Part 6

The bloom of the black oak consists of a fringe of yellow catkins at the base of each shoot, and pairs of red-tongued acorn flowers in the angles of some of the leaves. Back of the new shoot the half-grown acorns of the previous season are seen. In autumn the new crop is well along and the full-grown acorns, which have taken two seasons to ripen, are ready to be shed. Each kernel sits in a straight-sided cup of loosely shingled scales, which form a fringe at the margin. The kernel is bitter, and yellow, as it is in most of the species of the Black Oak Group.

The large, downy, pointed buds of this oak will often determine its name for us when we are confused by the shapes of the leaves. Often the red oak and the black oak “run together” in their leaf forms. To determine the tree’s name we must call in the buds, the acorns, and their cups, and the general shape of the trees, and consider all these points together.

Black oak leaves are thick, coarse, and leathery. Crumple one in your hand, and you cringe at the harsh scratching noise it makes. They vary from four to ten inches in length, and from two to six inches in breadth. The margins are deeply cut into seven or nine broad, bristly-toothed lobes, with rounded bays between. The upper surface is dark green in summer, shining and smooth, or sometimes hairy. The lining is brownish and a remnant of the scurfy down is found in the neighbourhood of the veins. In autumn these leaves turn brownish-yellow, but rarely show a tinge of red.

The bark of black oak is stripped and carried to the tan-yards. Or it furnishes a yellow dye, used in the printing of calicoes. The wood is used in house-building, and in the manufacture of furniture.

THE RED OAK

The red oak is the tree most likely to be mistaken for the black oak. The bark is brown, with a decided red tinge. The twigs are also reddish, and the wood is red-brown. The inner bark has the same tinge instead of the orange-coloured lining the black oak bark has.

The red oak is a large, stately tree, sometimes 150 feet in height, and far more symmetrical than the black oak. Its leaves vary greatly in the depth of their marginal clefts, but in general they are oval in outline, and their lobes and sinuses are triangular. These lobes always point forward, rather than outward, along the sides of the leaf, and they always end in the sharp, spiny points that belong to the leaves of all the trees that fall into the Black Oak Group. Red oak leaves are thinner than those of black oak, and not so harsh when crumpled in the hand. Their linings are pale green and smooth in summer. Their autumn colour is deep red.

The buds of the red oak are pointed, smooth, reddish, and about one-fourth of an inch long. They are much smaller, and lack the down of the buds of the black oak.

Red oak acorns are the most distinct feature of this species. They are large, often over an inch in length, and broad, and they sit in saucers, instead of cups. These saucers are made of close scales, and they curl in closely at the top as if to tighten their hold on the nut, which extends two-thirds its height above this rim. The kernel is white, and extremely bitter.

THE SCARLET OAK

The scarlet oak need not be confused with either the red or black oaks, for it is a far more dainty tree than either in its trim trunk, graceful curving branches, very slim twigs, and deeply cut leaves. In form, these leaves are oval, but so much of the “cloth” is cut away by the four or six deep bays along the sides that a small amount of green is left to do leaf duty. The slender lobes are strengthened by the branching veins, each of which ends in a spiny point. These almost skeleton leaves are beautifully lustrous and thin, a trifle paler beneath and sometimes hairy tufted at the veins. They are rarely six inches long, and the side lobes sometimes measure five inches from tip to tip. The leaf stems are long and flexible, and the whole tree top is as light and feathery and tremulous in a breeze as that of a honey locust or a willow. In autumn the scarlet oak blazes like a torch above the duller reds and browns of the woods, and keeps its brilliancy later than any other oak.

The acorn differs from the black oak in being smaller and daintier, and in having its cup drawn in tightly at the rim. The scales are smooth and close-pressed; the kernel white and bitter.

THE PIN OAK

The pin oak has foliage much like the scarlet oak, but coarser and not so lustrous. Often a pin oak tree has leaves that approach the red oak in form, and these lead to confusion, if leaves alone are consulted in determining the name of the tree. There are better signs in any pin oak that set it apart from its larger-leaved relative. Consult the acorns. They are plump little nuts, as broad as long, rarely measuring one-half inch either way, pale brown, streaked with black in straight lines, down from the pointed tips, and they sit in shallow, saucer-like cups made of close reddish scales. As they fall, the nuts roll out of the cups, which are lined with hair. The kernel is white and bitter and yet, late in winter, it is very common to find them gnawed open by some hungry little four-foot, whose winter store threatens to run short.

The pin oak takes its name from the fact that its branches are thickly set with short, pin-like twigs, many of which die but do not fall. These stubs stay on for several years. This fact alone will soon enable us to recognise the tree from a distance. No other species is so close-twigged, and the symmetrical form of this tree is very striking in the winter. It is a pyramid with many small branches thrust out horizontally from the main shaft. Below the middle of the tree, the long branches have a downward thrust, and the lowest ones often sweep the ground. Above the middle of the tree the branches are horizontal, and they gradually become shorter, and the tree ends in a pointed tip. There is no oak that I know which has so much the pyramidal form of evergreens like the firs, hemlocks, and spruces.

On the avenues of the city of Washington, we shall find superb double rows of American trees. On one which leads to the Navy Yard, I remember the beautiful pin oaks, uniform in size, perfect in symmetry, that stood in a double row along the sides of the avenue. To the crowds of tourists who visit the capital city every year, I hope that this will be an object lesson. In most towns and cities every owner plants the trees he likes in front of his house, so our streets and avenues present a mixture of trees of all ages, sizes, kinds, and conditions. The better way is for the city to plant the same tree in double lines, the whole length of a street, as has of late years been done in Washington. One needs only to see these trees coming on, each year adding beauty and dignity to the city, to realise that such planting may be done easily anywhere in the country, where trees as beautiful as the pin oaks grow wild.

THE WILLOW OAK

A Southern tree with slender twigs and narrow leaves like those of a willow, surprises us by bearing acorns! It is the willow oak, a beautiful, graceful tree for shade and for avenue planting. The tree naturally chooses wet ground, but it thrives where the soil is deep and well drained. I remember a fine large willow oak in John Bartram’s garden in Philadelphia, and a young tree in the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. This little one grows rapidly, but the frost nips its twigs in the winter. The species grows wild from New York southward, just back from the sea coast, to Texas. In swampy land, it is found from Missouri southward.

Willow oak acorns are downy, yellow-brown, and set in shallow saucer-shaped cups. The kernel is orange-yellow, and bitter. Half-grown acorns are found with the ripe ones on these trees, and the dark, rough bark agrees with others of the Black Oak Group. Though the leaves have rarely a side lobe, but are mostly narrow and plain-margined, the tip ends in a spine, as all black oak leaves should.

TREES WITH WINGED SEEDS

Why do the trees grow in such mixed groves, when Nature does the planting? Here and there we find solid groves of beech or oak, but the forest is, for the most part, a gathering together of all kinds of trees. A part of the beauty of any woodland is this variety in the planting. Under a tall oak we find a hornbeam, and under this the witch hazel, and under the witch hazel, a carpet of low woodland plants. We may walk in a straight line, or follow a woodland path a mile, and find every tree we meet is different from all the rest.

Many reasons explain the order in which Nature plants forests. One of the best of these is found in the kind of seeds trees bear. We shall find that trees most widely scattered are those whose seeds are winged. It is not hard to find, from May until far past midwinter, trees bearing light, winged seeds. All through the summer, the wind is busy sowing the seeds of the early-fruiting trees. In autumn, and all through the winter, the sowing of the larger crop goes on.

Let us begin our study with the maples, whose winged seeds every child knows. From the silver maple, whose seeds are dry before the first of June, there is a procession of ripening maple seeds that lasts throughout the year. A high wind shakes off the silver maple’s keys in showers in late May. Watch those in the tree-tops. The wind has a better chance up there. Each key, loosening from its twig, turns round and round in a dizzy whirl, and sails away still whirling as it falls, the heavy seed end always pointed downward. A tree is soon stripped, and the ground littered under it. But a great deal larger area than the tree’s shadow has the seeds scattered over it: the stronger the wind, the further these seeds go. Before the summer is over, a crop of little maple trees springs up from this sowing.

The red maple’s scarlet seed clusters turn brown, and the little winged seeds take flight in June. Lighter and smaller, they are carried longer distances than the seeds of the silver maple, and a crop of little red maples follows this June sowing of the trees.

I remember walking in a corn field in late June; the corn had been last ploughed a month before. Among the weeds that had grown up in this short time was a crop of young red maples, now six inches high. It was amazing to see these little trees grow so plentifully in a cultivated field. I looked for the seed tree, and there it stood on the edge of the field, the only maple tree in sight. A few young trees were growing in the matted grass of the roadside under the tree, but the great crop was from the seeds that flew out to the mellow ground between the corn rows. The disappointed seeds, those which fell and did not grow, were under the tree and in the dusty road.

In the autumn the hard maple, which we call the sugar maple, ripens its winged seeds. So does the three-leaved box elder (which is a maple) and the Norway maple, now a very familiar street tree. The wind takes its time, and the trees stubbornly hang on to their seeds, so that these maples are busy all winter with the sowing. Every day they give up a few, and many seeds that fall on the snow are picked up, again and again, by the wind and thus carried further and further away.

The maple seed, with its curiously one-sided wing, is the sign by which the maple family is easily recognised. Other trees have winged seeds, but none have the peculiar form of this one.

All summer long we may know the trees that belong to the ash family by the clusters of pale green darts that hang among their leaves. These are the ash seeds. Each one is a pointed seed case, containing the embryo plant, and out behind it extends the thin, light, two-edged wing. There is no one-sidedness to this blade. The seed is winged, but balanced like a dart. When the wind loosens one from the wiry stem, it goes like an arrow, seed downward. If there is a gale blowing, the seed may be caught up and borne far away in the upper air, before a lull lets it take a downward course, and drive its point into a snowbank, or into the ground. This little feathered arrow may be long or short, depending upon whether it belongs to the red ash, the white ash, or the black; but there is no mistaking an ash tree for any other, once the form of an ash seed is fixed in the mind.