Part 12

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 entrée." 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 Linnæus 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.