Part 6

Juniper flowers are of two kinds, and they usually grow on separate trees, though sometimes you may find both kinds on separate branches of the same tree. The stamen flowers (3) are in full bloom in May, and you will find them growing in small scaly catkins close to the foot of the leaf where it joins the stem. The heads of the stamens stand like a row of small yellow beads along the edge of each scale, and when they are ripe the beads burst and the leaves around are covered with their fine yellow powder.

The seed flowers (4) also grow at the foot of the leaves, and at first you might mistake them for young buds. They have thicker and more fleshy scales than those of the stamen catkins, and after the yellow stamen dust is blown by the wind on to their seed-vessels the upper scales grow into a green berry (5). These green berries remain in the tree all through the winter, and the following summer they change into a deep purplish black. Each berry has a soft grey bloom all over it, like the bloom on a grape.

These berries are very bitter to taste, but are not poisonous; in some illnesses country people use them successfully as a medicine.

Many are the uses of the Juniper, and in olden days it was highly valued.

In Sweden the berries are eaten to breakfast; sometimes they are roasted and ground into coffee.

The wood and its berries may be burnt in sick-rooms to purify the air and refresh the patient. Country people believed that burning sprays of Juniper kept away witches, and the smoke was supposed to drive away serpents, as well as to destroy any germs of plague or other infectious disease.

In Scotland the smoke from a Juniper fire is used for curing hams.

In Lapland the peasants make ropes from the Juniper bark, and they tell you that if a bit of Juniper wood is lighted and then carefully covered with ashes it will keep alight for a whole year.

The trunk of the Juniper tree is too small and slight to be very useful as timber; but good walking-sticks are often made from the branches and young stems.

PLATE XX

THE LARCH

“When rosy plumelets tuft the larch.”

--Tennyson.

The Larch (1) was brought to Britain in the seventeenth century from its home on the high mountains of Germany, Austria, and Italy. It has taken kindly to our cheerless climate, and now covers acres of what was once barren moorland.

A few years after Larches are planted the long flexible branches of the young trees meet and form a thicket into which little light or air can enter, and the weeds and heather growing round the tree roots are stifled. Each winter the Larch sheds on the bare ground millions of its tiny needle-leaves, which enrich the soil.

After the young trees have grown to a certain height the forester thins the plantation; he cuts down a number of the young trees, so that those which remain may have more room to grow, and he removes all the withered branches near the ground. This allows the sunshine to reach the soil, and soon after a crop of soft, fine grass is seen carpeting the ground. Sheep and cattle can now be pastured where a short time before there grew nothing but heather and weeds.

Look at a Larch plantation in winter time, and you will think that all the trees are dead. The Pines and the Firs are resting, and the Oaks and Beeches seem asleep, but their branches do not have the dead, withered look of the Larch trees. Come again early in spring, and you will see a wonderful change. These dead twigs are now a pale glossy brown, so glossy that they might have been varnished. Try to pull one, and you will find how tough and sound it is; only where the twig joins the branch can you separate it from the tree; and what a delightful smell of turpentine remains on your fingers after gathering the Larch twigs!

In the trunk of this tree there are stores of turpentine, tiny lakes of it, which are of considerable value. In Italy, where the Larch trees grow to great size, small holes are bored through the trunk to the very heart of the tree, and a thin pipe is put in. Then a can is hung on the end of the pipe, and the pure turpentine juice drops steadily into the can. It is then strained, and is sold just as it comes from the tree.

Early in April the Larch tree begins to get ready for summer; it is always one of the first trees to awaken at the call of spring. On each flexible twig there appear little brown scaly knobs like small beads, placed either singly or in pairs with a short space between each bead. In a few days these scaly beads burst open, and a tuft of vivid green leaves (2), like the fringes round the mouth of a sea-anemone, peeps out. These leaves are soft and flat and slender, very different from the hard needles of the Pine and the harsh swords of the Fir trees, and they grow in tufts, thirty or forty together, rising from the centre of the scaly brown bead. Each tuft is of the brightest green. So the Larch tree is a very vision of spring in the dark Fir plantations, while the leaf buds of many other trees are only awakening from their winter sleep.

In the hedgerows the Hawthorns are in full leaf, the stamen flowers cluster on the boughs of the Elm, and the Hazel and Willow catkins dangle their tails in the wind; but the forest trees remain sombre and gloomy, and the young Larch seems gay as the sunlight among them. As the season advances the Larch tree leaves become darker, and they fall early in winter. We have only one other cone-bearing tree which is not evergreen, and that is the Cypress.

After the leafy tufts appear you will notice that some of the scaly brown beads have not produced any leaves; instead they have become tiny oval catkins (3), which are made up of a crowd of small yellow grains. These catkins are the stamen flowers, and in the yellow grains, which are the heads of the stamens, is prepared the dust powder which the seed flowers require to assist them in getting ready the new seed.

On the same twig, and not far from the stamen catkins, you see a beautiful deep rose-red seed catkin (4). This tiny rose-red catkin is very lovely among the brilliant green tufts of leaves; no other cone-bearing tree has anything so attractive to show us. At first the catkin scales are soft and fleshy; they overlap each other very loosely, and from the base of each scale there rises a bright green point like a single needle-leaf.

In a few weeks the catkin has become a young cone (5), which looks like a small rosy egg sitting erect on a bent footstalk, then the rose-pink colour fades from the cone, and the scales become hard and woody. Behind each scale lie two tiny white seeds with wings, and there is a coating of sticky resin over these seeds to keep them dry. The ripe cones (6) remain on the tree for years, long after the seeds have been blown away on their transparent wings by the wind.

The crossbill often builds his nest in a Larch tree. He is particularly fond of Larch tree seeds, and is very clever at picking them out of the ripe cones.

The trunk of a full-grown Larch is reddish brown in colour, and it is covered with a rough, scaly bark, which is often hung with hoary tufts of pale grey lichen.

Larch wood is very valuable, and is used for many purposes. It is very tough, and does not rot in water. Joiners tell us there are fewer knots in planks of Larch than in those of either Silver Fir or Spruce. Wood knots are scars which occur where a dead branch has fallen from the tree, and builders complain that when the tree is sawn into planks, the knots shrink and fall out, leaving a round hole. This reduces the value of the wood; but in the Larch planks the knots are said not to come away from the surrounding wood.

PLATE XXI

THE SPRUCE FIR

Although the Scotch Pine is sometimes called the Scotch Fir, the latter name is generally admitted to be a mistake. It was given long ago by people who had not seen the real Fir trees, and who did not know how different they are from the Pines. It is several hundred years since the Spruce Fir was brought to this country, but it is not one of our native trees, like the Scotch Pine, the Yew, and the Juniper.

The Spruce (1) is one of our tallest trees; it loves to grow on ground many thousand feet above the level of the sea; and in Switzerland and Norway there are great forests of these slender, soldier-like trees, clothing the sides of the giant snow mountains. With us it does not grow so abundantly, but you will find many Spruce Firs mingling with the Scotch Pine in the large woods of our Scotch Highlands.

The Spruce Fir has a very straggling root which does not penetrate far into the ground; it creeps along close under the surface, and intertwines itself with any other tree roots in the neighbourhood. This does not give it a very firm hold, and after great gales you sometimes find a broad path opened in the Fir woods, which has been made by the Spruce trees falling in the track of the storm.

It is a very straight tree, with a smooth scaly bark of a reddish brown colour; from each side of the trunk slender branches grow straight out like the spokes of a wheel; but each branch rises a little way above the last as the steps rise in a ladder. These branches are very slender, and at first they sweep downwards in graceful curves; but at the tips they all turn upward, so that the points look toward the sky.

The branches get smaller and smaller as the tree grows higher, which gives it the appearance of a pyramid, and at the very top there stands a single upright branch like a spear. This spear-like tip is one of the distinctive features of the Spruce Fir.

The leaves (2) are short and flat and hard, and they are rather prickly to touch. They do not grow in pairs or bundles, as in the Scotch Pine or the Larch; they are placed singly and very close together all round the twig. The twigs grow almost opposite each other on the young sprays, and each spray hangs straight down from the main branch, which looks as if a parting had been made along its centre and the sprays combed evenly to either side. From a distance the Spruce tree branches resemble drooping feathers which curve skyward at the tips.

The Spruce Fir has two kinds of flowers. In May or June, if you look at the tips of the drooping sprays which grew last year, you will see two or three little oval catkins of a pretty yellowish pink colour nestling among the hard, flat leaves. These are the stamen flowers (3), and when ripe they will burst open and scatter a great deal of yellow pollen dust.

The seed flowers (4) grow in cones, and are found at the end of this year’s shoots. It is by these cones you will most readily recognise the Spruce Fir. You remember that in the Scotch Pine the full-grown cones were grey and woody, with tightly-pressed lips, and that these lips were very thick and curled upwards when the cone opened?

In the Fir trees the scales of the ripe cones (5) are like thin glossy brown paper. Each scale ends in two sharp little teeth, and the scales are not tightly pressed together, but overlap each other loosely, so that you could put the blade of a knife under each. The woody cones are always found in Pine trees, and the papery cones are characteristic of the Firs.

In the Spruce Fir these cones are about six inches long, with blunt tips, and when full grown they hang from the sprays. Do not forget to notice this, as in some Fir trees the full-grown cones are seated upright on the branches. Under each scale there lie two little seeds (6), with large pale brown wings; these seeds require over a year to ripen, then the wind blows them from the loosened cone scales to many a strange resting-place, where they take root, and a new tree begins to grow.

Sometimes you may see strange leafy-looking bunches (7) like soft, badly-made cones on the young sprays. These are caused by an insect which lays its eggs in the young leaf bud and destroys its graceful shape.

The Spruce Fir has two enemies that do it great harm. These are the crossbill and the squirrel. They break off the young shoots close to the end, and so stop the growth of the branches. You will often find the ground strewn with these fresh green twigs; but you require to sit very still for a long time if you wish to see the enemies at work.

The wood of the Spruce Fir is valuable for many purposes. The tall, smooth tree trunks are used for the masts of ships, for scaffolding poles, and telegraph posts; and many boat-loads of Fir planks are brought from Norway and from the shores of the Baltic Sea, to be manufactured into flooring boards for our houses. In some places the fibre of the Spruce Fir is reduced to pulp, and from this a common kind of paper is produced which is used for newspapers or cheap magazines.

From the sap we get resin and turpentine, and the bark is used in the tanning of leather.

Some people say that the name Fir wood is just a mistake for fire-wood, because in the old days torches were made of the young fir branches, whose gummy twigs burnt easily with a clear, strong light.

PLATE XXII

THE SILVER FIR

Many people find it difficult to distinguish between the Spruce Fir and the Silver Fir, and they are often called by each other’s names; yet they are unlike in many points, and a little trouble would prevent such mistakes.

The Silver Fir (1) is not one of our native trees; it was brought from Central or Southern Europe to this country in 1603, and has taken kindly to our moist climate. It does not grow on such lofty mountains as the Spruce, but it will thrive at a level of six thousand feet above the sea, higher than the highest mountain in Great Britain.

It is a tall, stately tree, but it is bushier and less regular than the Spruce Fir. The trunk is covered with greyish brown bark, which is smooth when the tree is young; but as the tree grows old--and the Silver Fir will live for four hundred years--this bark cracks into many rugged fissures. You remember that the Spruce tree has a sharp spear-like point rising from the very top of the trunk. In the Silver Fir the tree is only pointed when very young, and by the time it is full grown the top is bushy, with many small unequal branches standing out from the main stem.

These branches do not grow in whorls or circles, like the spokes of a wheel; they are often irregular, and there may be gaps in the tree where a branch has fallen off, and only a scar is left to show where the branch should have been. The Silver Fir is a firmly-rooted tree; it sends a long tap-shaped root, ending in two forks, deep into the soil, so that there is little danger of the wind uprooting it during the wintry gales.

Now look at the leaves (2) which grow on the Silver Fir. Like those of the Spruce, and unlike those of the Pine, they grow singly, each little leaf standing by itself on the rough twig. Although they are placed all round this twig, these leaves have a tendency to grow to right or left of the twig, and look as if they had been parted down the centre and carefully combed to each side.

Each leaf is flat and slender, and on the upper side it is a dark glossy green; the edges are rolled back on to the under-side of the leaf, which is much paler in colour. The centre rib of the leaf is much raised, and looks like a slender cord, and on each side of this cord, between it and the curled-back leaf edge, there runs a silvery white line; it is from this silvery line that the tree gets its name.

Notice that the leaf twigs of the Silver Fir do not droop in the feathery way they do in the Spruce; they are much stiffer, and stand out all round the branch; also, there is not nearly such a marked upward curve at the tip of the branch as you find in the Spruce Fir. The leaves of the Silver Fir remain on the tree eight or nine years, but each year the tree lengthens its sprays, and the young leaves are a beautiful pale yellowish green colour, almost as pale as the young leaves of the primrose.

The stamen flowers (3) grow at the ends of the young sprays. They consist of a few overlapping scales with a cluster of stamens inside. The seed flowers or cones (4) grow on the same tree, sometimes on the same branch, and they become cones in the same way as the seed flowers of the Pine and the Spruce. But you will at once notice a difference. The cones of the Silver Fir grow upright; they sit on the branches with their tops looking up to the sky, whereas the cones of the Spruce and the Scotch Pine when full grown hang down from the ends of the spray with their tips pointing to the ground. If there are any cones visible you will never mistake the Silver Fir for the Spruce.

The ripe cones (5) are made up of many thin, soft scales which overlap each other closely, and each scale ends in a sharp point which turns backward; this gives the cone a hairy appearance. At first the cones are green, like those of the Scotch Pine, but soon they turn purple, and when quite ripe they are a rich red-brown.

If the tree is old enough--that means if it is forty years of age--you will find small angular seeds (6), with a long filmy wing attached, nestling behind each scale. But if the tree is still young, the cones are seedless. It takes eighteen months for the cone to ripen, and when the seeds are ready and they and the red-brown scales fall from the cone, a bare brown stick is left standing upright on the branch.

The wood of the Silver Fir is very valuable, and it is used for many purposes; doors and window-frames and floors are constantly made of it, and for ship-building it is in great demand. In Switzerland there are great forests of Silver Fir, but they grow high on the mountain sides, where there are no roads and no means of getting the trees brought down after they are felled.

But at Lucerne, a town on the shores of a large lake, with great forests on the mountains above, the people invented an excellent way of overcoming this difficulty.

A narrow avenue was cut in the forest among the trees, and this was floored with trunks of Fir and Spruce. Snow and water were poured down this avenue, which the cold air quickly froze, and the avenue became a gigantic ice-slide eight miles long. The Fir trees were felled, and all their branches lopped off, the bare trunks were placed on this slide, and in six minutes they shot into the waters of the lake eight miles below. There they floated till the wood merchant was ready for them.

The Silver Fir tree is rich in gummy juice, which is made into turpentine and resin. Have you ever seen necklaces of pale cloudy beads, and of clear dark brown made of amber? People tell us this amber is found on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and that it is just the gummy juice which dropped long ago from some kind of Fir tree and has hardened in a mysterious way of which we know nothing.

PLATE XXIII

THE HOLLY

“Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seen, wrinkled and keen. No grazing cattle through their prickly round can reach to wound; But as they grow where nothing is to fear, Smooth and unarmed the pointless leaves appear.”

--Southey.

The Holly (1) is our most important evergreen, and is so well known that it scarcely needs any description. It has flourished in this country as long as the Oak, and is often found growing under tall trees in the crowded forests, as well as in the open glades, where lawns of fine grass are to be found.

People say that the Holly, or Holm tree, as it is often called, is the greenwood tree spoken of by Shakespeare, and that under its bushy shelter Robin Hood and his merry men held their meetings in the open glades of Sherwood Forest. Sometimes it is called the Holy tree, because from the oldest time of which we have any record its boughs have been used to deck our shrines and churches, and in some parts of England the country people in December speak of gathering Christmas, which is the name they give to the Holly, or Holy tree. It is this evergreen which we oftenest use at Christmas-tide to decorate our churches, and very lovely the dark green sprays, with their coral berries, look when twined round the grey stone pillars.

The Holly is looked upon as a second-rate forest tree. It is never very large, and it usually appears as a thick, tall bush, with many branches reaching almost to the ground. Sometimes you find it with a slender, bare trunk, clothed with pale grey bark, and if you look closely at this bark you will see that it is covered with curious black markings, as if some strange writing had been traced on it with a heavy black pen.

This writing is the work of a tiny plant which makes its home on the Holly stem and spreads in this strange way.

The bark of the young Holly shoots and boughs is pale green and quite smooth.

The tree requires little sunshine, and it seems to keep all it gets, as every leaf is highly polished and reflects the light like a mirror. These leaves grow closely on every branch; they are placed alternately on each side of the twigs, and are oval, with the edges so much waved that the leaves will not lie flat, but curl on each side of the centre rib.

The prickly leaves (3) which grow low down on the tree have sharp spines along the waved edges, and a very sharp spine always grows at the point of the leaf. But the upper branches are clothed with blunt leaves (2) which have no spines along the edges; instead there is a pale yellow line round each leaf, and there is a single blunt spine at the point.

Sheep and deer are very fond of eating the tough, leathery leaves of the Holly, and it is believed that the tree clothes its lower branches in prickly leaves to protect itself from these greedy enemies.

Country people tell you that if branches of smooth Holly are the first to be brought into the house at Christmas-time, then the wife will be head of the house all the next year, but if the prickly boughs enter first, then the husband will be ruler.

The Holly leaves hang on the tree several years, and after they fall they lie a long time on the ground before the damp soaks through their leathery skin and makes them decay. You will find Holly leaves from which all the green part of the leaf has disappeared, leaving a beautiful skeleton leaf of grey fibre, which is still perfect in every vein and rib.

The flowers (4) of the Holly bloom in May. They appear in small crowded clusters between the leaf stalk and the twig, and each flower is a delicate pale pink on the outside, but is pure white within. There is a calyx cup edged with four green points, and inside this cup stands a long white tube, with four white petals at the top. There are four yellow-headed stamens, and a tiny seed-vessel is hidden inside the flower tube. Sometimes all these parts will be found complete in a single flower; sometimes there will be flowers on the same branch which have stamens and no seed-vessel, and others which have seed-vessels and no stamens. Perhaps you will find a whole tree on which not a single seed flower grows. This tree may be laden with lovely white flowers in spring, but it will bear no berries in winter. You must have both stamen flowers and seed flowers if the tree is to produce any fruit.