Part 52
Lumbermen in this country could get along very well without the palms, as they are little used for ordinary lumber. Their wood does not grow in concentric rings, like that of the ordinary tree. The stems are usually single, cylindrical, and unbranched. The fruit is berry-like, and is usually one seeded, though sometimes there are two or three. When a seed sprouts, it puts out at first a single leaf, like a grain of corn. About 130 genera of palms are recognized in the world, most of them in the tropics, but several in the United States are of tree size. Botanists divide the palms of the United States into two groups, the palm family and the lily family. The yuccas belong in the lily family. In the very brief treatment that can be given the subject here, it is not necessary to recognize strict family divisions.
CABBAGE PALMETTO (_Sabal palmetto_) grows in the coast region from North Carolina to southern Florida, and west to the Apalachicola river. It is sometimes called Bank’s palmetto, cabbage tree, and tree palmetto. The name cabbage is due to the large leaf-bud in the top of the stem which is cooked as a substitute for cabbage. A sharp hatchet and some experience are necessary to a successful operation in extracting the bud from the tough fibers which surround it.
This palm is a familiar sight in the coast region within its range. The tall trunks, with tufts of leaves at the tops, suggest the supposed scenery of the Carboniferous age. Usually the trunks, in thick stands, rise straight like columns from twenty to forty feet high, but occasionally they bend in long, graceful curves, as if the weight of the tops caused them to careen, which is probably what does happen. They vary in diameter from eight inches to two feet.
The leaves are five or six feet long, and seven or eight wide, with stems six or seven feet long. Flowers occur in racemes two feet or more in length. The fruit is spherical and about a third of an inch in diameter. The roots are an important part of this palm, and are adapted to their environment, forming a rounded mass four or five feet in diameter, while small rope-like roots, half an inch in diameter, penetrate the wet marshy soil fifteen or twenty feet. The large, globe-like mass gives support in the soft soil, and the stringy roots supply water and mineral substances essential to growth. The wood is light, soft, pale-brown, with numerous hard, fibro-vascular bundles, the outer rim about two inches thick and much lighter and softer than the interior. The most important use for the wood at present is as wharf piles. It lasts well and is ideal in form. It is of historical interest that Fort Moultrie which defended Charleston, South Carolina, in the Revolutionary war, was built of palmetto logs. When the British made their memorable attack in 1776, their cannon balls buried in the spongy logs without dislodging them, and the fort successfully withstood the bombardment of ten hours, and disabled nine of the ten British ships taking part in the assault.
The wood is employed to a small extent in furniture making, and the bark for scrubbing brushes. Some of the finest forests of palmetto in Florida are much injured by fire that runs up the trunks to feed on stubs of leaves.
SILKTOP PALMETTO (_Thrinax parviflora_) and silvertop palmetto (_Thrinax microcarpa_) are species met with on some of the islands off the coast of southern Florida.
MEXICAN PALMETTO (_Sabal mexicana_) is much like cabbage palmetto in size and general appearance, and is put to similar uses, except that the leaf-bud does not appear to be used as food. The tree occurs in Texas along the lower Rio Grande, and southward into Mexico where the leaves are employed as house thatch by improvident Mexicans and Indians who do not care to exert themselves to procure better roofing material. In the vicinity of Brownsville, Texas, trunks of this palm are employed as porch posts and present a rustic appearance. They are said to last many years. The average size of trunks in Texas is fifteen or twenty feet high and a foot or less in diameter, but some much larger are found in Mexico. Some of the wharfs along the Texas coast are built on palmetto piles. It is said the trunks are not as strong as those of the cabbage palmetto in Florida.
SARGENT PALM (_Pseudophœnix sargentii_) is interesting but not commercially important, but may become so as an ornamental plant. It is occasionally planted on lawns in south Florida. Leaves are five or six feet long with stems still longer. The clusters of flowers are sometimes three feet in length. A single species is known, occurring on certain keys in southern Florida, and is so limited in its range that it would be possible to count every tree in existence. A grove of 200 or 300 trees occurs on Key Largo.
ROYAL PALM (_Oreodoxa regia_) is one of the largest palms of this country. It is said to reach a height of eighty feet, but such sizes are rare. The trunk rises from an enlarged base, and may be two feet in diameter. Bark is light gray in color, and its appearance suggests a column of cement. Leaves are ten or twelve feet long, and the stems increase the total length to twenty feet or more. Flowers are two feet in length, and in Florida open in January and February. The fruit is smaller than would be expected of a tree so large. It is a drupe about the size of a half-grown grape. The wood is spongy, but the outer portion of the stem is strong and is made into canes and other small articles. Trunks are sometimes used as wharf piles. This palm’s range is confined to south Florida in this country, but it is common in the West Indies. In Miami and other towns of southern Florida it is much planted for ornament.
FANLEAF PALM (_Neowashingtonia filamentosa_) also called Washington palm, California fan palm, Arizona palm, and wild date, ranges through southern California, and occupies depressions in the desert west of the Colorado river. There are said to be several forms and varieties. It ranges in height from thirty-five to seventy feet and in diameter from twenty to thirty inches. Trunks are of nearly the same diameter from bottom to top, or taper very gradually. They usually lean a little. Dead leaves hang about the trunks and blaze quickly when fire touches them, but the palm is seldom killed by fire. The small black fruit is about a third of an inch in diameter, and of no commercial importance; wood is little used; and the tree is chiefly ornamental, and has been much planted in California.
MOHAVE YUCCA (_Yucca mohavensis_) is one of a half dozen or more palms of the yucca genus and the lily family. Trees of this group are characterized by their stiff, sharp-pointed leaves, some of which are called daggers and others bayonets. Both names are appropriate. The Mohave yucca takes its name from the Mohave desert in California, where it is occasionally an important feature of the doleful landscape. The ragged, leather-like leaves, forming the tops of the short, weird trees, rattle in the wind, or resound with the patter of pebbles when sandstorms sweep across the dry wastes. It is believed to be one of the most slowly-growing trees of this country. Trunks are seldom more than fifteen feet high and eight or ten inches in diameter. The wood is spongy and interlaced with tough, stringy fibers. Stockmen whose ranges include this tree, make corrals of the stems by setting them in the ground as palisades. When weathered by wind and made bone dry by the sun’s fierce heat, the trunks are reduced to almost cork-lightness. Other yuccas are the Spanish bayonet (_Yucca treculeana_) of Texas; Joshua-tree (_Yucca arborescens_), which ranges from Utah to California and is known as tree yucca, yucca cactus, and the Joshua; Schott yucca (_Yucca brevifolia_) of southern Arizona; broadfruit yucca (_Yucca macrocarpa_) of southwestern Texas; aloe-leaf yucca (_Yucca aloifolia_) with a range from North Carolina near the coast to Louisiana; and Spanish dagger (_Yucca gloriosa_), on the coast and islands of South Carolina.
GIANT CACTUS (_Cereus giganteus_) is a leafless tree of Arizona and attains a height of forty or sixty feet, diameter of one or two. About twenty genera of cactus are known in the world and a large number of species. Two genera, the cereuses and opuntias, have representatives of tree size in this country. The two genera differ in form. Cereus in the Latin language means a candle, and the cactuses of that genus stand up in straight stems like candles, or have branches like old-fashioned candlesticks. The opuntias have flat, jointed stems, like thick leaves. Giant cactus bears flowers four inches long and two wide; fruit two inches long and one wide, and edible. Indians derive a considerable part of their food from this cactus. They use the wood for rafters, fences, fuel, lances, and bows. The trunks consist of bundles of fiber, very hard and strong. In the dry region where this cactus grows, the woody parts of fallen stems last long periods, some say for centuries, but there are no records. Schott cactus (_Cereus schottii_) and Thurber cactus (_Cereus thurberi_) are found in southern Arizona and southward in Mexico.
CHOLLA (_Opuntia fulgida_) ranges from Nevada southward into Mexico. It is popularly called “divil’s tongue cactus,” but there are other species with the same name. Trunks are occasionally ten or twelve feet high, and the wood is made into canes and small articles of furniture, but as lumber it is not important. The fruit is not eaten. A closely-related species is known as tassajo (_Opuntia sponsior_). It is found on the dry mesas of southern Arizona where trunks may be ten feet high and a few inches in diameter. It has the same uses as cholla. A third species is _Opuntia versicolor_ of southern Arizona. It is similar to the other opuntias. Attempts have been made to grow spineless varieties of this group of cactuses. It is believed that cattle, sheep, and goats would thrive on the pulpy growth, if the thorns could be gotten rid of. The semi-desert regions of the Southwest produce enormous quantities of cactus of many kinds, and if those worthless species could be made way with and thornless varieties substituted, it is probable that much land now worthless would become valuable.
MINOR SPECIES
A considerable number of trees grow in this country which, taken singly, are of small importance, but in the aggregate they fill a place which would be difficult to fill without them. Most of them are local, and are seldom heard of outside of the regions where they grow. Some are small, and for that reason are not demanded by the ordinary user of lumber; but small size is not necessarily a bar to the use of a wood. Many places may be filled by pieces too small for the sawmill. Sometimes a diminutive trunk contains material of extraordinary hardness, or it may be polished to a rare smoothness, or the colors may be exquisite. Numerous commodities can be successfully manufactured from blocks or billets which are only a few inches in diameter and a foot or two in length. This is particularly true of some of the rare hardwoods of Florida and southern Texas where tropical species have extended their ranges northward over the borders of the United States. Some of the small trees in that group are known by name in only the immediate locality where they grow, and their qualities are scarcely appreciated even there. In some instances railroad ties are hewed from wood which is fit for the finest furniture.
It is no uncommon thing for Mexicans along the Rio Grande to warm their huts and cook their meals with fuel chopped from trunks of Texas ebony, algarita, cat’s claw, bluewood, huisache, retama, and junco. Those who have traveled among the Indian rancherias of New Mexico and Utah have grown familiar with the peculiar odor filling the air in the vicinity of camp fires. It is the smoke of the rare junipers which the Indians burn for fuel; and yet it is wood of such soft tones and exquisite blending of colors that the shades of a Persian rug suffer by comparison. Among the ten thousand islands which fringe the coasts of south Florida, and also among the hummocks of the mainland, are rare trees whose wood is unsurpassed in hardness, fineness of texture, and beauty. These are not being used at all, or only as fuel to feed some fisherman’s or camper’s fire, or to make a smoke to drive away mosquitoes. The time will come when small and scarce woods will be sought, if they are valuable for any special purpose. In preceding pages of this book many minor species have been listed and briefly described in connection with those more important, and with which they are closely related. There are more than a hundred others which were necessarily omitted from former pages. A few of these deserve at least a brief mention, and are listed in the following paragraphs.
KŒBERLINIA (_Kœberlinia spinosa_) is commonly considered a curiosity; a tree without a relative in the world, and without leaves, flowers, or fruit. The popular notion is wrong, of course, for no tree is without relatives, and none without leaves, flowers, and fruit, or something that takes their place. The flowers, leaves, and fruit of this tree are small and escape notice of the casual observer, but they exist. Its nearest relative in this country is the paradise tree of Florida and the ailanthus introduced from China. It has a small, thorny, crooked trunk; the wood is dark, turning nearly black with exposure; it is rich with oil; and it is very hard. The species grows in certain places along the Rio Grande. The wood is made into canes, rulers, knife handles, turned articles, and a little furniture of the smaller kinds. The trunks are too small for ordinary sizes of lumber.
GUM ELASTIC (_Bumelia lanuginosa_) ranges from Georgia to Texas, and in Florida is called black haw. Children in Texas mix its berries with chewing gum, to increase the quantity, and the name which they apply to it is “gum stretch it.” An exuded resin is also used for chewing gum. Trees are sometimes sixty feet high and two in diameter, and a considerable number of logs go to hardwood mills, where they lose their name, and possibly appear as ash lumber, or occasionally as maple. The wood is white, tinged with yellow, and is manufactured into agricultural implements. A scarce and smaller species, known as buckthorn bumelia and ironwood (_Bumelia lycioides_) covers nearly the same range. From a tree of the same family in southern Asia the gutta percha of commerce is obtained. Other woods of the same family in this country are mastic (_Sideroxylon mastichodendron_) of south Florida, a tree sometimes sixty feet high and three feet in diameter, useful for boat building; satinleaf (_Chrysophyllum monopyrenum_), also of Florida, a tree twenty-five feet high and one in diameter, the wood very heavy, hard, and strong; tough bumelia (_Bumelia tenax_), ranging from South Carolina to Florida, a tree twenty feet high and six inches in diameter, called black haw in some parts of its range; saffron plum or ant’s wood (_Bumelia angustifolia_), growing in Florida and Texas, the trunk twenty feet high and six inches in diameter; wood orange colored, and the fruit sweet; bustic (_Dipholis salicifolia_), in south Florida, a tree forty feet high and eighteen inches in diameter, with wood exceedingly hard, strong, and heavy, and dark brown or red in color; wild sapodilla or dilly (_Mimusops sieberi_), a tree of south Florida with rich, very dark brown wood, height of tree twenty feet, diameter one foot.
DWARF SUMACH (_Rhus copallina_) is known by many names. It is distinguished from staghorn sumach by its smooth branches, those of staghorn being hairy. Sumach’s chief importance is due to its value as tanning material. Leaves and small branches are used. The family has some well-known members in other parts of the world, among them the mangoes. The name dwarf sumach is not well selected, for the species is nearly as large as any other sumach. Trees are sometimes thirty feet high and ten inches in diameter. The tree’s range extends from New England to Florida and Texas. It reaches its largest size west of the Mississippi river. In the East and North it is usually a shrub. Trees of largest size are not believed to exceed fifty years in age. The wood is richly striped with yellow and black. Balls turned of it, seven inches in diameter, are used for newel-post ornaments, and smaller balls are made for use in darning stockings. Cups are turned on the lathe, and the bright stripes in the wood give the wares a striking appearance. It was formerly much employed for spiles in tapping maple trees for sugar making. Staghorn sumach (_Rhus hirta_) is of a different species but of the same genus. Its range extends from New Brunswick nearly to the Mississippi river. Its name refers to the down on the young branches resembling the velvet on the horns of a deer at certain seasons. The tree is known as Virginia sumach and hairy sumach. Its compound leaves are sometimes two feet long--two or three times the size of dwarf sumach’s. Trunks have been reported forty feet high and more than a foot through. The uses of this wood are the same as of dwarf sumach, including tanning. It is more abundant east than west of the Alleghanies. Poisonwood (_Rhus metopium_) belongs to the same family. It is known in Florida as doctor gum, hog plum, coral sumach, bumwood, and mountain manchineel. The juice is exceedingly poisonous, and gum produced by wounding the bark is reported to have medicinal value. Trees are sometimes forty feet high and two feet in diameter. The American smoke tree (_Cotinus cotinoides_) is another member of the sumach family. It is found in the southern states from eastern Tennessee to Texas. It is nowhere common, and its only reported use is as fence posts. Trees may be a foot in diameter and thirty feet high. The wood is a bright clear orange color, and a yellow dye has been manufactured from it. Poison sumach (_Rhus vernix_) is not the same as poisonwood, though sometimes the two are confounded. It is usually a shrub, and rarely twenty feet high. It is overloaded with names, as might be expected of a plant considered as dangerous as this. Among its names are poison elder, poison dogwood, swamp sumach, poison oak, poisonwood, poisontree, and thunderwood. It grows from New England to Georgia, and west to Minnesota and Louisiana. It is apt to occur in wet swamps, and Sargent pronounces it “one of the most dangerous plants of the North American flora.” A black, lustrous varnish can be made of the acrid poisonous juice, and this may sometime give the species a commercial value. When the skin is poisoned by contact with this tree, an effective remedy may be found in a saturated alcoholic solution of acetate of lead, if applied as a wash within an hour or two after the poisoning occurs. A wash with pure alcohol is also effective if applied within an hour. Following either treatment the skin should be thoroughly washed with soap and water. Western sumach (_Rhus integrifolia_), a closely related California species, is a small evergreen, seldom more than twenty feet high and a foot in diameter. The wood is heavy, hard, and red, is used as fuel, and occasionally in small turnery. The fruit is a berry half an inch long.
CASCARA BUCKTHORN (_Rhamnus purshiana_) is of the buckthorn family, and is known by many names on the Pacific coast where the species is best developed. It grows as far east as Colorado and Texas. Cascara sagrada, its Mexican name, is often used for this tree. It is known also as bearberry, bearwood, yellow-wood, pigeonberry, coffeeberry, bayberry, and California coffee. The tree’s usual size is from ten to thirty feet high and twelve to twenty inches in diameter. It is often shrubby, and is more valuable for its bark than its wood. Large quantities are peeled for medicinal uses, and many trees are thus destroyed. A little of the wood is burned as fuel, and some is made into handles. Yellow buckthorn (_Rhamnus caroliniana_), with a range from New York to Texas, and evergreen buckthorn (_Rhamnus crocea_), a California species, are closely related to cascara buckthorn, but are of comparatively little importance. Blue myrtle (_Ceanothus thyrsiflorus_) is a California species, sometimes called wild lilac or blue blossoms. It ranges in height from thirty-five feet, among the redwoods on the Santa Cruz mountains, to only one foot high on some of the wind-swept coasts. The wood is pale yellowish-brown, and is somewhat used for novelties. Tree myrtle (_Ceanothus arboreus_), often known as lilac, is also a California tree, closely related to blue myrtle, but is of smaller size and of very restricted range. Its prospective value lies more in its bloom than in its wood. Naked-wood (_Colubrina reclinata_), a Florida species, is of a kindred genus. Trees are sometimes fifty feet high and three in diameter. The wood is hard, very strong, and is dark brown tinged with yellow.
LIGNUM-VITÆ (_Guajacum sanctum_) grows in Florida, and a species which is probably the same is found in south Texas along the Rio Grande. In Texas the tree is known as guayacon, which name has come down from the times when the Carib Indians ruled the West Indies. That was their name for the tree. The annual rings are usually too vague and too involved to be counted, but the tree is known to be of slow growth. The wood is pitted and it contains cavities and creases; but the clear wood is very hard and of fine and various colors. It is dark green, brown, black, yellow and of mixed colors, and clouded effects, all in the same block. Small pieces of furniture, like bureau cabinets, present attractive combinations of colors. The wood is of such exceeding hardness that it turns, breaks, or batters the carpenter’s tools. Candlesticks, egg cups, goblets, vases, checker pieces, dominos, boxes, trays, canes, paper knives, and souvenirs are manufactured in a small way. Trees attain a height of thirty feet and a diameter of two or more. The compound leaves adhere to the branches until those of the following season appear. The fruit is an orange-colored pod three-fourths of an inch long.