In preceding chapters of this series I have treated of trees in a relationship of family, or according to some noted similarity. There are, however, some trees of my acquaintance of which the family connections are remote or unimportant, and there are some other trees of individual merit with the families of which I am not sufficiently well acquainted to speak familiarly as a whole. Yet many of these trees, looked at by themselves, are as beautiful, interesting, and altogether worthy as any of which I have written, and they are also among the familiar trees of America. Therefore I present a few of them apart from the class treatment.

One day in very early spring or was it very late in winter? I walked along the old canal road, looking for some evidence in tree growth that spring was really at hand. Buds were swelling, and here and there a brave robin could be heard telling about it in song to his mate (I think that settled the season as earliest spring!); but beyond the bud evidences the trees seemed to be silent on the subject. Various herbs showed lusty beginnings, and the skunk-cabbage, of course, had pushed up its tropical richness in defiance of any late frost, pointing the way to its peculiar red-purple flowers, long since fertilized and turning toward maturity.

The search seemed vain, until a glint of yellow just ahead, too deep to proceed from the spice-bush I was expecting to find, drew me to the very edge of the water, there to see hanging over and reflected in the stream a mass of golden catkins. Looking closely, and touching the little tree, I disengaged a cloud of pollen and a score of courageous bees, evidently much more pleased with the sweet birch than with the near-by skunk-cabbage flowers. Sweet birch it was; the stiff catkins, that had all winter held themselves in readiness, had just burst into bloom with the sun’s first warmth, introducing a glint of bright color into the landscape, and starting the active double work of the bees, in fertilizing flowers while gathering honey, that was not to be intermitted for a single sunshine hour all through the season.

A little later, along the great Susquehanna, I found in full bloom other trees of this same birch, beloved of boys and of girls for its aromatic bark. Certainly picturesque and bright, the little trees were a delight to the winter-wearied eye, the mahogany twigs and the golden catkins, held at poise over the water, being full of spring suggestion.

All of the birches I wish I knew them better! are good to look at, and I think the bees, the woodpeckers, the humming-birds and other wood folk must find some of them good otherwise. At Eagles Mere there was a yellow birch in the bark of which scores of holes had been drilled by the woodpeckers or the bees, at regularly spaced intervals, to let the forest life drink at will of the sweet sap. I remember also that my attempt to photograph a score of bees, two large brown butterflies and one humming-bird, all in attendance upon this birch feast, was a surprising failure. I secured a picture of the holes in the bark, to be sure, but the rapidly moving insect and bird life was too quick for an exposure of even a fraction of a second, and my negative was lifeless. These same yellow birches, picturesque in form, ragged in light-colored bark, give a brightness all their own to the deep forest, mostly of trees with rather somber bark.

A woodsman told me one summer of the use of old birch bark for starting a fire in the wet woods, and I have since enjoyed collecting the bark from fallen trees in the forest. It strips easily, in large pieces, from decayed stems, and when thrown on an open fire, produces a cheery and beautiful blaze, as well as much heat; while, if cunningly handled, by its aid a fire can be kindled even in a heavy rain.

The great North Woods show us wonderful birches. Paddling through one of the Spectacle ponds, along the Racquette river, one early spring day, I came upon a combination of white pine, red pine, and paper-birch that was simply dazzling in effect. This birch has bark, as every one knows, of a shining creamy white. Not only its color, but its tenacity, resistance to decay, and wonderful divisibility, make this bark one of the most remarkable of nature’s fabrics. To the Indian and the trapper it has long been as indispensable as is the palm to the native of the tropics.

There are other good native birches, and one foreigner the true white birch whose cut-leaved form, a familiar lawn tree of drooping habit, is worth watching and liking. The name some of the nurserymen have given it, of “nine-bark,” is significantly accurate, for at least nine layers may be peeled from the glossy whiteness of the bark of a mature tree.

I intend to know more of the birches, and to see how the two kinds of flowers act to produce the little fruits, which are nuts, though they hardly look so. And I would urge my tree-loving friends to plant about their homes these cheery and most elegantly garbed trees.

The spice-bush, of which I spoke above, is really a large shrub, and is especially notable for two things the way it begins the spring, and the way it ends the fall. About my home, it is the first of wild woods trees to bloom, except perhaps the silver maple, which has a way of getting through with its flowers unnoticed before spring is thought of. One finds the delicate little bright yellow flowers of the spice-bush clustered thickly along the twigs long before the leaves are ready to brave the chill air. After the leaves have fallen in the autumn, these flowers stand out in a reincarnation of scarlet and spicy berries, which masquerade continually as holly berries when cunningly introduced amid the foliage of the latter. Between spring and fall the spice-bush is apparently invisible.

How many of us, perfectly familiar with “the holly berry’s glow” about Christmas time, have ever seen a whole tree of holly, set with berries? Yet the trees, sometimes fifty feet high, of American holly and this is very different from the English holly in leaf grow all along the Atlantic sea-board, from Maine to Florida, and are especially plenty south of Maryland and Delaware. There is one superb specimen in Trenton, New Jersey’s capital, which is of the typical form, and when crowded with scarlet berries it is an object of great beauty. One reason why many of us have not seen holly growing in the wild is that it seems to prefer the roughest and most inaccessible locations. Years ago I was told that I might see plenty of holly growing freely in the Pennsylvania county of my home. “But,” my informant added, “you will need to wear heavy leather trousers to get to it!” The nurserymen are removing this difficulty by growing plants of all the hollies American, Japanese, English and Himalayan so that they may easily be set in the home grounds, with their handsome evergreen foliage and their berries of red or black.

One spring, the season and my opportunities combined to provide a most pleasing feast of color in the tree quest. It was afforded by the juxtaposition at Conewago of the bloom-time of the deep pink red-bud, miscalled “Judas tree,” and the large white dogwood, both set against the deep, almost black green of the American cedar, or juniper. These two small trees, the red-bud and the dogwood, are of the class of admirable American natives that are notable rather for beauty and brightness of bloom than for tree form or size.

The common dogwood Cornus florida of the botany appears in bloom insidiously, one might say; for the so-called flowers open slowly, and they are green in color, and easily mistaken for leaves, after they have attained considerable size. Gradually the green pales to purest white, and the four broad bracts, with the peculiar little pucker at the end of each, swell out from the real flowers, which look like stamens, to a diameter of often four inches. With these flowers clustered thickly on the usually flat, straight branches, the effect against the green or brown of near-by trees is startling. The dogwood’s horizontal branching habit makes every scrap of its lovely white blooms effective to the beholder on the ground below, but far more striking if one may see it from above, as looking down a hillside.

Though the dogwood blooms before its leaves are put forth, the foliage sometimes catches up with the flowers; and this foliage is itself a pleasure, because of its fineness and its regular venation, or marking with ribs. In the fall, when the flowers of purest white have been succeeded by oblong berries of brightest scarlet, the foliage remains awhile to contrast with the brilliance of the fruit. The frosts soon drop the leaves, and then the berries stand out in all their attractiveness, offering food to every passing bird, and thus carrying out another of nature’s cunning provisions for the reproduction of the species. Seeds in the crops of birds travel free and far, and some fall on good ground!

Is it not sad to know that the brave, bold dogwood, holding out its spring flag of truce from arduous weather, and its autumn store of sustenance for our feathered friends, is in danger of extinction from the forest because its hardy, smooth, even-grained white wood has been found to be especially available in the “arts”? I feel like begging for the life of every dogwood, as too beautiful to be destroyed for any mere utility.

I have been wondering as to the reason for the naming of the cornuses as dogwoods, and find in Bailey’s great Cyclopedia of Horticulture the definite statement that the name was attached to an English red-branched species because a decoction of the bark was used to wash mangy dogs! This is but another illustration of the inadequacy and inappropriateness of “common” names.

There are many good dogwoods the Cornus family is admirable, both in its American and its foreign members but I must not become encyclopedic in these sketches of just a few tree favorites. I will venture to mention one shrub dogwood I never heard its common name, but it has three botanical names (Cornus sericea, or coerulea, or Amomum, the latter preferred) to make up for the lack. It ought to be called the blue-berried dogwood, by reason of its extremely beautiful fruit, which formed a singular and delightful contrast to the profusion of red and scarlet fruits so much in evidence, one September day, in Boston’s berry-full Franklin Park.

The red-bud, as I have said, is miscalled Judas-tree, the tradition being that it was on a tree of this family, but not of the American branch, happily and obviously, that the faithless disciple hanged himself after his final interview with the priests who had played upon his cupidity. Indeed, tradition is able to tell even now marvelous stories to travelers, and not long ago I was more amused than edified to hear an eloquent clergyman just returned from abroad tell how he had been shown the fruits of the Judas-tree, “in form like beautiful apples, fair to the eye, but within bitter and disappointing;” and he moralized just as vigorously on this fable as if it had been true, as he thought it. He didn’t particularly relish the suggestion that the pulpit ought to be fairly certain of its facts, whether of theology or of science, in these days; but he succumbed to the submission of authority for the statement that the Eastern so-called Judas-tree, Cercis siliquastrum, bore a small pod, like a bean, and was not unpleasant, any more than the pod was attractive.

I mention this only in reprobation of the unpleasant name that really hurts the estimation of one of the most desirable and beautiful of America’s smaller trees. The American red-bud is a joy in the spring about dogwood time, for it is all bloom, and of a most striking color. Deep pink, or purplish light red, or clear bright magenta all these color names fit it approximately only. One is conscious of a warm glow in looking toward the little trees, with every branch clear down to the main stem not only outlined but covered with richest color.

There is among the accompanying illustrations (page 201) a photograph of a small but characteristic red-bud in bloom, looking at which reminds me of one of the pleasantest experiences of my outdoor life. With a cameristic associate, I was in a favorite haunt, seeing dogwoods and red-buds and other things of spring beauty, when a sudden warm thunder shower overtook us. Somewhat protected in our carriage and it would have been more fun if we had stood out to take the rain as comfortably as did the horse we saw the wonder of the reception of a spring shower by the exuberant plant life we were there to enjoy. When the clouds suddenly obscured the sky, and the first drops began to fall, the soft new umbrellas of the May-apples, raised to shield the delicate white flowers hidden under them from the too ardent sunshine, reversed the usual method by closing tightly and smoothly over the blooms, thus protecting perfectly their pollen hearts, and offering little resistance to the sharp wind that brought the rain. At our very feet we could see the open petals of the spring beauty coil up into tight little spirals, the young leaves on the pin-oaks draw in toward the stems from which they had been expanding. Over the low fence, the blue phlox, that dainty carpeting of the May woods, shut its starry flowers, and lay close to the ground. Quiet as we were, we could see the birds find sheltered nooks in the trees about us.

But soon the rain ceased, the clouds passed away, and the sun shone again, giving us a rainbow promise on the passing drops. Everything woke up! The birds were first to rejoice, and a veritable oratorio of praise and joyfulness sounded about our ears. The leaves quickly expanded, fresher than ever; the flowers uncurled and unfolded, the May-apple umbrellas raised again; and all seemed singing a song as joyous as that of the birds, though audible only to the nerves of eye and brain of the human beings who had thus witnessed another of nature’s interior entertainments.

How much we miss by reason of fear of a little wetting! Many of the finest pictures painted by the Master of all art are visible only in rain and in mist; and the subtlest coloring of tree leaf and tree stem is that seen only when the dust is all washed away by the shower that should have no terrors for those who care for the truths of nature. In these days of rain-proof clothing, seeing outdoors in the rain is not even attended by the slightest discomfort, and I have found my camera quite able to stand a shower!

Another of the early spring-flowering small trees indeed, the earliest one that blooms in white is the shad-bush, or service-berry. Again the “common” names are trifling and inadequate; shad-bush because the flowers come when the shad are ascending the rivers along which the trees grow, and service-berry because the pleasant fruits are of service, perhaps! June-berry, another name, is better; but the genus owns the mellifluous name of Amelanchier, and the term Canadensis belongs to the species with the clouds of little white flowers shaped like a thin-petaled star. The shad-bush blooms with the trilliums but I may not allow the spring flowers to set me spinning on another hank!

Searching for early recollections of trees, I remember, when a boy of six or seven, finding some little green berries or fruits, each with its long stem, on the pavement under some great trees in the Capitol Park of my home town. I could eat these; and thus they pleased the boy as much as the honey-sweet flowers that gave rise to them now please the man. The noble American linden, one of the really great trees of our forests, bears these delicate whitish flowers, held in rich clusters from a single stem which is attached for part of its length to a curious long green bract. If these flowers came naked on the tree, as do those of the Norway maple, for instance, they would be easily seen and admired of men, but being withheld until the splendid heart-shaped foliage is well out, the blooms miss the casual eye. But the bees see them; they know the linden for their own, and great stores of sweetest honey follow a year when abundant pasture of these flowers is available.

A kindly tree is this linden, or lime, or basswood, to give it all its common names. Kindly as well as stately, but never rugged as the oak, or of obvious pliant strength as the hickory. The old tree invites to shade under its limbs crowded with broad leaves; the young tree is lusty of growth and clean of bark, a model of rounded beauty and a fine variant from the overworked maples of our streets.

Again, the tale of woe! for the great lindens of our forests are nearly all gone. Too useful for timber; too easy to fell; its soft, smooth, even wood too adaptable to many uses! Cut them all; strip the bark for “bast,” or tying material; America is widening; the sawmills cannot be idle; scientific and decent forestry, so successful and so usual in Europe, is yet but a dream for future generations here in America!

But other lindens, those of Europe especially, are loved of the landscape architect and the Germans. “Unter den Linden,” Berlin’s famous street, owes its name, fame and shade to the handsome European species, the white-lined leaves of which turn up in the faintest breeze, to show silvery against the deep green of their upper surfaces. Very many of these fine lindens are being planted now in America by landscape architects, and there are some lindens on Long Island just as prim and trim as any in Berlin. Indeed, there is a sort of German “offiziere” waxed-mustache air of superiority about them, anyway!

There is an all-pervading Middle States tree that I might give a common name to as the “fence-post tree,” because it is so often grown for that use only, by reason of its enduring timber and its exceeding vigor under hard usage. Yet the common black locust is one of the most distinct and pleasing American trees of moderate height. Distinct it is in its framework in winter, mayhap with the twisted pods of last season’s fruits hanging free; distinct again in its long-delayed late-coming acacia-like foliage; but fragrant, elegant and beautiful, as well as distinct, when in June it sets forth its long, drooping racemes of whitest and sweetest flowers. These come only when warm weather is an assured fact, and the wise Pennsylvania Germans feel justified in awaiting the blooming of the locust before finally discarding their winter underclothing!

For years a family of my knowledge has held it necessary, for its proper conduct, to have in order certain floral drives. First the apple blossom drive introduces the spring, and the lilac drive confirms the impression that really the season is advancing; but the locust drive is the sweetest of all, taking these nature lovers along some shady lanes, beside the east bank of a great river, and in places where, the trees planted only for the fence utility of the hard yellow wood, these fragrant flowers, hanging in grace and elegance far above the highway, have redeemed surroundings otherwise sordid and mean.

I want Americans to prize the American locust for its real beauty. The French know it, and show with pride their trifling imported specimens. We cannot exterminate the trees, and there will be plenty for posts, too; but let us realize its sweetness and elegance, as well as the durability of its structure.

There are fashions in trees, if you please, and the nurserymen set them. Suddenly they discover the merits of some long-forgotten tree, and it jumps into prominence. Thus, only a few years ago, the pin-oak came into vogue, to the lasting benefit of some parks, avenues and home grounds. Then followed the sycamore, but it had to be the European variety, for our own native “plane tree,” or “button-ball,” is too plentiful and easy to sing much of a tree-seller’s song about. This Oriental plane is a fine tree, however, and the avenue in Fairmount Park that one may see from trains passing over the Schuylkill river is admirable. The bark is mottled in green, and especially bright when wet with rain. As the species is free from the attacks of a nasty European “bug,” or fungus, which is bothering the American plane, it is much safer to handle, commercially.

But our stately American sycamore is in a different class. One never thinks of it as a lawn tree, or as bordering a fashionable roadway; rather the expectation is to find it along a brook, in a meadow, or in some rather wild and unkempt spot. As one of the scientific books begins of it, “it is a tree of the first magnitude.” I like that expression; for the sycamore gives an impression of magnitude and breadth; it spreads out serenely and comfortably.

My friend Professor Bailey says Platanus occidentalis, which is the truly right name of this tree, has no title to the term sycamore; it is properly, as his Cyclopedia gives it, Buttonwood, or Plane. Hunting about a little among tree books, I find the reason for this, and that it explains another name I have never understood. The sycamore of the Bible, referred to frequently in the Old Testament, traditionally mentioned as the tree under which Joseph rested with Mary and the young child on the way to Egypt, and into which Zaccheus climbed to see what was going on, was a sort of fig tree “Pharaoh’s Fig,” in fact. When the mystery-plays of the centuries gone by were produced in Europe, the tree most like to what these good people thought was the real sycamore furnished the branches used in the scene-setting and it was either the oriental plane, or the sycamore-leaved maple that was chosen, as convenient. The name soon attached itself to the trees; and when homesick immigrants looked about the new world of America for some familiar tree, it was easy enough to see a great similarity in our buttonwood, which thus soon became sycamore.

So much for information, more or less legendary, I confess; but the great tree we are discussing is very tangible. Indeed, it is always in the public eye; for it carries on a sort of continuous disrobing performance! The snake sheds his skin rather privately, and comes forth in his new spring suit all at once; the oak and the maple, and all the rest of them continually but invisibly add new bark between the splitting or stretching ridges of the old; but our wholesome friend the sycamore is quite shamelessly open about it, dropping off a plate or a patch here and there as he grows and swells, to show us his underwear, which thus at once becomes overcoat, as he goes on. At first greenish, the under bark thus exposed becomes creamy white, mostly; and I have had a conceit that the colder the winter, the whiter would be those portions of Mr. Buttonball’s pajamas he cared to expose to us the next spring!

The leaves of the sycamore are good to look at, and efficient against the sun. The color above is not as clear and sharp as that of the maple; underneath the leaves are whitish, and soft, or “pubescent,” as the botanical term goes. Quite rakishly pointed are the tips, and the whole effect, in connection with the balls, which are first crowded clusters of flowers, and then just as crowded clusters of seeds is that of a gentleman of the old school, dignified in his knee-breeches and cocked hat, fully aware that he is of comfortable importance!

Those little button-balls that give name to this good American tree follow the flower clusters without much change of form they were flowers, they are seeds and they stay by the tree persistently all winter, blowing about in the sharp winds. After a while one is banged often enough to open its structure, and then the carrying wind takes on its wings the neat little cone-shaped seeds, each possessed of its own silky hairs to help float it gently toward the ground and thus is another of nature’s curious rounds of distribution completed.

A tree is never without interest to those whose eyes have been opened to some of the wonders and perfections of nature. Nevertheless, there is a time in the year’s round when each tree makes its special appeal. It may be in the winter, when every twig is outlined sharply against the cold sky, and the snow reflects light into the innermost crevices of its structure, that the elm is most admirable. When the dogwood has on its white robe in May and June, it then sings its song of the year. The laden apple tree has a pure glory of the blossoms, and another warmer, riper glory of the burden of fruit, but we think most kindly of its flowering time. Some trees maintain such a continuous show of interest and beauty that it is difficult to say on any day, “Now is this tulip or this oak at its very finest!” Again, the spring redness of the swamp maple is hardly less vivid than its mature coloring of the fall.

But as to the liquidambar, or sweet-gum, there can be no question. Interesting and elegant the year round, its autumn covering of polished deep crimson starry leaves is so startlingly beautiful and distinct as to almost take it out of comparison with any other tree. Others have nearly the richness of color, others again show nearly the elegance of leaf form, but no one tree rivals completely the sweet-gum at the time when the autumn chill has driven out all the paleness in its leaf spectrum, leaving only the warm crimson that seems for awhile to defy further attacks of frost.

As to shape, the locality settles that; for, a very symmetrical small to maximum-sized tree in the North and on high dry places, in the South and in wet places north it becomes another “tree of the first magnitude,” wide-spreading and heavy. A stellar comparison seems to fit, because of these wonderful leaves. They struck me at first, hunting photographs one day, as some sort of a maple; but what maple could have such perfection of star form? A maple refined, perfected, and indeed polished, one might well think, for while other trees have shining leaves, they are dull in comparison with the deep-textured gloss of these of the sweet-gum.

Here, too, is a tree for many places; an adaptable, cosmopolitan sort of arboreal growth. At its full strength of hard, solid, time-defying wooded body on the edge of some almost inaccessible swamp of the South, where its spread-out roots and ridgy branches earn for it another common name as the “alligator tree,” it is in a park or along a private driveway at the North quite the acme of refined tree elegance, all the summer and fall. It takes on a rather narrow, pyramidal head, broadening as it ages, but never betraying kin with its fellow of the swamp, save perhaps when winter has bared its peculiar winged and strangely “corky” branches.

These odd branches bear, on some trees particularly, a noticeable ridge, made up of the same substance which in the cork-oak of Europe furnishes the bottle-stoppers of commerce. It makes the winter structure of the sweet-gum most distinct and picturesque, which appearance is accentuated by the interesting little seed-balls, or fruits, rounded and spiny, that hang long from the twigs. These fruits follow quickly an inconspicuous flower that in April or May has made its brief appearance, and they add greatly to the general attractiveness of the tree on the lawn, to my mind. Years ago I first made acquaintance with the liquidambar, as it ought always to be called, one wet September day, when an old tree-lover took me out on his lawn to see the rain accentuate the polish on the starry leaves and drip from the little many-pointed balls. I found that day that a camera would work quite well under an umbrella, and I obtained also a mind-negative that will last, I believe, as long as I can think of trees.

The next experience was in another state, where a quaint character, visited on business, struck hands with me on tree-love, and took me to see his pet liquidambar at the edge of a mill-pond. That one was taller, and quite stately; it made an impression, deepened again when the third special showing came, this time on a college campus, the young tree being naked and corky, and displayed with pride by the college professor who had gotten out of his books into real life for a joyous half day.

He wasn’t the botany professor, if you please; that dry-as-dust gentleman told me, when I inquired as to what I might find in early bloom, or see with the eyes of an ignorant plant-lover, that there was “nothing blooming, and nothing of interest.” He added that he had a fine herbarium where I might see all the plants I wanted, nicely dried and spread out with pins and pasters, their roots and all!

Look at dead plants, their roots indecently exposed to mere curiosity, on a bright, living early April day? Not much! I told my trouble to the professor of agriculture, whose eyes brightened, as he informed me he had no classes for that morning, and “We would see!” We did see a whole host of living things outdoors, flowers peeping out; leaves of the willows, just breaking; buds ready to burst; all nature waiting for the sun’s call of the “grand entree.” It was a good day; but I pitied that poor old dull-eyed herbarium specimen of a botanical professor, in whose veins the blood was congealing, when everything about called on him to get out under the rays of God’s sun, and study, book in hand if he wanted, the bursting, hurrying facts of the imminent spring.

But a word more about the liquidambar the name by which I hope the tree we are discussing may be talked of and thought of. Old Linnaeus gave it that name, because it described euphoniously as well as scientifically the fact that the sap which exudes from this fine American tree is liquid amber. Now isn’t that better than “gum” tree?

With trees in general as objects of interest, I have always felt a special leaning toward tropical trees, probably because they were rare, and indeed not to be seen outside of the conservatory in our Middle States. My first visit to Florida was made particularly enjoyable by reason of the palms and bananas there to be seen, and I have by no means lost the feeling of admiration for the latter especially. In Yucatan there were to be seen other and stranger growths and fruits, and the novelty of a great cocoanut grove is yet a memory not eclipsed by the present-day Floridian and Bahamian productions of the same sort.

It was, therefore, with some astonishment that I came to know, a few years ago, more of a little tree bearing a fruit that had been familiar from my boyhood, but which I was then informed was the sole northern representative of a great family of tropical fruits, and which was fairly called the American banana. The papaw it was; a fruit all too luscious and sweet, when fully ripe in the fall, for most tastes, but appealing strongly to the omnivorous small boy. I suppose most of my readers know its banana-like fruits, four or five inches long, green outside, but filled with soft and sweet aromatic yellow pulp, punctuated by several fat bean-like seeds.

But it is the very handsome and distinct little tree, with its decidedly odd flowers, I would celebrate, rather than the fruits. This tree, rather common to shady places in eastern America as far north as New York, is worth much attention, and worth planting for its spreading richness of foliage. The leaves are large, and seem to carry into the cold North a hint of warmth and of luxuriant growth not common, by any means I know of only one other hardy tree, the cucumber magnolia, with an approaching character. The arrangement of these handsome papaw leaves on the branches, too, makes the complete mass of regularly shaped greenery that is the special characteristic of this escape from the tropics; and, since I have seen the real papaw of the West Indies in full glory, I am more than ever glad for the handsomer tree that belongs to the regions of cold and vigor.

The form of our papaw, or Asimina triloba the botanical name is rather pleasing is noticeable, and as characteristic as its leafage. See these side branches, leaving the slender central stem with a graceful up-curve, but almost at once swinging down, only to again curve upward at the ends! Are they not graceful? Such branches as these point nature’s marvelous engineering, to appreciate which one needs only to try to imagine a structure of equal grace and efficiency, made with any material of the arts. How awkward and clumsy steel would be, or other metal!

Along these swinging curved branches, as we see them in the April winds, there appear hints of the leaf richness that is to come but something else as well. These darkest purple-red petals, almost black, as they change from the green of their opening hue, make up the peculiar flowers of the papaw. There is gold in the heart of the flower, not hid from the bees, and there is much of interest for the seeker for spring knowledge as well; though I advise him not to smell the flowers. Almost the exact antithesis of the dogwood is the bloom of this tree; for, both starting green when first unfolded from the buds, the papaw’s flowers advance through browns and yellows, dully mingled, to the deep vinous red of maturity. The dogwood’s final banner of white is unfolded through its progress of greens, about the same time or a little later.

A pleasant and peculiar small tree is this papaw, not nearly so well known or so highly esteemed as it ought to be.

Another tree with edible fruits but here there will be a dispute, perhaps! is the persimmon. I mean the American persimmon, indissolubly associated in our own Southland with the darky and the ’possum, but also well distributed over Eastern North America as far north as Connecticut. The botanical name of the genus is Diospyros, liberally translated as “fruit of the gods,” or “Jove’s fruit.” If his highness of Olympus was, by any chance, well acquainted with our ’simmon just before frost, he must have had a copper-lined mouth, to choose it as his peculiar fruit!

Making a moderate-sized tree of peculiar and pleasing form, its branches twisting regardless of symmetry, the persimmon in Pennsylvania likes the country roadsides, especially along loamy banks. Here it has unequaled opportunity for hanging out its attractively colored fruits. As one drives along in early fall, just before hard frost, these fine-looking little tomato-like globes of orange and red are advertised in the wind by the absence of the early dropping foliage. They look luscious and tempting; indeed, they are tempting! Past experience you need but one had prepared me for this “bunko” fruit; but my friend would not believe me, one day in early October he must taste for himself. Taste he did, and generously, for the first bite is pleasing, and does not alarm, wherefore he had time, before his insulted nerves of mouth and tongue gave full warning, to absorb two of the ’simmons. Whew! What a face he made when the puckering juice got to work, and convinced him that he had been sucking a disguised lump of alum. Choking and gasping, he called for the water we were far from; and he won’t try an unfrosted persimmon again!

My clerical friend who brought home the fairy tale about the red-bud, or Judas-tree, might well have based his story on the American persimmon, but for the fact that this puckery little globe, so brilliant and so deceptive before frost, loses both its beauty and its astringency when slightly frozen. Then its tender flesh is suave and delicious, and old Jove might well choose it for his own.

But the tree that is a beauty all summer, with its shining leaves, oblong, pointed and almost of the magnolia shape. It will grace any situation, and is particularly one of the trees worth planting along highways, to relieve the monotony of too many maples, ashes, horse-chestnuts and the like, and to offer to the passer-by a tempting fruit of which he will surely not partake too freely when it is most attractive. I read that toward the Western limit of its range the persimmon, in Louisiana, Eastern Kansas and the Indian Territory, becomes another tree of the first magnitude, towering above a hundred feet. This would be well worth seeing!

There is another persimmon in the South, introduced from Japan, the fruits of which are sold on the fruit-stands of Philadelphia, Boston and New York. This, the “kaki” of Japan, is a small but business-like tree, not substantially hardy north of Georgia, which provides great quantities of its beautiful fruits, rich in coloring and sweet to the taste, and varying greatly in size and form in its different varieties. These ’simmons do not need the touch of frost, nor do they ever attain the fine, wild, high flavor of the frost-bitten Virginian fruits; the tree that bears them has none of the irregular beauty of our native persimmon, nor does it approach in size to that ornament of the countryside.

And now, in closing these sketches, I become most keenly sensible of their deficiencies. Purely random bits they are, coming from a busy man, and possessing the one merit of frankness. Deeply interested in trees, but lacking the time for continuous study, I have been turning my camera and my eyes upon the growths about me, asking questions, mentally recording what I could see, and, while thankful for the rest and the pleasure of the pursuit, always sorry not to go more fully into proper and scientific tree knowledge. At times my lack in this respect has made me ashamed to have written at all upon trees; but with full gratitude to the botanical explorers whose labors have made such superficial observations as mine possible, I venture to send forth these sketches, without pretension as to the statement of any new facts or features.

If anything I have here set down shall induce among those who have looked and read with me from nature’s open book the desire to go more deeply into the fascinating tree lore that always awaits and inevitably rewards the effort, I shall cry heartily, “God-speed!”