American Forest Trees Part 52

(_Tilia Americana_)

There are about twenty species of ba.s.swood in the world, and from three to six of them are in the United States. Authors do not agree on the number of species in this country. There are at least three, and they occupy, in part, the same range, with consequent confusion. They are much alike in general appearance, and not one person in twenty knows one from the other. The same names apply to all, when they occur in the same region. Few trees carry more names, and with less reason. Ba.s.swood is generally not difficult to identify in summer, but in winter a person only slightly acquainted with different trees might take it for cuc.u.mber, and if of small size, it might possibly be mistaken for ash or mountain maple. When the tree is bearing leaves, flowers, and fruit, there is no excuse for mistaking it for any other. The fruit, a cl.u.s.ter of four or five berry-like globes, hangs under a leaf, fixed by a short stem to the midrib. This feature alone should be sufficient to identify the ba.s.swood in this country.

Among the many names by which this tree is known, in addition to ba.s.swood, are American linden, linn, lynn, limetree, whitewood, beetree, black limetree, wickup, whistle wood, and yellow ba.s.swood.

The range is extensive, its northeastern boundary lying in New Brunswick, its southwestern in Texas. It reaches Lake Winnipeg, and is found in Georgia. This delimited area is little short of a million square miles. It reaches a height of from sixty to 120 feet, and a diameter of from eighteen inches to four feet. It has a decided preference for rich soil, and the best lumber is cut in fertile coves and flats, or in low land near streams. The largest trees formerly grew in the forests of the lower Ohio valley, but few of the giants of former times are to be found in that region now. They went to market a generation or two ago. The largest cut of ba.s.swood lumber now is in Wisconsin, Michigan, and West Virginia, but most of that from West Virginia is white ba.s.swood (_Tilia heterophylla_).

The wood weighs 28.20 pounds per cubic foot, which is more than the other ba.s.swoods in this country weigh. The rings of annual growth are not very clearly marked. They may be distinguished, in most cases, by a narrow, light-colored line. This is the springwood. In some trees it is much more distinct than in others. The wood is very porous, but the pores are small, cannot readily be seen with the naked eye, and are scattered pretty evenly through the yearly ring. The medullary rays are small but numerous. They give quarter-sawed lumber a pleasing l.u.s.ter, but are too minute to develop much figure. The general tone of the wood is white. It is soft, works easily, holds its shape well, and is tough, but is in no sense a compet.i.tor of oak and hickory in toughness, though it shows the quality best in thin panels which resist splitting and breaking.

In the days when it was customary to ceil houses with boards, both overhead and the walls of rooms, carpenters were partial to ba.s.swood because of its softness. Dressing lumber was then nearly always done by hand, and the carpenter who pushed the jack plane ten or twelve hours a day, looked pretty carefully to the softness of the wood he handled. In tongued and grooved work, as in ceiling and wainscoting, it was not necessary to dress the fitting edges as carefully when ba.s.swood was used as in using some others, because it is so soft that fittings can be forced, and cracks may be closed by driving the boards together.

Slack coopers have long employed ba.s.swood for barrel headings, and also in the manufacture of various kinds of small stave ware, such as pails, tubs, and kegs. In this use, as in ceiling, the softness of the wood is a prime consideration, because the pressure of the hoops will close any small openings. Its whiteness and its freedom from stains and unpleasant odors are likewise important when vessels are to contain food products.

Box makers like the wood on that account, and large quant.i.ties are manufactured into containers for articles of food.

Much ba.s.swood is cut into veneer, some of which serves in single sheets as in making small baskets and cups for berries and small fruits, but a large part of the output is devoted to ply work. Usually three sheets are glued together, but sometimes there are five. By crossing the sheets, to make the grain of one lie at right angles to the next, plies of great strength and toughness are produced. Trunk makers are large users of such, and many panels of that kind are employed by manufacturers of furniture and musical instruments.

Woodenware factories find ba.s.swood one of their most serviceable materials, and it is made into ironing boards, wash boards, bread boards, and cutting boards for cobblers, saddlers, and gla.s.s cutters.

Its lightness and toughness make it serviceable as valves and other parts of bellows for blacksmiths, organs, and piano players. Makers of gilt picture frames prefer it for molding which is to be overlaid with the gilt or gold. It is serviceable for advertising signs because its whiteness contrasts well with printing. Makers of thermometers use it frequently for the wooden body of the instrument, and yard sticks are made of it. Apiarists find no wood more suitable for the small, light frames in which bees build the comb.

The uses of this wood are so many and so various that lists would prove monotonous. The annual cut in this country, exclusive of veneer, is nearly 350,000,000 feet, and the demand for veneer takes many millions more.

Ba.s.swood is named for the bark, and the spelling was formerly bastwood.

The manufacture of articles from the bark was once a considerable industry, not so much in this country as in Europe. However, some use has been made of the bark here. Louisiana negroes make horse collars of it by braiding many strands together, and chair bottoms are woven of it in lieu of cane and rattan, and it is likewise woven into baskets of coa.r.s.e kinds. Bark is prepared for this use by soaking it in water, by which the annual layers of the bark are separated, long, thin sheets are produced, and these are reduced to strips of the desired width.

The annual cut of ba.s.swood lumber is declining with no probability that it will ever again come up to past figures; but ba.s.swood is in no immediate danger of disappearing from American forests. It is not impossible that it may be planted for commercial purposes. In central Europe, forests of ba.s.swood, there called linden, are maintained for the honey which bees gather from the bloom. In this country it is often called beetree because of the richness of its flowers in nectar.

Possibly bee owners may grow forests for the honey, and when trees are mature, dispose of them for lumber.

WHITE Ba.s.sWOOD (_Tilia heterophylla_) attains a trunk diameter as great as that of the common ba.s.swood, but is not as tall. Trees sixty or seventy feet high are among the tallest. This species ranges from New York to Alabama, and is found as far west as southern Illinois, and its best development is among the rich valleys and fertile slopes of the Appalachian mountains from Pennsylvania southward. It is the prevailing ba.s.swood of West Virginia, and reaches its largest size on the high mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. It averages about two pounds lighter per cubic foot than the common ba.s.swood, but ordinarily neither the lumber nor the standing trees of the two species are distinguished.

Only persons somewhat skilled in botany are able to tell one species of ba.s.swood from another as they occur in the forests of this country.

DOWNY Ba.s.sWOOD (_Tilia p.u.b.escens_) is a southern member of the ba.s.swood group, and is scarce. Its range extends from North Carolina to Arkansas and Texas. Trees are rarely more than forty feet high and fifteen inches in diameter. The wood is light brown, tinged with red, and the sap is hardly distinguishable from the heart. As far as it is used at all, its uses are similar to those of other ba.s.swoods.

SOUTHERN Ba.s.sWOOD (_Tilia australis_) is confined, as far as is now known, to a small section of Alabama, where it attains a height of sixty feet in rich woodlands. No reports on the quality of the wood have been published, and the species is too scarce to possess much interest to others than systematic botanists.

FLORIDA Ba.s.sWOOD (_Tilia floridana_), as its name suggests, is a Florida species, and has not been reported elsewhere. It seems to be the smallest of American ba.s.swoods, the largest trees being little more than thirty feet high. No tests of the wood have been made and no uses reported.

MICHAUX Ba.s.sWOOD (_Tilia michauxii_) has been listed for a long time, but is still not well known. Its range extends from Canada to Georgia and westward to Texas. Trees three feet in diameter and eighty feet high have been reported. Only botanists distinguish it from other species of ba.s.swood with which it is a.s.sociated.

PAWPAW (_Asimina triloba_) is of more value for its fruit than its wood. It grows from New York to Texas, but in certain localities only. It is the most northern species of the custard apple family, and is usually of little importance above an alt.i.tude of 1,500 feet.

In Arkansas and some other southwestern regions it is called banana.

It is usually a shrub, but may reach a height of forty feet and a diameter of twelve inches. The wood is light, soft, and weak. Pond apple (_Annona glabra_), called custard apple in some parts of its range in Florida, is a member of the same family. It attains the size of pawpaw, and the wood is similar.

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AMERICAN HOLLY

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AMERICAN HOLLY

(_Ilex Opaca_)

Holly is a characteristic member of a large family scattered through most temperate and tropical regions of the world. It belongs to the family _Aquifoliaceae_, a name which conveys little meaning to an English reader until botanists explain that it means trees with needles on their leaves, _acus_ meaning needle, and _folium_ leaf. How well holly, with its spiny leaves, fits in that family is seen at once.

About 175 species of holly are dispersed in various parts of the world, the largest number occurring in Brazil and Guiana. _Ilex_ is the cla.s.sical name of the evergreen oak in southern Europe.

The glossy green foliage and the brilliant red berries of the holly tree have long been a.s.sociated in the popular mind with the Christmas season.

Mingled with the white berries and dull green foliage of the mistletoe, it is the chief Yuletime decoration, and many hundred trees are annually stripped of their branches to supply this demand. The growth is still quite abundant, but if the destruction and waste continue, American holly will soon be exhausted.

Its range extends from Ma.s.sachusetts to Texas and from Missouri to Florida. In New England, the trees are few and small, and the same holds true in many parts of the Appalachian region. The largest trees are found in southern Arkansas and eastern Texas. In the North it grows in rather dry, gravelly soil, often on the margins of oak woods, but in the South it takes to swamps, and does best on river bottoms where the soil is rich. It is often a.s.sociated with evergreen magnolia, which it resembles at a distance, though differences are plain enough on close examination. The light, grayish-green barks of the two trees look much alike; but the magnolia's leaves are larger, thicker, and lack the briers on the margins.

Holly varies in size from small straggling bushes to well-formed trees fifty or sixty feet high and two or three in diameter. The princ.i.p.al value of holly is not in its wood, but in its leaves and berries. Some persons suppose that holly leaves never fall. That is true of no tree that attains any considerable age. An examination of a holly thicket, or a single tree, in the spring of the year will reveal a fair sprinkling of dead leaves on the ground, though none may be missed from the branches. Those that fall are three years old, and they come down in the spring. There are always two full years of leaves on the trees.

Flowers are the least attractive part of holly. Few people ever notice the small, un.o.btrusive cymes, scattered along the base of the young shoots in the early spring, with the crop of young leaves. Nothing showy about them attracts attention.

The fruit is the well-known berry, the glory of winter decorations. It is usually red, but sometimes yellow. The latter color is not often seen in decorations because it is a poor contrast with the glossy green of the leaves. The berries ripen late in autumn and hang until nearly spring, provided they are let alone. That is seldom their fortune, for if they escape the wreath hunter at Christmas, they remain subject to incessant attacks by birds. Fortunately, the berries are not very choice food for the feathered bevies that fly in winter; otherwise, the trees would be stripped in a day or two. Birds are attracted by the color, and they keep pecking away, taking one or two berries at a bait, and in the course of a long winter they get most of them.

The gathering of holly leaves and berries is an industry of much importance, taken as a whole; but it lasts only a short time, and is carried on without much system. The greatest source of supply is northern Alabama, and the neighboring parts of surrounding states; but some holly is gathered in all regions where it is found. Those who collect it for market make small wages, but the harvest comes at a season when little else is doing, and the few dimes and dollars picked up are regarded as clear gain--particularly since most of the holly harvesters have no land of their own and forage for supplies on other people's possessions.

The seeds of holly are a long time in germinating, and those who plant them without knowing this are apt to despair too soon. The great differences in the germinating habits of trees are remarkable. Some of the maples bear seeds which sprout within a few days after they come in contact with damp soil, certain members of the black oak group of trees drop their acorns with sprouts already bursting the hulls, and mangroves are in a still greater hurry, and let fall their seeds with roots several inches long ready to penetrate the mud at once. But holly is in no hurry. Its seeds lie buried in soil until the second year before they send their radicles into the soil. They are so slow that nurserymen usually prefer to go into the woods and dig up seedlings which are already of plantable size.

Users of woods find many places for holly but not in large amounts. The reported output by all the sawmills in the United States in 1909 was 37,000 feet, and Maryland produced more than any other state. The wood is employed for inlay work, parquetry, marquetry, small musical instruments, and keys for pianos and organs. Engravers find it suitable for various cla.s.ses of work, its whiteness giving the princ.i.p.al value.

It approaches ivory in color nearer than any other American wood. Brush back manufacturers convert it into their choice wares. It is occasionally worked into small articles of furniture, but probably never is used in large pieces.

The wood is rather light, and the vague boundaries between the annual rings, and the smallness and inconspicuousness of the medullary rays, are responsible for the almost total absence of figure, no matter in what way the wood is worked. The so-called California holly (_Heteromeles arbutifolia_) is of a different family, and is not a holly.

DAHOON HOLLY (_Ilex ca.s.sine_) grows in cold swamps and on their borders in the coast region from southern Virginia to southern Florida, and westward to Louisiana. It is often found on the borders of pine barrens, is most common in western Florida and southern Alabama, and when at its best, is from twenty-five to thirty feet high and a foot or more in diameter. The leaves are nearly twice as long as those of common holly, and are generally spineless or nearly so. The fruit ripens late in autumn and hangs on the branches until the following spring. The berries are sometimes bright red, oftener dull red, and those fully up to size are a quarter of an inch in diameter. Some hang solitary, others in cl.u.s.ters of three. The wood is light and soft, weighing less than thirty pounds per cubic foot. The heart is pale brown, and the thick sapwood nearly white. The tree is known locally as yaupon, dahoon, dahoon holly, and Henderson wood. This species pa.s.ses gradually into a form designated as _Ilex myrtifolia_, which Sargent surmises may be a distinct species.

Another form, narrowleaf dahoon (_Ilex ca.s.sine angustifolia_), is listed by Sudworth.

YAUPON HOLLY (_Ilex vomitoria_) is a small, much-branched tree, often shrubby, and at its best is seldom more than twenty-five feet high and six inches in diameter. Its range follows the coast from southern Virginia to St. John's river, Florida, and westward to eastern Texas. It sticks closely to tidewater in most parts of its habitat, but when it reaches the Mississippi valley it runs north into Arkansas. It attains its largest size in Texas, and is little more than a shrub elsewhere.

Berries are produced in great abundance, are red when ripe, but they usually fall in a short time and are not much in demand for decorations.

The wood weighs over forty-five pounds per cubic foot, is hard, and nearly white, but turns yellow with exposure. The leaves of this holly were once gathered by Indians in the southeastern states for medicine.

The savages journeyed once a year to the coast where the holly was abundant, boiled the leaves in water, and produced what they called the "black drink." It was nauseating in the extreme, but they drank copious draughts of it during several days, then departed for their homes, confident that good health was a.s.sured for another year.

MOUNTAIN HOLLY (_Ilex monticola_) is so named because it grows among the Appalachian ranges from New York to Alabama. It is best developed in the elevated district where Tennessee and North and South Carolina meet near one common boundary. It is elsewhere shrubby. The leaves are deciduous, and the bright scarlet berries are nearly as large as cherries. They fall too early to make them acceptable as Christmas decorations. The wood is hard, heavy, and creamy-white, and if it could be had in adequate quant.i.ties, would be valuable. The trees are sometimes a foot in diameter and forty feet high, but they are not abundant. Their leaves bear small resemblance to the typical holly leaf, but look more like those of cherry or plum.

DECIDUOUS HOLLY (_Ilex decidua_) is called bearberry in Mississippi and possum haw in Florida, while in other regions it is known as swamp holly because of its habit of clinging to the banks of streams and betaking itself to swamps. It keeps away from mountains, though it is found in a shrubby form between the Blue Ridge and the sea in the Atlantic states, from Virginia southward. It runs west through the Gulf region to Texas, and ascends the Mississippi valley to Illinois and Missouri, attaining tree size only west of the Mississippi. The wood is as heavy as white oak, hard, and creamy-white, both heart and sap. Doubtless small quant.i.ties are employed in different industries, but the only direct report of its use comes from Texas where it is turned for drawer and door k.n.o.bs in furniture factories. Most but not all of the leaves fall in early winter. The berries obey the same rule, some fall and others hang till spring. They are orange or orange-scarlet.

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