Trees Worth Knowing Part 15

=The Black Haw=

_V. prunifolium_, Linn.

The black haw has the characteristic flowers and fruit of its genus, but is smaller throughout than the other two, and its branches are stout. In European parks and gardens it is known as the "stagbush."

Its fruit turns dark when dead ripe, and persists well into the winter. In the wilds, this little viburnum is found from southern New England to Michigan, and south to Georgia and Texas.

THE MOUNTAIN ASHES

The handsome foliage and showy flower cl.u.s.ters make the mountain ashes a favorite group of little trees for border shrubberies and other ornamental planting. The foliage is almost fern-like in delicacy and it spreads in a whorl below the flower cl.u.s.ters in spring and the scarlet berry cl.u.s.ters in autumn. Far into the winter after the foliage has dropped the berries persist, supplying the birds with food, especially in snowy winters, when their need is greatest, and brightening the dull thickets of bare twigs on dreary days.

=Eastern Mountain Ash=

_Sorbus Americana_, Marsh.

The common eastern mountain ash reaches thirty feet in height--a slender, pyramidal tree, with spreading branches and delicate leaves of from thirteen to seventeen leaflets. The flat-topped cl.u.s.ter of creamy white flowers (_see ill.u.s.tration, page 135_) appears in May and June, above the dark yellow-green foliage; and the scarlet berries, ripe in September when the leaves have turned yellow, may persist until spring.

Along the borders of swamps and climbing rocky bluffs, often scattered in plum thickets, these trees are handsome at any season. Along the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina home remedies are made out of the berries. From Newfoundland to Manitoba and southward the tree grows wild and is planted for ornament in home grounds.

=Elder-leaved Mountain Ash=

_S. sambucifolia_, Roem.

The elder-leaved mountain ash overlaps the first species, and is even more daring as a climber. It ranges from Labrador to Alaska, follows the Rocky Mountains to Colorado, and in the Eastern states goes no farther south than Pennsylvania. Its leaves are graceful and drooping like the elder. The flowers and fruits are large; the whole tree tropical looking, its open, pyramidal head giving each leaf a chance at the sun.

=European Mountain Ash=

_S. Aucuparia_, Linn.

Most common in cultivation is the European mountain ash called in England the rowan tree. This trim round-headed species is very neat and conventional compared with its wild cousins, but in the craggy highlands of Scotland and Wales it much resembles our mountain ashes.

Old superst.i.tions cl.u.s.ter around the rowan tree in all rural sections.

These are preserved in the folk-lore and the literature of many countries. Rowans were planted by cottage doors and at the gates of church yards, being considered effectual in exorcising evil spirits.

Leafy twigs hung over the thresholds, crosses made of "Roan" wood given out on festival days, were worn as charms or amulets. Milkmaids, especially, depended upon these for the defeat of the "black elves"

who constantly tried to make their cows go dry, and unless prevented got into the churns--and then the b.u.t.ter would never come!

The farther north a tree can grow, the more likely it is to have close relatives in the Old World. One mountain ash of j.a.pan is hardly distinguishable from our western species, and some authorities believe that our two native species are but varieties of the rowan tree of Europe.

THE RHODODENDRON

The heath family, of about sixty-seven genera, distributed over the temperate and tropical countries of the earth, has twenty-one genera in the United States, seven of which have tree representatives.

Azaleas, the mult.i.tude of the heathers, the huckleberries, the madronas, call to mind flower shows we have seen--under gla.s.s, in gardens, in parks, and among mountain fastnesses brightened by the loveliness of the mountain laurel, azalea, and rhododendron. In this wonderful family the leaves are simple and mostly evergreen. Rarely are the fruits of any importance. It is the flowers in ma.s.ses that give the chief distinction to a family with over a thousand species, which have been the subjects of study and cultivation through centuries. The type of the family is the Scotch heather, immortalized in song and story. In London the Christmas season is marked by the sale of half a million little potted plants of heather! Each is about a foot in height and bears a thousand tiny bells, rosy, with white lips. This is the poor man's Christmas flower. It costs a shilling and lasts a month or more.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _See page 111_

FLOWERING DOGWOOD]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _See page 99_

THE OSAGE ORANGE

Flowers appear in June, after the l.u.s.trous leaves]

Trees are scarce in the heath family. Shrubs are in the majority. The azaleas, which the Belgian gardeners have brought to such perfection and developed in such a great number of varieties, are among the best known of the heaths. The profuse blossoms in potted azaleas entirely extinguish the foliage, and the flowers are almost as lasting as if they were artificial.

The genus rhododendron in American woods is represented by a mountain shrub and a tree. Both are evergreen and both are widely planted for ornament during the entire season. Carloads of these wonderful plants are shipped from the mountain slopes of the Alleghanies for ma.s.s planting on rocky ground, and to cover embankments along the drives in great estates. Because of the alt.i.tude of their native habitat, they are hardy in New England, and even as far as the Great Lakes. In time of bloom, these ma.s.ses are the great flower show of the countryside, and in winter nothing is more beautiful than the evergreen foliage of rhododendrons, lifted out of the snow.

=Great Laurel or Rose Bay=

_Rhododendron maximum_, Linn.

Among the Alleghany Mountains, from Virginia southward, the great laurel rises to a height of forty feet, and interlaces its boughs with those of Fraser's magnolia and the mountain hemlock in the dense forest cover. Thickets of rhododendron trees are common, and though its stature is reduced, it follows the highlands into New York, and is one of the most striking and beautiful shrubs in the Pennsylvania mountains. Scattered and becoming more rare and more stunted, it reaches Lake Erie and on into New Brunswick. The leaves crown each of the stiff branches with an umbrella-like whorl, that stands guard in winter time about a large scaly bud. In spring the scales fall and a cone-like flower cl.u.s.ter rises. Each blossom is white, marked with yellow or orange spots, in the bell-like corolla's throat; or the flowers may be pale rose, with deeper tones in the unopened buds. A great tree in blossom, with its flower cl.u.s.ters lighting up the umbrella-like whorls of glossy, evergreen leaves, illuminates the woods, and makes every other tree look commonplace beside it.

In late summer, green capsules, each with a curving style at the top, cl.u.s.ter where the flowers stood, but these are scarcely ornamental.

The evergreen leaves and the buds, full of promise for June blossoming, are the beautiful features of rhododendrons in winter.

The wonderful array of color and profusion of bloom, seen in an exhibit of rhododendrons and azaleas, is the most convincing proof of what crossing and careful selection can do in developing races of flowering plants. The ancestry of all these tub-plants is a matter of record, and goes back to a few comparatively insignificant wild species, competing with all the rest of the native flora for a livelihood.

THE MOUNTAIN LAUREL

The mountain laurel (_Kalmia latifolia_, Linn.) grows from Nova Scotia to Lake Erie and southward through New England and New York, and along the Alleghanies to northern Georgia. Hardier than the rhododendrons, smaller in blossoms and in foliage, the laurel is in many points its superior in beauty. In June and July the polished evergreen foliage of the kalmia bushes is almost overwhelmed by the ma.s.ses of its exquisite pink blossoms, beside which the bloom of rhododendrons looks coa.r.s.e and crude in coloring. Coral-red fluted buds with pointed tips show the richest color, making with the yellow-green of the new leaves one of the most exquisite color combinations in any spring shrubbery. The largest buds open first, spreading into wide five-lobed corollas, with two pockets in the base of each forming a circle of ten pockets. Ten stamens stand about the free central pistil, and the anther of each is hid in a pocket of the corolla--the slender filament bent backward.

This is a curious contrivance for insuring cross-fertilization through the help of the bees. (_See "Flowers Worth Knowing."_)

Linnaeus commemorated in the name of this genus the devoted and arduous labors of Peter Kalm, the Swedish botanist, who sent back to his master at the university of Upsala specimens of the wonderful and varied flora found in his travels in eastern North America. Most of the names accredited to Linnaeus were given to plants he never saw except as dried herbarium specimens from the New World.

THE MADRO?A

The madrona (_Arbutus Menziesii_, Pursh.), another member of the Heath family, is one of the superbly beautiful trees in the forests that stretch from British Columbia southward into California. South of the bay of San Francisco and on the dry eastern slopes of California mountains it is stunted to a shrub, but on the high, well-drained slopes through the coast region and in the redwood forests of northern California it is a tree that reaches a hundred feet in height.

John Muir writes: "The madrona, clad in thin, smooth, red and yellow bark, with big, glossy leaves, seems in the dark coniferous forests of Washington and Vancouver Island like some lost wanderer from the magnolia groves in the South." All the year around this is one of the most beautiful of American trees. It bears large conical cl.u.s.ters of white flowers above the vivid green of its leathery leaves, that are wonderfully lightened by silvery linings. In autumn the red-brown of the branches is enriched and intensified by the luxuriant cl.u.s.ters of scarlet berries against the red and orange of the two-year-old leaves.

Among the giant redwoods this tree commands the highest admiration.

THE SORREL TREE

The sorrel tree, or sour-wood (_Oxydendrum arboreum_, DC.) belongs among the heaths. Its vivid scarlet autumn foliage is its chief claim to the admiration of gardeners. In spring the little tree is beautiful in its bronze-green foliage, and in late July and August it bears long branching racemes of tiny bell-shaped white flowers. This mult.i.tude of little bells suggests the tree's relationship to the blossoming heather we see in florists' shops.

The leaves give the tree its two common names: they have a sour taste, resembling that of the herbaceous sorrels. The twigs, even in the dead of winter, yield this refreshing acid sap, that flows through the veins of the membranous leaves in summer. Many a hunter, temporarily lost in Southern woods, quenches his thirst by nibbling young shoots of the sour-wood.

After the flower comes a downy capsule, five-celled, with numerous pointed seeds. The leaves are not unlike those of a plum tree except that they attain a length of five to seven inches. In the woods from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, southward to Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas this tree ranges, and we often see it in cultivation as far north as Boston. It grows to its largest size on the western slopes of the Big Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, attaining here a height of sixty feet. In cultivation it is one of the little, slender-stemmed, dainty trees, beautiful at any season. It is the sole representative of its genus in the world, so far as botanists know.