Part 3

THE CANADIAN RHODORA.

In the latter part of May, when the early spring flowers are just beginning to fade, and when the leaves of the forest trees are sufficiently expanded to display all the tints attending the infancy of their growth, no plant attracts more admiration than the Canadian Rhodora. The flowers, of a purple crimson, are in umbels on the ends of the branches, appearing before the leaves. The corolla, consisting of long narrow petals, very deeply cleft, the stamens on slender hairy filaments, and the projecting style, resemble tufts of colored silken fringe. The Rhodora is from two to six feet in height, and is one of the most conspicuous ornaments of wet, bushy pastures in this part of the country. It is the last in the train of the delicate flowers of spring, and by its glowing hues indicates the coming of a brighter vegetation. When other shrubs of different species are only half covered with foliage, the Rhodora spreads out its flowers upon the surface of the variegated ground, in plats and clumps of irregular sizes, and sheds a checkered glow of crimson over whole acres of moor. The poets have said but little of this flower because it wants individuality. We look upon the blossoms of the Rhodora as we look upon the crimsoned clouds, admiring their general glow, not the cast of single flowers. But there is something very poetical in the rosy wreaths it affixes to the brows of Nature, still pallid with the long confinement of winter.

THE WILLOW.

The Willow is of all trees the most celebrated in romance and romantic history. Its habit of growing by the sides of lakes and rivers, and of spreading its long branches over wells in solitary pastures, has given it a peculiar significance in poetry as the accompaniment of pastoral scenes, and renders it one of the most interesting objects in landscape. Hence there is hardly a song of nature, a rustic lay of shepherds, a Latin eclogue, or any descriptive poem, that does not make frequent mention of the Willow. The piping sounds from wet places in the spring of the year, the songs of the earliest birds, and the hum of bees when they first go abroad after their winter’s rest, are all delightfully associated with this tree. We breathe the perfume of its flowers before the meadows are spangled with violets, and when the crocus has just appeared in the gardens; and its early bloom makes it a conspicuous object when it comes forth under an April sky, gleaming with a drapery of golden verdure among the still naked trees of the forest and orchard.

When Spring has closed her delicate flowers, and the multitudes that crowd around the footsteps of May have yielded their places to the brighter host of June, the Willow scatters the golden aments that adorned it, and appears in the deeper garniture of its own green foliage. The hum of insects is no longer heard among the boughs in quest of honey, but the notes of the phebe and the summer yellow-bird, that love to nestle in their spray, may be heard from their green shelter on all summer noons. The fresh and peculiar incense of the peat-meadows, with their purple beds of cranberry-vines and wild strawberries, the glistening of still waters, and the sight of little fishes that gambol in their clear depths, are circumstances that accompany the Willow, and magnify our pleasure on beholding it, either in a picture or real landscape. We prize the Willow for its material qualities no more than for its poetic relations; for it is not only the beauty of a tree, but the scenes with which it is allied, and the ideas and images it awakens in the mind, that make up its attractions.

The very name of this tree brings to mind at once a swarm of images, rural, poetical, and romantic. There is a softness in the sound of Willow that accords with the delicacy of its foliage and the flexibility of its slender branches. The syllables of this word must have been prompted by the mellow tones which are produced by the wind when gliding through its airy spray. Writers of romance have always assigned the Willow to youthful lovers, as affording the most appropriate arbor for their rustic vows, which would seem to acquire a peculiar sacredness when spoken under the shade of the most poetical of all trees.

The Willow, though tenacious of life, will not prosper in dry places. Its presence is a sure indication of water, either on the surface of the ground or a little beneath it. The grass is green at all times under this tree, and the herds that browse upon its foliage and young branches find beneath them the most grateful pasture. In the New England States it has long been customary to plant Willows by the wayside, wherever the road passes over wet grounds. Some of the most delightful retreats of the pedestrian are found under their shady boughs. When he is panting with heat and thirst, the sight of their green rows fills him with new animation, as they indicate the presence of water as well as cooling shade. The same comely rows are seen skirting the pools and watercourses of our pastoral hills and arable meadows. They are planted also by the sides of streams and canals, where they serve, by their long and numerous roots, to consolidate the banks, and by their leaves and branches afford shelter to cattle. These Willows are among the fairest ornaments of the landscape in Massachusetts just after the elm and red maple have put forth their flowers. And so lively is their appearance, with their light green foliage, that when we meet with a group of them in the turn of a road on a cloudy day, we seem to be greeted with a sudden gleam of sunshine.

The Willow is one of the few trees which have been transplanted from Europe to our own soil without being either equalled or surpassed by some American tree of kindred species. But there is no indigenous Willow in any part of the American continent that will bear comparison in size and in those general qualities which we admire in trees, either with the Weeping Willow or the common yellow Willow. The latter is as frequent in our land as any one of our native trees, except in the forest. It attains a considerable height and great dimensions, seldom forming a single trunk, but sending upward from the ground, or from a very short bole, three or four diverging branches, so as to resemble an immense shrub. This mode of growth is caused perhaps by our way of planting it,—by inserting into the ground cuttings which have no leading shoot. Indeed, all these Willows are pollards. Not one of the species is found in our forest, except where it has spread over land that has once been cleared and cultivated. In that case, we find mixed with the forest trees Willows, apple-trees, and lilacs, which were planted there before the tract was restored to nature. I have seen trees of this species growing as standards of immense size, with their branches always joining the trunk very near the ground. On this account little rustic seats and arbors are more frequently erected in the crotch of a Willow than in that of any other tree.

The most of our indigenous Willows are mere shrubs. Though there are above thirty American species, but few of them rise to the stature of trees. Some of them are creeping plants and prostrate shrubs, some are neat and elegant trees in miniature. Their branches are also of many colors, some of a fine golden hue, spreading a sort of illumination over the swamps where they abound; some are red; others with foliage so dark as to have gained the name of Mourning Willow. Some, like our common bog Willow, are called white, from their downy or silken aments. One of the most beautiful of the small species is the golden osier, or Basket Willow. The yellow twigs of this shrub, coming up from the ground like grass without subdivisions, but densely from one common root, are very ornamental to low grounds. It would seem as if Nature, who has given but little variety to the foliage of this tree had made up for its deficiency by causing the different species to display a charming variety in their size. Thus, while the common yellow Willow equals the oak in magnitude, there are many species which are miniature shrubs, not larger than a heath plant. As one of the beautiful gifts of nature, the Willow claims a large share of our admiration. Though not a convenient ornament of our enclosures, the absence of this tree from the banks of quiet streams and glassy waterfalls, overhanging rivers and shading the brink of fountains, would be most painfully felt by every lover of nature.

ROTATION AND DISTRIBUTION.

It has been observed by foresters that there is a tendency in any soil which has long been occupied by a certain kind of timber, to produce, after the trees have been felled, a very different kind, if it be left to its spontaneous action. The laws affecting such rotations have been very well ascertained, and a careful investigation of the subject would undoubtedly reveal many curious facts not yet known. If the stumps of the trees, consisting of oak, ash, maple, and some other deciduous kinds, remain after the wood is felled, they will throw up suckers, and the succeeding timber will be an inferior growth of the original wood. But if the stumps and roots of the trees should be entirely removed, it would be more difficult to determine what would be the character of the next spontaneous growth. It would probably be planted by the kinds that prevail in the neighboring forests, and it would depend on the character of the soil whether the hard or soft-wood trees would finally predominate.

There is an important chemical agency at work, that originally determines the distribution of forests, and afterwards their rotation. The hard-wood trees require more potash and a deeper soil than the coniferous and soft-wood trees. Hence they are found chiefly on alluvial plains and the lower slopes of mountains, where the soil is deep and abounds in all valuable ingredients for the support of vegetation. Pines and firs, on the contrary, though frequently discovered of an immense size on alluvial soils, are generally crowded out of such grounds by the superior vigor of the hard-wood trees; and they can only maintain their supremacy on barren and sandy levels, and the thin soils of mountain declivities, too meagre to support the growth of timber of superior kinds. But a wood must stand a great many years, several centuries perhaps, after its spontaneous restoration, before this order of nature could be fully established. We must observe the spontaneous growth and distribution of herbaceous plants in different soils to ascertain these laws, which are the same in a field as in a forest.

When any growth of hard wood has been felled and the whole removed from the ground, the soil, having been exhausted of its potash, cannot support a new and vigorous growth of the same kind of timber. The succession will consist of a meagre growth of the same species from seeds already planted there; but the white birch and poplar, especially the large American aspen, usually predominate in clearings in this part of the country. When a pine wood is felled, it is succeeded by an inferior growth of conifers, and a species of dwarf or scrub oak. Seldom, indeed, after any kind of wood has been cut down and carried away from the spot, can the exhausted soil support another that is not inferior in quality or species. Though an oak wood may be succeeded by pines, a pine wood will not be succeeded by oaks or any other hard timber, unless the trees were burned and their ashes restored to the soil. Hence we may account for the fact that poplars, white birches, and wild-cherry-trees, occupy a larger proportion of the ground that is now covered with wood than they did a century ago, in all parts of the country.

I have already alluded to the well-known fact, that the generic character of the timber, in the distribution of the primitive forest, in any country, is determined in great measure by the geological character of the soil. On sandy plains in the primitive forest, the white birch, the poplar, the aspen, and the pitch pine were abundant, as they are now on similar soils. The preference of the red maple for wet and miry soils is well known; while hard maple, oak, beech, and hickory do not prosper except in strong alluvial tracts. A heavy growth of hard timber indicates a superior soil; pine indicates an inferior one, if it has been left to the spontaneous action of nature. In the primitive forest we were sure of finding such relations of soil and species. They are not so invariable since the operations of agriculture have interrupted the true method of nature.

When a wood has been burned, the process of renewal, when left to nature, is much more tardy than if it had been felled, since it can now be restored only by a regular series of vegetable species, which must precede it, according to certain inevitable laws. The soil, however, being improved and fertilized by the ashes of the burnt timber, is in a chemical condition to support a luxuriant forest as soon as in the course of nature it can be planted there. Trees will not immediately come up from this burnt ground as in a clearing; and if they should appear, they would mostly perish from the want of protection. In the order of nature herbaceous plants are the first to occupy the soil, and these are followed by a uniform succession of different species. There is an epilobium, or willow herb, with elegant spikes of purple flowers, conspicuous in our meadows in August, which is one of the earliest occupants of burnt ground, hence called fireweed in Maine and Nova Scotia. The downy appendage to its seeds causes it to be planted there by the winds immediately after the burning. The trillium appears also in great abundance upon the blackened surface of the ground in all wet places. Plants like the ginseng, the erythronium, and the like, whose bulbs or tubers lie buried deep in the mould, escape destruction, and come up anew. These, along with several compound plants with downy seeds, and a few ferns and equisetums, are the first occupants of burnt lands.

But the plants mentioned above have no tendency to foster the growth of young trees. They are, however, succeeded by the thistles and thorny plants, which are nature’s preparation of any tract, once entirely stripped of vegetation, as a nursery for the seedlings. All the phenomena of nature’s rotation are but the necessary giving place of rapid-growing and short-lived plants to others which are perennial and more capable of maintaining their ground after being once planted. Thorns and thistles soon appear on burnt lands, and protect the young trees as they spring up, both from the winds and the browsing of animals. Thus many an oak has been nursed in a cradle of thorns and brambles, and many a lime-tree growing in a bower of eglantine has been protected by its thorns from the browsing of the goat.

We very early discover a variety of those woody plants that bear an edible fruit, which is eaten by birds and scattered by them over the land, including many species of bramble. The fruit-bearing shrubs always precede the fruit-bearing trees; but the burnt land is first occupied by those kinds that bear a stone-fruit. Hence great numbers of cherry-trees and wild-plum-trees are found there, as the natural successors of the wild gooseberry and bramble-bushes. These are soon mixed with poplars, limes, and other trees with volatile seeds. But oaks, hickories, and the nut-bearing trees must wait to be planted by squirrels and field-mice and some species of birds. The nut-bearers, therefore, will be the last to appear in a burnt region, for the little quadrupeds that feed upon their fruit will not frequent this spot until it is well covered with shrubbery and other vegetation. If the soil be adapted to the growth of heavy timber, the superior kinds, like the oak, the beech, and the hard maple, will gradually starve out the inferior species, and in the course of time predominate over the whole surface.

When I consider all these relations between plants and animals, I feel assured, if the latter were destroyed that plant their seeds, many species would perish and disappear from the face of the earth. Nature has provided, in all cases, against the destruction of plants, by endowing the animals that consume their fruits with certain habits that tend to perpetuate and preserve them. In this way they make amends for the vast quantities they consume. After the squirrels and jays have hoarded nuts for future use, they do not find all their stores; and they sow by these accidents more seeds than could have been planted by other accidental means, if no living creature fed upon them. Animals are not more dependent on the fruit of these trees for their subsistence, than the trees are upon them for the continuance of their species. And it is pleasant to note that, while plants depend on insects for the fertilization of their flowers, they are equally indebted to a higher order of animals for planting their seeds. The wasteful habits of animals are an important means for promoting this end. The fruit of the oak, the hickory, and the chestnut will soon decay if it lies on the surface of the ground, exposed to alternate dryness and moisture, and lose its power of germination. Only those nuts which are buried under the surface are in a condition to germinate. Many a hickory has grown from a nut deposited in the burrow of a squirrel; and it is not an extravagant supposition that whole forests of oaks and hickories may have been planted in this manner.

These facts are too much neglected in our studies of nature. A knowledge of them, and a consideration of their bearings in the economy of nature, might have saved many a once fertile country from being converted into a barren waste, and may serve yet to restore such regions to their former happy condition. But these little facts are not of sufficient magnitude to excite our admiration, and they involve a certain process of reasoning that is not agreeable to common minds, or even to the more cultivated, which have been confined chiefly to technology. The few facts to which I have alluded in this essay are such as lie at the vestibule of a vast temple that has not yet been entered. I am not ready to say that no single species of the animal creation may not be destroyed without derangement of the method of nature; for thousands have, in the course of time, become extinct by the spontaneous action of natural agents. But there is reason to believe that, if any species should be destroyed by artificial means, certain evils of grievous magnitude might follow their destruction.

The frugivorous birds are the victims of constant persecution from the proprietors of fruit gardens. Their persecutors do not consider that their feeding habits have preserved the trees and shrubs that bear fruit from utter annihilation. They are the agents of nature for distributing vegetables of all kinds that bear a pulpy fruit in places entirely inaccessible to their seeds by any other means. Notwithstanding the strong digestive organs of birds, which are capable of dissolving some of the hardest substances, the stony seeds of almost all kinds of pulpy fruit pass through them undigested. By this providence of nature the whole earth is planted with fruit-bearing trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants, while without it these would ultimately become extinct. This may seem an unwarrantable assertion. It is admitted that birds alone could distribute the seeds of this kind of plants upon the tops of mountains and certain inaccessible declivities, which, without their agency, must be entirely destitute of this description of vegetation. But these inaccessible places are no more dependent on the birds than the plains and the valleys. The difference in the two cases is simply that the one is apparent, like a simple proposition in geometry, and the other requires a course of philosophical reasoning to be perfectly understood.

THE WEEPING WILLOW.

In the early part of my life, one of my favorite resorts during my rambles was a green lane bordered by a rude stone-wall, leading through a vista of overarching trees, and redolent always with the peculiar odors of the season. At the termination of this rustic by-road,—a fit approach to the dwelling of the wood-nymphs,—there was a gentle rising ground, forming a small tract of tableland, on which a venerable Weeping Willow stood,—a solitary tree overlooking a growth of humble shrubs, once the tenants of an ancient garden. The sight of this tree always affected me with sadness mingled with a sensation of grandeur. This old solitary standard, with a few rose-bushes and lilacs beneath its umbrage, was all that remained on the premises of an old mansion-house which had long ago disappeared from its enclosure. Thus the Weeping Willow became associated in my memory, not with the graveyard or the pleasure-ground, but with these domestic ruins, the sites of old homesteads whose grounds had partially reverted to their primitive state of wildness.

Of all the drooping trees the Weeping Willow is the most remarkable, from the perfect pendulous character of its spray. It is also consecrated to the Muse by the part which has been assigned to it in many a scene of romance, and by its connection with pathetic incidents recorded in Holy Writ. It is invested with a moral interest by its symbolical representation of sorrow, in the drooping of its terminal spray, by its fanciful use as a garland for disappointed lovers, and by the employment of it in burial-grounds and in funereal paintings. We remember it in sacred history, associating it with the rivers of Babylon and with the tears of the children of Israel, who sat down under the shade of this tree and hung their harps upon its branches. It is distinguished by the graceful beauty of its outlines, its light green delicate foliage, its sorrowing attitude, and its flowing drapery.

Hence the Weeping Willow never fails to please the sight even of the most insensible observer. Whether we see it waving its long branches over some pleasure-ground, overshadowing the gravel walk and the flower garden, or watching over a tomb in the graveyard, where the warm hues of its foliage yield cheerfulness to the scenes of mourning, or trailing its floating branches, like the tresses of a Naiad, over some silvery lake or stream, it is in all cases a beautiful object, always poetical, always picturesque, and serves by its alliance with what is hallowed in romance to bind us more closely to nature.

It is not easy to imagine anything of this character more beautiful than the spray of the Weeping Willow. Indeed, there is no other tree that is comparable with it in this respect. The American elm displays a more graceful bend of all the branches that form its hemispherical head; and there are several weeping birches which are very picturesque when standing by a natural fountain on some green hillside. The river maple is also a theme of constant admiration, from the graceful flow of its long branches that droop perpendicularly when laden with foliage, but partly resume their erect position in winter, when denuded. But the style of all these trees differs entirely from that of the Weeping Willow, which in its peculiar form of beauty is unrivalled in the whole vegetable kingdom.