Part 16
By far the most graceful tree of this genus is the River Maple, to which the cockneyish epithet of “silver” is applied, from the whitish under surface of its leaves. It is not found in the woods near Boston, but is a favorite shade-tree in all parts of New England. It abounds in the Connecticut Valley and on the banks of some of the rivers in Maine. It is rather slender in its habit, with very long branches, that droop considerably in old and full-grown trees. The foliage of this tree is dull and whitish, but it hangs so loosely as to add grace to the flowing negligence of its long slender branches. The leaves are very deeply cleft, like those of the scarlet oak, so that at a considerable distance they resemble fringe; but they are seldom very highly tinted in autumn.
THE DARK PLAINS CONTAINING MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF A FOREST.
In our early days, when all the scenes about us are full of mysteries, and even the adjoining country is an unexplored region, we feel the liveliest impressions from nature and our own imagination. Those who pass their childhood in the woods, and become acquainted with their inconveniences and their dangers, learn to regard them as something to be avoided. The Western pioneer destroys immense tracts of forest to make room for agriculture and space for his buildings. The inhabitant of the town, on the contrary, sees the woods only on occasional visits, for pleasure or recreation, and acquires a romantic affection for them and their scenes, unfelt by the son of the pioneer or the forester. The earliest period of my life was passed in a village some miles distant from an extensive wood, which was associated in my mind with many interesting objects, from the infrequency of my visits. It was at a very early age, and when I first began to feel some interest in natural objects beyond my own home, that I heard my mother describe the “Dark Plains,” a spacious tract of sandy country, covered with a primitive growth of pines and hemlocks, such as are now seen only in the solitudes of Canada and the northern part of Maine.
The very name of this wooded region is highly significant and poetical, and far removed from the disagreeable character of names vulgarly given to remarkable places. What eccentric person, among the unpoetic society of Puritans and pedlers, could have felt sufficient reverence for Nature to apply to one of her scenes a name that should not either degrade it or make it ridiculous! The very sound of this name sanctifies the place to our imagination; and it is one of the very few applied to natural objects, if the original Indian appellation has been lost, that is not either vulgar or silly. Nothing can be more solemn or suggestive, nothing more poetical or impressive, than the name of this remarkable forest.
I attached a singular mystery to this region of Dark Plains. When I first heard the words spoken, they brought to mind all that I have since found so delightful in the green solitudes of nature,—their twilight at noonday; their dark sombre boughs and foliage, full of sweet sounds from unknown birds, whose voices are never heard in the garden and orchard; the indistinct moaning of winds among their lofty branches, like a storm brewing in the distant horizon, sublime from its seeming distance and indistinctness, though not loud enough to disturb the melody of thrushes and sylvias. All these things had been described to me by her to whom I looked, in that early time of life, for all knowledge and the solution of all mysteries. I had never visited a wood of great extent, and the Dark Plains presented to my imagination a thousand indefinable ideas of beauty and grandeur.
It has often been said that the style of the interior arches of a Gothic cathedral was indicated by the interlacing and overarching boughs of the trees as they meet over our heads in a path through the woods. I think also that the solemnity of its dark halls and recesses, caused by the multiplicity of arches and the pillars that support them, closely resembles that of the interior of a forest; and that the genius of the original architect must have been inspired by the contemplation of those grand woods that pervaded the greater part of Europe in the Middle Ages. The solemn services of the Roman Catholic religion found a people whose imagination having been stimulated by their druidical rites looked upon these wonderful temples as transcending nature in grandeur; and they bowed before the Cross with still greater devotion than they had felt when they made sacrifices under the oak.
There is an indefinable charm in a deep wood, even before we have learned enough to people it with nymphs and dryads and other mythical beings. Groups of trees that invite us to their shade and shelter, in our childhood, on a sultry summer noon, yield us a foretaste of their sensible comfort; and a fragment of wild wood, if we see nothing more spacious, with its cawing crows, its screaming jays, and its few wild quadrupeds, gives us some conception of the immensity of a pathless forest that never yet resounded with the woodman’s axe. I was already familiar with these vestiges of nature’s greatness, enough to inspire me with feelings that do not become very definite until the mind is matured.
The time had come at last when I was to visit one of these solemn temples of the gods. I was between eight and nine years of age, and was to accompany my parents on a journey from Beverly to Concord, my mother’s native town, in New Hampshire. I give this narrative of personal experience, to prove that our love of nature is an innate feeling, which is exalted, but not created, by the imagination. Nothing ever occupied my mind so intensely as the thought of visiting these Dark Plains. Other objects seen on our journey were amusing and attractive; but this wood was the only one that excited in me a passionate interest. All my thoughts were obscure and indefinite, associated with some dreary conceptions of beauty and grandeur; for in our early years we aspire after more exalted feelings than the common scenes of Nature can awaken.
When at length we entered upon the road that led through this forest, the sweetest music had never held me so completely entranced as when I looked up to these lofty trees, extending their branches beyond my ken, with foliage too dense for the sun to penetrate, and all the mysterious accompaniments of the wood, its silence and darkness, its moanings and its echoes. I watched the scenes as we rode slowly by them,—the immense pillars that rose out of a level plain, strewed with brown foliage, and interspersed with a few bushes and straggling vines; the dark summits of the white pines that rose above the round heads of the other species which were the prevailing timber; the twilight that pervaded these woods even at high noon; and I thought of their seemingly boundless extent, of their mysterious solitude, and their unspeakable beauty. Certain religious enthusiasts speak of a precise moment when they feel a certain change that places them in communication with Heaven. If one is ever in a similar manner baptized with the love of nature, it was at this moment I felt that hidden influence which, like the first emotion of love, binds the heart with an unceasing devotion.
I did not at this early age examine individual objects. Yet now and then the note of some solitary bird, or the motions of a squirrel on the outer trees of the wood, held my attention while I was absorbed in a revery of delight. An occasional clearing, containing a cottage with its rustic appendages, opened the sunshine into our path, and made the wood cheerful by this pleasant contrast. When at length we emerged from this gloomy region into the brightness and cheerfulness of the open country, I still dwelt upon the quiet grandeur of its solitudes, and have never forgotten the impressions I had received from them, nor the passionate interest awakened in me before my journey.
About thirty years afterwards I revisited this wood, and traversed the greater part of it, accompanied by an old friend of the generation that had passed before me. From him I learned that the original growth of timber had been mostly felled, and a second growth of inferior height and dimensions occupied its place. He pointed out to me how the whole character of the wood was changed by the simple act of felling the primitive trees. The ground was not so wet as formerly; the standing waters did not occupy so wide a space; the forest contained more openings, the barren elevations not having been supplied with a new growth of trees. In the place of them were a few scrub oaks, some whortleberry-bushes, and other native shrubs; the trees were smaller, and there was a greater predominance of pitch-pine in all the more sandy parts of the tract, and numerous white birches had sprung up among them.
“Such is the change,” he remarked, “which is gradually taking place over the whole continent.” He seemed to regret this change, and thought the progress of the civilized arts, though it rendered necessary the clearing of the greater part of the wooded country, ought not to be attended with such universal devastation. Some spacious wood ought to remain, in every region, in which the wild animals would be protected, and where we might view the grounds as they appeared when the wild Indian was lord of this continent. Even at that time I found some acres of forest which had been unmolested still retaining those grand, wild, and rugged features that entitled the region to the poetic name of Dark Plains.
THE RED MAPLE.
Not dainty of its soil, but thriving equally well in a bog or upon a fertile river-bank, by the side of a stream or upon a dry eminence; coming forth in the spring, like morning in the east, arrayed in crimson and purple; bearing itself not proudly, but gracefully, in modest green, among the more stately trees in summer; and, ere it bids adieu to the season, stepping forth in robes of gold, vermilion, crimson, and variegated scarlet, stands the queen of the American forest, the pride of all eyes and the delight of every picturesque observer of nature,—the Red Maple. There are but few trees that surpass it in general beauty of form and proportion, and in the variety and splendor of its autumnal tints it is not equalled by any known tree. Without this species, the American forest would hardly be distinguished from that of Europe by any superiority of tinting. It stands among the occupants of the forest like Venus among the planets, the brightest in the midst of brightness, and the most beautiful in a constellation of beauty.
The Red Maple is a tree of second magnitude, very comely at all periods of its growth, producing many branches, forming a somewhat pyramidal top while young, but expanding into a round head as it grows old. It is very evenly subdivided, the central shaft seldom being distinguished above the lower junction of its principal branches. The leaves are palmate, of rather a pale green, and the spray, though neat and elegant, does not equal that of the lime or the birch. We associate this tree with the valleys and lowlands, but a wet soil is not necessary for its prosperity. Some of the finest single trees I have known were standing upon a dry soil; but a forest of them is always located in a swamp.
The Red Maple is one of the most common trees in the southern parts of New England, and it occupies a very wide geographical range. In the North it first appears in the latitude of Quebec. It seems to avoid the company of the rock maple, and forms no large assemblages above the northern boundary of Massachusetts, below which the kindred species becomes rare in New England. The Red Maple is abundant in all the Atlantic States, as far as Florida, and there is no other tree that occupies so large a proportion of the wet lands in the Middle States. According to Michaux, it is the last tree which is found in swamps, as we approach the boundary of vegetation.
Preference is generally given to the other two species for planting by waysides and in pleasure-grounds in Massachusetts, because they are more luxuriant in their growth. Perhaps they are chosen for the sake of variety, being less common in the woods of this State than the Red Maple; and being planted from nurseries, and costly, they are found chiefly in dressed grounds. But the Red Maple is far more interesting and beautiful than any other species, and its lighter foliage, more airy habit, and more delicate spray bring it into better harmony with wild and rude scenery, as the paler and less luxuriant wild flowers better adorn a wood-path than the more showy denizens of the garden. The Red Maple bears a profusion of crimson flowers in the spring, and from them it derives its name. When the flowers have dropped their petals, the keys, or fruit-pods, that succeed them, retain the same crimson hue for some days, gradually fading into brown as they mature.
THE WHITE BIRCH.
On the sandy plains of many parts of New England, some of the most prominent objects are coppices of slender White Birch trees, intermingled with pitch-pine. These trees are seldom more than four or five inches in diameter, rising to the height of about twenty feet, with a grayish-white trunk, and, as may be observed in winter, a dense and dark-colored spray. This species is called Poplar Birch, from the tremulous habit of the foliage, but is never assembled in large forest groups. Like the alder, it is employed by Nature for the shading of her living pictures, and for producing those gradations which are the charm of spontaneous wood-scenery. In all the Northern States, a pitch-pine wood is generally fringed with White Birches, and outside of them is a still more humble growth of hazels, cornels, and vacciniums, uniting them imperceptibly with the herbage of the plain.
The White Birch is remarkable for its elegance. It seldom divides the main stem, which extends to the summit of the tree, giving out from all parts numerous slender branches, forming a very neat and beautiful spray, of a dark chocolate-color, contrasting finely with the whiteness of the trunk. This tree, when growing as a standard, has more of a pyramidal shape than in a wood; but it does not attain in this country the magnitude of the same species in Europe. The durability of the bark of the White Birch is said to be unsurpassed by that of any other vegetable substance. Selby records a fact related by Du Hamel, which is remarkable. In the ruins of Dworotrkoi, in Siberia, a piece of birch wood was found changed into stone, while the outer bark, white and shining, remained in its natural state.
So many of the most delightful scenes of nature are in my own mind allied with the different birches, that there is not one that does not immediately call up some charming scenery and impress my mind with pleasant memories. He who in his early days was a rambler in the woods is familiar with the White Birch trees. They have shaded him in his sylvan researches and his solitary musings, his social walks in quest of flowers with the sex for whom the flowers seemed to be created, or with his male companions in pursuit of game. When journeying, these graceful trees, in company with the fragrant pitch-pines, have offered him their flickering shade, and along the sandy plains have defended him from the scorching heat of the sun, and spread a leafy canopy over his rustic path. In the sultry heat of summer noonday, I have often followed the course of some humble cart-path through their tangled undergrowth, gathering wild fruits from bush and bramble, or watching the singing birds that nestled in their boughs and blended their wild notes with the sound of the green rustling leaves.
All the birches are graceful trees. Their branches are finely divided, like those of the elm and the lime, and many of them incline to a drooping habit. There is a remarkable airiness in their slender feathery spray, rendered still more lively in the White Birch by its small tremulous leaves. This species is found in the highest latitude in which any tree can live. It is the last deciduous tree in the northern boundaries of vegetation in America and Europe, before we reach the Arctic Circle, and the last that appears when we ascend high mountains, occupying the belt just below the line of perpetual snow. It is worthy of notice that the small White Birch in this country, though considered identical with the White Birch of Europe, is greatly inferior to it in size. In America, however, the white canoe birch, a very similar species, equally surpasses the European White Birch. It seems as if the thrifty habit of the canoe birch had some mysterious influence in dwarfing the other species in America.
THE CANOE BIRCH.
Some of the most beautiful assemblages of wood in high latitudes on this continent consist of the Canoe Birch. It is seen in Massachusetts and Connecticut only in occasional groups; but in the States of Maine and New Hampshire, on the sandy river-banks and diluvial plains, it forms woods of great extent and unrivalled beauty. With their tall shafts resembling pillars of polished marble, supporting a canopy of bright green foliage, they form one of the picturesque attractions of a Northern tour. Nature indicates the native habitat of this noble tree by causing its exterior to display the whiteness of snow. The foliage of the Canoe Birch is of a very bright green, and exceeds that of all the family in the depth of its golden tints in autumn. We never see in the foliage of the birches any of that glaucous or pea-green color so common in the maples. The leaves of the Canoe Birch deviate from the ovate form and approach the heart shape. Its bark is almost purely white, and attracts the attention of every visitor of the woods. The clean white shafts of a Canoe Birch wood, towering upward among the other trees of the forest, present a scene with which nothing else is comparable. The uses which have been made of the bark of this tree are so numerous and so familiar to all that it would be idle to enumerate them. Indeed, it would be difficult to estimate its importance to the aboriginal inhabitants of America.
RELATIONS OF TREES TO BIRDS AND INSECTS.
“My neighbors,” said my philosophic friend, “are the cause of more than half the injury my crops receive from caterpillars and other insects. They will not allow the birds a harbor of wood and shrubbery upon their own grounds, and they shoot those which I endeavor to entice by offering them a shelter in my farm. It is strange they cannot understand the mischievous character of their operations of smoothing and grubbing. That little rising ground you see before you, covered with trees and shrubs, is hardly more than a bare rock. It occupies about an eighth of an acre; but no other possible use could be made of it, except as a quarry. The little grove, or coppice, that stands upon it, is the most beautiful object in sight from my house. I have never allowed it to be disturbed or frequented by social assemblages. I keep it sacred for the use of the birds, and it is a perfect aviary. The birds that feed upon the destructive insects that infest my grounds are raised in that temple of the gods, which is watered by numerous little springs that ooze from the crevices of the rock. While they are rearing their young, all species, even if they live exclusively upon seeds after they have left their nest, feed their offspring upon larvæ, which they collect from the nearest ground that affords them a supply. Hence I consider that bare rock, with its trees and shrubbery, the most profitable division of my farm, from the shelter it affords the birds, which are in an important sense my most profitable stock.”
I have often thought of my neighbor’s remarks, especially when I have observed the diligence of our farmers in destroying upon their grounds every acceptable harbor for the birds. When we are traversing a wood, if we discover an apple-tree growing in a little clearing or open space, we find it invariably exempt from the ravages of the common apple-borer. The same exemption is observed in those fruit-trees that stand very near a wild wood, or any wood containing a spontaneous undergrowth. The explanation of this fact is that the wood affords a harbor to the birds that destroy these insects in all their forms. Orchards and gardens, on the contrary, which are located at any considerable distance from a wood, have not this security. Robins, it is true, are very abundant in orchards, which are their breeding-places; but robins, though the most useful birds that are known to exist, take all their food from the ground. They destroy vast quantities of cutworms and chrysalids buried in the soil, but they take no part of their insect food from the trees. The birds that perform this work are the sylvias, woodpeckers, creepers, and other species that live only in woods and thickets. Hence an orchard that is nearly surrounded by a wild wood of much extent is not badly infested by borers and other injurious insects.
All species of insects multiply in cultivated grounds, while the birds, with a few exceptions, that feed upon them, can find a nursery and protection only in the woods. “The locust,” says George P. Marsh, “which ravages the East with its voracious armies, is bred in vast open plains, which admit the full heat of the sun to hasten the hatching of the eggs, gather no moisture to destroy them, _and harbor no bird to feed upon their larvæ_. It is only since the felling of the forests of Asia Minor and Cyrene that the locust has become so fearfully destructive in those countries; and the grasshopper, which now threatens to be almost as great a pest to the agriculture of North American soils, breeds in seriously injurious numbers only where a wide extent of surface is bare of woods.”
Some men destroy trees and shrubbery in their borders, because they are supposed to harbor insects. But if this be true, it is because they are not sufficient in extent to shelter the birds that feed upon them. The insects that multiply upon our lands deposit their eggs some in the soil, some on the branches of trees and upon fences and buildings. They are nowise dependent on a wild growth of wood and shrubbery. These pests of agriculture need nothing better than the under edge of a clapboard or a shingle whereon to suspend their cocoons or lay their eggs. So minute are the objects that will afford them all the conveniences they need, when hatching and when passing through all their transformations, till they become perfect insects, that no artifice or industry of man can deprive them of their nurseries, or appreciably lessen their numbers. All inventions and appliances used to rid the trees and grounds of these pests never destroyed more than one in a million of their whole number. It is not in the power of man, with all his science, unassisted by birds, to prevent the multiplication of insects from being the cause of his own annihilation. But the farmer, when he destroys the border shrubbery in his fields and the coppice and wood on his hills, exterminates the birds by hosts, while the mischievous boy with his gun destroys only a few individuals. The clipped hedge-row, which is often substituted for a border of wild shrubbery, may assist in breeding insects; but the birds never build their nests in a hedge-row, unless it be a long-neglected one.