Part 20

In July the dark green is illuminated by thousands of starry white blossoms, a few at the end of a slender stem that rises out of a pale green, leaf-like blade. There is nothing like it borne on any other tree.

The news that the basswoods are in bloom reaches the hives in good time. One is able to hear the murmur of bees as far as he can see the flowers, but the fragrance travels much farther. Basswood honey is higher in price than other kinds. Is this the reason the bees are so hard at work? Small as the individual flowers are, they have an unusual supply of nectar, and the bees revel in the plenty of what will feed them and yield wax. They make honey while the sun shines, counting the basswoods their best source of the crude materials for honeymaking. It was so in the days of old. Greek poets sang of the honey-laden lindens. Honey made from linden trees in the Lithuanian forests was carried to Rome, where it sold for three times the price of ordinary honey.

Bees swarm, and the new colony often takes to the woods and sets up housekeeping in a hollow tree. This is so likely in the Southern states to be a linden that “bee tree” is a familiar name of this tree.

THE EARLY BERRIES IN THE WOODS

Robins come to our cherry trees in June, and they hunt for our strawberries under the green leaves. The blackberries come on, and the raspberries, and currants. The birds look at them with calculating eyes. An appetite for berries is inherited in them, learned in the woods, where wild berries have grown, and ripened for them, from the times long before there were gardens and cultivated fruits.

Back in the woods we shall find wild berries ripening, and birds feasting thankfully upon them. The harvest begins with the June-berries in the month of June. Serviceberries they are also called, and the tree is known also as the shadbush. We remember the lovely veil of white blossoms this tree put on before its leaves came out. In June we might not know the trees, except that they bear red berries, few on a cluster, and here the birds are feasting.

There is no other tree with berries that ripen so early, unless it be the broad-leaved mulberry. Here, too, the birds will be found in numbers. Turn back the wide, heart-shaped leaves, and you will find the single berries of all sizes, some green, some reddening and soft. They are like blackberries, each made of many tiny berries, grown together.

The beauty of the mulberry is that its fruit keeps coming on from June until August. It is a very slow, easy-going tree, in no hurry to have its harvest over. The birds like the soft, seedy berries, which to our taste are insipid.

It is a shrewd thing to plant mulberry trees on the edges of fruit gardens, and set a row of June-berry trees along the road outside the cherry orchard. It is the scarcity of wild berries that brings the birds into our gardens. Many a fruit-grower has saved his crop by planting wild berry trees for the birds.

The elders are shrubby trees with large, fern-like leaves. They lift up flat, white flower clusters, sometimes as large as dinner plates, in June, and in the middle of summer dark red berries are ripening where the flowers were. Here is another feast for the birds, and elderberry pies are the reward of boys and girls who gather the berries, and take them home to mother. Grandma thinks of elderberry wine, so good for many ailments, and if the berries are plenty it is easy to gather a bucketful to make a few pints of this old-fashioned cordial.

Among the shining green leaves of the wild red cherry tree the little fruits glow like rubies in the summer. Here is a feast for the birds. We find these small pin cherries very thin-fleshed, and sour, and the biggest of them is no larger than a pea. But how the birds love them! The bird cherry is indeed the bird’s tree. In blossom it belongs to the bees, which come in swarms for nectar. To them, unconscious carriers of pollen from flower to flower, the birds owe a debt of gratitude. They insure the setting of seed, and this means a big crop of fruit.

The wild black cherry is later with its shining clusters of dark red cherries. They come in September, when the birds’ procession has turned southward. The earliest comers hold high carnival in these trees, devour quantities of the bitter-sweet fruit, and drop the seeds near and far. The wind can do little in scattering the seeds of fruit trees. The birds are the chief agents of distribution.

THE SASSAFRAS

The sassafras is not important as a forest tree, yet I do not know another to whom so many kinds of people, of all ages, go, asking for favours this tree alone can give. Even in regions where the tree does not grow, its name is well known. Sassafras tea has a world-wide reputation as a cure for “spring fever,” otherwise known as “that tired feeling.” Drug store windows are piled high in spring with bits of the corky bark of the sassafras roots, and the buds in winter taste of the same aromatic oil, whose flavour rises from a steaming pot of sassafras tea. Many a bad-tasting medicine is made more palatable by a drop or two of oil of sassafras.

The leaves and twigs of young sassafras trees are used in the South to flavour and thicken gumbo soups. The wood of sassafras is light and tough. The long limbs are cut and stripped by country boys going fishing, who know what trees yield the best fishing rods. Sassafras posts last a long while, for the wood does not rot in contact with soil, or soaked with water. It makes good boats and barrels for this same reason.

Children know the sassafras tree. In winter they nibble the dainty green buds, or dig away the snow at the roots to get a morsel of the aromatic bark. In summer it is the leaves that are the chief charm of the tree. It is a fascinating game to look for the “mittens and double mittens,” which seem to be more numerous than the plain oval leaves on this tree. There is no other tree that has three distinct leaf shapes. The mitten form has its thumb just right, on one side. It might be used for a mitten pattern. There are lefts and rights, and mittens of all sizes. The doll-sized ones are the youngest, and they grow near the tips of the twigs. The double mittens have a thumb on each side, and the simple oval shape—the hand part with no thumb at all—is usually harder to find than either of the others.

When looking for these strange leaf shapes, there is always a chance of coming upon a strange inhabitant of the sassafras tree. A great green caterpillar is lying at ease upon a hammock of silk, which he has spun for himself. There he lies, and gazes at the startled person who discovers him. Are those really eyes, or only black spots? They probably scare away birds which are looking for worms. The effect of the two “eye spots” is almost as surprising as if two rolling eyeballs glared at the intruder, and threatened violence if he came near.

Carry home this fearsome green mummy on the leaf; put him in a cage made of wire screen, and watch him. He needs no food, for he is asleep. When he awakes his mummy case will split open, and out of it will emerge a wonderful butterfly, with banded wings of black and yellow velvet, and long, tapering points trailing behind, which gives him his name—the swallow-tailed butterfly. He has a flexible tongue, an inch or more in length, coiled like a watch spring. With it he will probe the tubes of flowers, and find the nectar at the base of each. He is hungry now, so let him go. Turn him loose in a bed of flowers, and you may see just how he feeds.

When the mother butterfly laid its tiny green egg on the face of an open leaf of the sassafras, the tree was probably in blossom. In June, delicate, starry, greenish-yellow flowers come out in clusters on the ends of twigs. The butterfly finds nectar in these fragrant and dainty blossoms. In the autumn birds come and feast upon the blue berries which look very handsome on their red stems. Indeed, it is quite usual for the trees to be stripped while the berries are still green, so hungry are the birds that stop to feed on their long journey to the South.

In the autumn the sassafras trees change colour from the brilliant green of summer. All colours of the sunset, purple, red, and golden, blend in these shining tree tops. A clump of sassafras and sweet gum trees, with here and there a tupelo and a dogwood, a scarlet oak and a hard maple, make a picture never to be forgotten. If the roadside trees were on fire, they would not show any more vivid colouring. It is their glorious good-bye to the year, before they all let their leaves fall and enter into the sleep of winter.

THE ASH FAMILY

The trees whose leaves are set opposite upon the twigs are few in the American woods compared with those whose leaves alternate. The maples have the opposite arrangement of leaves; so have the dogwoods. These trees have simple leaves. The horse chestnuts and buckeyes have their leaves set opposite, and these leaves are compound: five or seven leaflets rise from the end of the stout leaf stem. The ash family is another large group of trees, with leaves set opposite on the twigs. These leaves are compound, but of a different pattern from those of the horse chestnut. The leaf stem has the leaflets arranged in pairs along its sides. This is the feather type of compound leaf, seen in the locust family, and among walnuts and hickories.

Ash trees are recognised by their opposite compound leaves. There is another sign: the fruit has a dry seed, pointed and winged like a dart. There is no other seed exactly like those of the ash. The seed clusters hang on the bare twigs, far into winter. The twigs are stout, and set in pairs on the branches. The trees grow large, and their tops are regular and handsome. The bark is close, broken by shallow fissures into small, often diamond-shaped plates.

Our common ash trees are distinguished by colour, as the names indicate. A few well-marked differences are shown by the species, which are often found growing together in mixed woods.

The white ash is a tall, handsome, stately tree, with a trunk like a grey granite column. The white in its name is from the pale leaf linings, that illuminate the tree top in summer. The twigs are pale, and the bark is often as pale grey as that of a white oak. The slender, dart-like seeds are one to two inches long, with a wing which is twice the length of the round, tapering seed. They hang in thick clusters, paler green than the leaves, and often flushed with a rosy tinge in late summer. All winter the wind harvests the crop of seeds, and plants young white ashes wherever the darts fall on good ground.

The black ash is a slender, upright tree, with narrow head and stout twigs. The plump, leathery buds on the winter twigs are almost black, and the bark is a very dark grey. The foliage in summer is much darker green than that of any other ash, so the name is earned by buds, bark, and leaves. The seeds are flat and short, and the wing is broad and short, and deeply notched. A black ash leaf has all its leaflets stemless except the one at the tip. The white ash has a much fleecier foliage than that of the black, because each leaflet has a stem of its own.

The wood of the black ash splits readily into thin sheets, each representing the growth of a single year. The Indians taught the white men to make baskets out of black ash splints. They cut the tree down, sawed the log into the lengths required, split the blocks into pieces as wide as the splints should be. These sticks were bent over a board, and the strain separated the bands of dense, tough wood into the thin strips just right for basket weaving.

The red ash is a small, spreading tree, with a close head, slender branches, and crowded twigs. Its bark is reddish, closely furrowed, and scaly. The young twigs are covered with soft hairs. The leaves are a shiny yellow-green above, often a foot long, made of seven to nine slender leaflets, whose stems and veins have a silky down, that remains all summer.