In foreign countries the chestnut is a rich, nouris.h.i.+ng food, comparable to the potato. Who could go into ecstasies over a vegetable that is a staple food for the peasants of Europe, Asia, and North Africa? Our chestnut is no staple. It is a delicacy. It is treasure trove from the autumn woods, and the gathering of the crop is a game in which boys and squirrels are rivals.

Ernest Thompson Seton, always a boy, knows the impatience with which the opening of the burs is watched for, as the belated frosts keep off, and the burs hang tantalizingly closed. The cruel wounds made by the spines and the raw taste of the immature nuts are poor recompense for the labor of nutting before Nature gives the sign that all's ready.

Here is Mr. Seton's estimate of the chestnut of "brown October's woods."

"Whenever you see something kept under lock and key, bars and bolts, guarded and double-guarded, you may be sure it is very precious, greatly coveted. The nut of this tree is hung high aloft, wrapped in a silk wrapper, which is enclosed in a case of sole leather, which again is packed in a ma.s.s of shock-absorbing, vermin-proof pulp, sealed up in a waterproof, ironwood case, and finally cased in a vegetable porcupine of spines, almost impregnable. There is no nut so protected; there is no nut in our woods to compare with it as food."

What a disaster then is the newly arisen bark disease that has already killed every chestnut tree throughout large areas in the Eastern states. Scientists have thus far struggled with it in vain and it is probable that all chestnuts east of the Rockies are doomed.

Chinquapins grow to be medium-sized trees in Texas and Arkansas, but east of the Mississippi they are smaller, and east of the Alleghanies, mere shrubby undergrowth, covering rocky banks or crouching along swamp borders. They are smaller throughout, but resemble the chestnut in leaf, flowers, and fruit. The bur contains a single nut.

The chestnut tree grows large and attains great age, its st.u.r.dy, rough gray trunk crowned with an oblong head of irregular branches, hidden in summer by the abundant foliage ma.s.s. (_See ill.u.s.tration, page 23._) The ugly cripple that lightning has maimed covers its wounds when May wakes the late-opening buds and the leaves attain full size.

Each leaf tapers at both ends, its length three or four times its width. Strong-ribbed and sharp-toothed, and wavy on the midrib, dark, polished, like leather, these units form a wonderful dome, lightened in midsummer by the pencil-like plumes of the staminate flowers, with the fertile ones at their bases. As autumn comes on the leaf crown turns to gold, and the mature fruits are still green spiny b.a.l.l.s. The first frost and the time to drop the nuts are dates that every schoolboy knows come close together.

When a chestnut tree falls by the axe, the roots restore the loss by sending up sprouts around the stump. The mouldering pile nourishes a circle of young trees, full of vigor, because they have the large tree's roots gathering food for them. No wonder their growth is rapid.

Besides this mode of reproduction, chestnut trees, growing here and there throughout a mixed forest, are the offspring of trees whose nuts were put away, or dropped and lost by squirrels. When spring relieves the danger of famine, many of the rodent cla.s.s abandon their winter stores before they are all devoured. Such caches add many nut trees to our native woods.

THE OAKS

This is the great family of the cup-bearers, whose fruit, the acorn, is borne in a scaly cup that never breaks into quarters, as does the husk that holds a chestnut, beechnut, or hickory nut. All oak trees bear acorns as soon as they come to fruiting age. This is the sign by which they are known the world over. Seldom is a full-grown oak without its little insignia, for the cups cling after the nut falls, and one grand division of the family requires two seasons to mature its fruit. For this reason, half-grown acorns are seen on the twigs after the ripe ones fall.

We cannot say of oak trees that they all have st.u.r.dy trunks, rough bark, and gnarled limbs, for not all of them have these characteristics. But there is a certain likeness in oak leaves. They are simple, five-ranked, generally oval, and the margins are generally cut into lobes by deep or shallow bays. Most oak leaves have leathery texture, strong veins, and short petioles. They are leaves that outlast the summer, and sometimes persist until spring growth unseats the stalks; sometimes, as in the "live oaks," they hang on three to five years.

The twigs of oak trees are more or less distinctly five-angled, and the winter buds cl.u.s.ter at the ends. This insures a group of young shoots, crowded with leaves, on the ends of branches, and a dense outer dome of foliage on the tree.

Nearly three hundred distinct species of oaks are recognized by botanists, and the list is growing. New species are in the making. For instance, a white oak and a bur oak grow near enough for the wind to "cross-fertilize" their pistillate flowers. The acorns of such mixed parentage produce trees that differ from both parents, yet reveal characteristics of both. They are "hybrids," and may be called new varieties of either parent. Other species of oak are intercrossing by the same process--the interchange of pollen at the time of blossoming.

This proves that the oak family is young, compared with many other families, whose members are too distantly related to intercross.

Though geologically young, the oak family is one of the most important, furnis.h.i.+ng timber of superior strength and durability for bridge-building, s.h.i.+p-building, and other construction work. Tanning has depended largely upon oak bark. As fuel, all oak trees are valuable.

Fifty species of oak are native to North American forests. Twice as many grow east of the Rocky Mountains as west of the Great Divide. No species naturally pa.s.ses this barrier. The temperate zone species extend southward into tropical regions, by keeping to high alt.i.tudes.

Thus we find American oaks in the Andes and Colombia; Asiatic species occur in the Indian Archipelago. No Old World species is native to America. Each continent has its own.

East of the Rocky Mountains the oaks hold a place of preeminence among broad-leaved trees. They are trees of large size, and they often attain great age. They are beautiful trees, and therefore highly valued for ornamental planting. This has led to the introduction of oaks from other countries. We have set European, j.a.panese, and Siberian oaks in our finest parks. Europe has borrowed from our woods the red oak and many others. All countries are richer by this horticultural exchange of trees.

Our native oaks fall into two groups: the annual-fruiting and the biennial-fruiting species. The first group matures its acorns in a single season; the second requires two seasons. It happens that annuals have leaves with rounded lobes, while biennials have leaves with lobes that end in angles and bristly tips. The bark of the annual trees is generally pale; that of the biennials, dark. Hence the white oak group and the black oak group may be easily distinguished at a glance, by the bark, the leaf, and the acorn crop.

THE WHITE OAK GROUP

=The White Oak=

_Quercus alba_, Linn.

The white oak has no rival for first place in the esteem of tree-lover and lumberman. Its broad, rounded dome, st.u.r.dy trunk, and strong arms (_see ill.u.s.tration, page 38_), and its wide-ranging roots enable a solitary tree to resist storms that destroy or maim other kinds.

Strength and tenacity in the fibre of root and branch make it possible for individuals to live to a great age, far beyond the two centuries required to bring it to maturity. Such trees stir within us a feeling of reverence and patriotism. They are patriarchs whose struggles typify the pioneer's indomitable resistance to forces that destroyed all but the strong.

White oak trees in the forest grow tall, lose their lower branches early, and lift but a small head to the sun. The logs, quarter-sawed, reveal the broad, gleaming "mirrors" that make a white oak table beautiful. The botanist calls these the _medullary rays_--thin, irregular plates of tissue-building cells, that extend out from the central pith, sometimes quite to the sap-wood, crowding between the wood fibres, which in the heart-wood are no longer alive. A slab will show only an edge of these mirrors. But any section from bark to pith will reveal them.