Part 17

The nut yields an abundance of valuable oil, and the wood of the tree is very beautiful and useful for many purposes, one of which is to finish houses on the inside, and another to make gunstocks.

There is another tree belonging to the same family that grows in America and looks very much like the black walnut tree. It is the butternut. Butternut wood is valuable, and butternuts have sweet, oily kernels that most people like. The flowers, of course, are like those of the walnut.

A brown dye is made from the inner bark of the butternut tree, and also a medicine is obtained from it.

During the War of the Rebellion the Southern soldiers were often dressed in homespun clothes dyed by the bark of the butternut, and on this account they were called “butternuts.”

THE CHESTNUT.

The chestnut is a very large and beautiful tree that grows abundantly in some parts of New England and over the Alleghany Mountains. Children always know the chestnut trees, if they live near them.

Like the hickory and walnut, the chestnut has its staminate flowers in catkins, but these are white instead of green, and give the chestnut a very handsome appearance when they cover it with airy plumes in the early summer.

The nuts grow in prickly burrs, two or three in a burr. When the nuts are ripe in the fall, the burrs open to let them out. As everybody knows, they have a thin shell and a sweet kernel. They are sometimes boiled and sometimes eaten raw.

Squirrels, chipmunks, and some birds are fond of them and are often the means of planting them.

Chestnut wood is soft and has rather a coarse, loose grain. It is used largely for fence rails, cheap shingles, and railroad ties.

Chestnuts grow in some parts of Europe and Asia, and there is one kind that bears a nut as large as a black walnut. This nut is not as sweet as our chestnuts, but it is extensively used as food in some parts of Europe. The people go in families to gather the nuts, and prize them as we prize wheat and corn.

OTHER EDIBLE SEEDS.

There are other nuts, as the pecan, whose tree belongs to the Hickory family and grows wild in the southern part of the United States; the beechnut, which grows on a stately tree of our forests; and the hazelnut, that grows on bushes in thickets near streams sometimes, or on the borders of woods.

But squirrels, chipmunks, birds, and such folk are not the only ones that plant seeds. Some ants do. Indeed ants are great hands to plant seeds. They do not take the hard nuts, but rather the seeds of certain grasses and other plants that bear rather small seeds. The ants carry the seeds into their holes, where they sometimes eat only one part of the seed, not enough to hurt it in the least, and so the seeds, buried in the ant-hills, are able to grow.

Ants often drop the seeds they are carrying and lose them, and so the road to the home of the seed-eating ants is often grown over by plants the ants have sown.

BERRIES.

Some berries, such as raspberries and strawberries, are so good they seem to grow on purpose to be eaten. Very likely they do.

It is quite necessary for the blackberry and raspberry bushes to have their seeds sown at some distance from the parent plants, and it is also an advantage to strawberries to have their seeds dispersed. So what is better than to get the help of the birds?

To this end the berries are sweet and juicy when ripe, and they are bright in color, so that the birds can easily find them. A bird often picks a berry and carries it somewhere else to eat, and often it eats only a part and leaves the rest, which falls to the ground.

All berries have seeds in them or outside of them. Strawberries have the little seeds on the outside, as you can easily see.

Gooseberries, currants, and grapes have the little seeds inside, but, whichever way it is, some of the seeds will be left or scattered about by the birds that eat the berries. If some of the seeds are swallowed, that does not seem to hurt them; like the mistletoe seeds, they are able to sprout after having been eaten by a bird.

Birds eat a great many kinds of berries that we never think of eating. Notice how often in the late summer and the autumn you will see bright red or blue, or black, or white berries shining out from the leaves or bare branches of the wayside hedges. All of these are eaten by birds and carried away to new growing places.

Not all birds eat berries or seeds. Watch the birds and see if you can find out which kinds eat berries and seeds.

CHERRIES.

There is no need of describing cherries, as everybody knows them well.

The birds are so fond of ripe cherries that we sometimes have difficulty in getting our share before the robins and thrushes have taken all. Birds frequently fly away with the cherries, eat the pulp, and drop the stone, which, of course, contains a seed, and this seed then often sprouts and grows into a cherry tree. We sometimes find good cherries growing in hedges and thickets, far from the orchard; these have been planted there by the birds.

The sweet cherry is not a native of this country, but was brought here from Europe. We have a number of wild cherries, however, whose fruit we do not esteem, but the birds are fond of it, and they are the means of planting a good many wild cherry trees over the country.

Plums, peaches, and apricots are delicious fruits with hard-shelled seeds. The fruit is gathered, the pulp eaten, and the stone thrown away. We do not eat the seed of the plum, peach, and cherry, as we do that of the hickory and butternut. We throw it away, and thus disperse the seed children of these fruit trees.