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There is a popular fallacy that trees have no buds until spring. Some trees have very small buds. But there is no tree in our winter woods that will not freely show its buds to any one who wishes to see them. A very important part of the summer work of a tree is the forming of buds for next spring. Even when the leaves are just unfolding on the tender shoots a bud will be found in each angle between leaf and stem. All summer long its bud is the especial charge of each particular leaf. If accident destroy the leaf, the bud dies of neglect. When midsummer comes the bud is full grown, or nearly so, and the fall of the leaf is anticipated. The thrifty tree withdraws as much as possible of the rich green leaf pulp, and stores it in the twig to feed the opening buds in spring.

What is there inside the wrappings of a winter bud? "A leaf," is the usual reply--and it is not a true one. A bud is an embryo shoot--one would better say, a shoot in miniature. It has very little length or diameter when the scales are stripped off. But with care the leaves can be spread open, and their shape and venation seen. The exact number the shoot was to bear are there to be counted. Take a horse-chestnut bud--one of the biggest ones--and you will unpack a cluster of flowers distinct in number and in parts. The bud of the tulip tree is smaller, but it holds a single blossom, and petals, stamens, and pistil are easily recognizable. Some buds contain flowers and no leaves. Some have shoots with both upon them. If we know the tree, we may guess accurately about its buds.

There is another popular notion, very pretty and sentimental, but untrue, that study of buds is bound to overthrow. It is the belief that the woolly and silky linings of bud scales, and the scales themselves, and the wax that seals up many buds are all for the purpose of keeping the bud warm through the cold winter. The bark, according to the same notion, is to keep the tree warm. This idea is equally untenable. There is but feeble analogy between a warm-blooded animal wrapped in fur, its bodily heat kept up by fires within , and the winter condition of a tree. Hardy plants are of all things the most cold blooded. They are defended against injuries from cold in an effective but entirely different way.

Exposure to the air and consequent loss of its moisture by evaporation is the death of the cambium--that which lies under the thick bark and in the tender tissues of the bud, sealed up in its layers of protecting scales.

The cells of the cambium are plump little masses of protoplasm, semi-fluid in consistency in the growing season. They have plenty of room for expansion and division. Freezing would rupture their walls, and this would mean disintegration and death. Nature prepares the cells to be frozen without any harm. The water of the protoplasm is withdrawn by osmosis into the spaces between the cells. The mucilaginous substance left behind is loosely enclosed by the crumpled cell wall. Thus we see that a tree has about as much water in it in winter as in summer. Green wood cut in winter burns slowly and oozes water at the ends in the same discouraging way as it does in summertime.

A tree takes on in winter the temperature of the surrounding air. In cold weather the water in buds and trunk and cambium freezes solid. Ice crystals form in the intercellular spaces where they have ample room, and so they do no damage in their alternate freezing and thawing. The protoplasm stiffens in excessive cold, but when the thermometer rises, life stirs again. Motion, breathing, and feeding are essential to cell life.

It is hard to believe that buds freeze solid. But cut one open in a freezing cold room, and before you breathe upon it take a good look with a magnifier, and you should make out the ice crystals. The bark is actually frozen upon a stick of green stovewood. The sap that oozes out of the pith and heart wood was frozen, and dripped not at all until it was brought indoors.

What is meant by the freezing of fruit buds in winter, by which the peach crop is so often lost in Northern states? When spring opens, the warmth of the air wakes the sleeping buds. It thaws the ice in the intercellular spaces, and the cells are quick to absorb the water they gave up when winter approached. The thawing of the ground surrounds the roots with moisture. Sap rises and flows into the utmost twig. Warm days in January or February are able to deceive the tree to this extent. The sudden change back to winter again catches them. The plump cells are ruptured and killed by the "frost bite."

It is a bad plan to plant a tender kind of tree on the south side of a house or a wall. The direct and the reflected warmth of the sun forces its buds out too soon, and the late frosts cut them off. There is rarely a good yield on a tree so situated.

There is no miracle like "the burst of spring." Who has watched a tree by the window as its twigs began to shine in early March, and the buds to swell and show edges of green as their scales lengthened? Then the little shoot struggled out, casting off the hindering scales with the scandalous ingratitude characteristic of infancy. Feeble and very appealing are the limp baby leaves on the shoot, as tender and pale green as asparagus tips. But all that store of rich nutritive material is backing the enterprise. The palms are lifted into the air; they broaden and take on the texture of the perfect, mature leaf. Scarcely a day is required to outgrow the hesitation and inexperience of youth. The tree stands decked in its canopy of leaves, every one of which is ready and eager to assume the responsibilities it faces. The season of starch making has opened.

Cut some twigs of convenient trees in winter. Let them be good ones, with vigorous buds, and have them at least two feet long. You may test this statement I have made about the storing of food in the twigs, and the one about the unfolding of the leafy shoots. Get a number of them from the orchard--samples from cherry, plum, and apple trees; from maple and elm and any other familiar tree. Put them in jars of water and set them where they get the sun on a convenient window shelf. Give them plenty of water, and do not crowd them. It is not necessary to change the water, but cutting the ends slanting and under water every few days insures the unimpeded flow of the water up the stems and the more rapid development of the buds you are watching. When spring comes there are too many things that demand attention. The forcing of winter buds while yet it is winter is the ideal way to discover the trees' most precious secrets.

PART II

THE NUT TREES

The Walnuts--The Hickories--The Beech--The Chestnuts--The Oaks--The White Oak Group--The Black Oak Group--The Horse-Chestnuts, or Buckeyes--The Lindens, or Basswoods

THE WALNUTS

Hickories are included with their near relatives, the walnuts, in one of the most important of all our native tree groups. They are distinct, yet they have many traits in common--the flowers and the nut fruits, the hard resinous wood, with aromatic sap and leaves of many leaflets, instead of a single blade.

The walnuts are decidedly "worth knowing." All produce valuable timber and edible nuts, and all are good shade trees. Four native walnuts are well known in this country, for in October, every tree in every bit of woods is likely to be visited by school boys with bags, eager to gather the nuts before some other boy finds the tree, and thus establishes a prior claim upon it. The curiously gnawed shells outside the winter storehouse of some furry woods-dweller reveal the most successful competitor boys have, the constant watcher of the nut trees, a harvester who works at nothing else while the season is on.

The walnut of the Southwest grows into a spreading, luxuriant tree, where its roots find water. But on the canyon sides, and higher on mountain slopes, it becomes a stunted shrub, because of lack of moisture.

The nut is smaller than that of the eastern walnuts and has a thick shell, but the kernel is sweet and keeps its rich flavor for a long time. The Mexicans and Indians are glad to have this nut added to the stores they gather for their winter food.

One striking feature of this tree is the pale, cottony down on its twigs, which sometimes persists three or four years. The long limbs droop at the extremities, almost deserving to be called "weeping." But nothing could be more cheerful in color than the yellow-green foliage, shining in the sun, against the white bark of the tree. In autumn the foliage turns bright yellow. A specimen, much admired, grows in the Arnold Arboretum in Boston.

The California walnut is a stocky, round-headed tree, with heavy, drooping branches, and bark that is white and smooth on limbs and on trunks of young trees. Ultimately the trunk turns nearly black, and is checked into broad, irregular ridges. In bottom lands, along the courses of rivers, back thirty miles from the coast, these trees are found, from the Sacramento Valley to the southern slopes of the San Bernardino Mountains.

In eastern woods the butternut is known by its long, pointed nuts, with deeply and raggedly sculptured shells, in fuzzy, clammy, sticky husks that stain the hands of him who attempts to get at the oily meat before the husks are dry. This dark stain was an important dye in the time when homespun cotton cloth was worn by men and boys. The modern khaki resembles in color the "butternut jeans," in which backwoods regiments of the Civil War were clad. Butternut husks and bark yield also a drug of cathartic properties.

Pickling green oilnuts in their husks is a housewifely industry, on the summer programme of many housewives still, if the woods near by furnish the raw material for employing her great-grandmother's recipe, brought from England, or perhaps from France. The green nuts are tested with a knitting needle. If it goes through them with no difficulty, and yet the nuts are of good size, they are ready. Vigorous rubbing removes the fuzz after the nuts are scalded. Then they are pickled whole, in spiced vinegar, and are a rare, delectable relish with meats for the winter table.

A butternut tree, beside the road, or elsewhere, with room to grow, has a short trunk, and a low, broad head, with a downward droop to the horizontal limbs. The bark is light brown, the limbs grayish green, the twigs and leaves all ooze a clammy, waxy, aromatic sap, and are covered with fine hairs of velvety abundance.

Because it is low and rather wayward in growth, late to leaf out in spring, and early to shed its leaves in summer, the butternut is not a good street tree. It breaks easily in the wind, and crippled trees are more common than well-grown specimens. Insect and fungous enemies beset the species, and take advantage of breaks to invade the twigs through the chambered pith. Short-lived trees they are, whose brown, satiny wood is used in cabinet work, but is not plentiful.

The black walnut is the second species east of the Rocky Mountains, and the tree chiefly depended upon, during the century just closed, by the makers of furniture of the more expensive grades. Black walnut wood is brown, with purplish tones in it, and a silvery lustre, when polished. Its hardness and strength commend it to the boat and ship builder. Gunstock factories use quantities of this wood. In furniture and interior woodwork, the curly walnut, found in the old stumps of trees cut long before, is especially sought for veneering panels. Old furniture, of designs that have passed out, are often sold to the factories, and their seasoned wood cut thin for veneering.

Walnut trees one hundred and fifty feet high were not uncommon in the forests primeval, in the basin of the Ohio and Wabash rivers. These giants held up their majestic heads far over the tops of oaks and maples in the woods. They were slaughtered, rolled together, and burned by the pioneers, clearing the land for agriculture. These men had a special grudge against walnut trees, they were so stubborn--so hard to make away with. How unfortunate it is that our ancestors had the patience to go forward and conquer the unconquerable ones. Had they weakly surrendered, and let these trees stand, we should have had them for the various uses to which we put the finest lumber trees to-day.

Unhappily, the growing of young trees has not been extensively undertaken to replace those destroyed. The newer forestry is awake to the need, and the loss may be made good, from this time forward.

The black walnut is nearly globular, deeply sculptured, with a sweet nut rich in oil, very good if one eats but a few at a time. Locally, they find their way to market, but they soon become rancid in the grocer's barrel. At home, boys spread them, in their smooth, yellow-pitted husks, on the roof of the woodshed, for instance, so the husks can dry while the nuts are seasoning. No walnut opens its husk in regular segments, as the hickories all do. But the husking is not hard. The thick shells require careful management of the hammer or nut-cracker, to avoid breaking the meats.

Dark as is its wood and bark, no walnut tree in full leaf is sombre. The foliage is bright, lustrous, yellow-green, graceful, dancing. A majestic tree, with a luxuriant crown from May till September, this walnut needs room to display its notable contour and size. It deserves more popularity than it enjoys as a tree for parks. No tree is more interesting to watch as it grows.

The bitter spongy husk deters the squirrels from gnawing into the nut until the husk is dry and brittle. Hidden in the ground, the shell absorbs moisture, and winter frost cracks it, by the gentle but irresistible force of expanding particles of water as they turn to ice. So the plantlet has no hindrance to its growth when spring opens.

Imitating nature, the nurseryman lays his walnuts and butternuts in a bed of sand or gravel, one layer above another, and lets the rain and the cold do the rest. In spring the "stratified" nuts are ready for planting. Sometimes careful cracking of the shell prepares the nut to sprout when planted.

The Japanese walnuts are grown to a limited extent in states where the English walnut is not hardy. They are butternuts, and very much superior to our native species. A Manchurian walnut has been successfully introduced, but few people but the pioneers in nut culture know anything about these exotic species. South America and the West Indies have native species. So we shall not be surprised, in our travels, to find walnuts in the woods of many continents.

It became the fad of gardeners, before the fifteenth century, to improve the varieties, and to compete with others in getting the thinnest shell, the largest nut, the sweetest kernel, just as horticulturists do now. In 1640 the herbalist Parkinson wrote about a variety of "French wallnuts, which are the greatest of any, within whose shell are often put a paire of fine gloves, neatly foulded up together." Another variety he mentions "whose shell is so tender that it may easily be broken between one's fingers, and the nut itsself is very sweete."

In England, the climate prevents the ripening of the fruit of walnut trees. But the nuts reach good size, and are pickled green, for use as a relish; or made into catsups--husks and all being used, when a needle will still puncture the fruit with ease.

In America, the first importations of the walnuts came from the Mediterranean countries, by way of England, "the mother country." In contradistinction to our black walnuts and butternuts, these nuts from overseas were called by the loyal colonists "English walnuts," and so they remain to this day in the markets of this country.

It was natural and easy to grow these trees in the Southern states. But little had been done to improve them, or to grow them extensively for market, until California undertook to compete with Europe for the growing American trade. Now the crop reaches thousands of tons of nuts, and millions of dollars come back each year to the owners of walnut ranches. Hardy varieties have extended the range of nut-orcharding; and so has the grafting of tender varieties on stock of the native black walnut of California.

The beauty of this Eurasian walnut tree would justify planting it merely for the adornment of parks and private grounds. Its broad dome of bright green foliage in summer, and its clean gray trunk and bare branches in winter, are attractive features in a landscape that has few deciduous trees. A fine dooryard tree that bears delicious nuts, after furnishing a grateful shade all summer, is deserving the popularity it enjoys with small farmers and owners of the simplest California homes.

As a lumber tree, the walnut of Europe has long been commercially important. It is the staple wood for gun-stocks, and during wars the price has reached absurd heights, one country bidding against its rival to get control of the visible supply. Furniture makers use quantities of the curly walnut often found in stumps of old trees. The heart wood, always a rich brown, is often watered and crimped in curious and intricate patterns, that when polished blend the loveliest dark and light shades with the characteristic walnut lustre, to reward the skilled craftsman.

In the United States this wood is rarely seen, because the trees are grown for their nuts. They require several years to come into bearing, are long-lived, have few enemies, and need little pruning as bearing age approaches.

THE HICKORIES

Americans have a right to be proud that the twelve hickory species are all natives of this country. Eleven of the twelve are found in the eastern half of the United States; one, only, strays into the forests of Mexico. No other country has a native hickory.

Indians of the Algonkin tribe named this tree family, and taught the early colonists in Virginia to use for food the ripe nuts of the shagbark and mockernut. After cracking the shells, the procedure was to boil and strain the mixture, which gave them a rich, soupy liquid. Into this they stirred a coarse meal, made by grinding between stones the Indian corn. The mush was cooked slowly, then made into cakes, which were baked on hot stones. No more delicious nor wholesome food can be imagined than this. Frequently the soup was eaten alone; its name, "Powcohicora," gave the trees their English name, part of which the botanist, Rafinesque, took, Latinized, and set up as the name of the genus.

Cut a twig of any hickory tree, and you realize that the wood is close-grained and very springy. The pith is solid, with a star form in cross-section, corresponding to the ranking of the leaves on the twigs. The wind strews no branches under a hickory tree, for the fibres of the wood are strong and flexible enough to resist a hurricane.

Hickory wood is unequalled for implements which must resist great strain and constant jarring. The running-gear of wagons and carriages, handles of pitchforks, axes, and like implements require it. Thin strips, woven into baskets for heavy market use, are almost indestructible. No fuel is better than seasoned hickory wood.

The shagbark has gray bark that is shed in thin, tough, vertical strips. Attached by the middle, these strips often spring outward, at top and bottom, giving the bole a most untidy look , and threatening the trousers of any boy bold enough to try climbing into the smooth-barked top to beat off the nuts.

In spite of the ragged-looking trunk, a shagbark grown in the open is a noble tree. The limbs are angular, but they express strength to the utmost twig, as the bare oblong of the tree's lofty head is etched against a wintry sky.

The nuts are the chief blessing this tree confers upon the youngsters of any neighborhood. Individual trees differ in the size and quality of their fruit. The children know the best trees, and so do the squirrels, their chief competitors at harvest time.

Frost causes the eager lads to seek their favorite trees, and underneath they find the four-parted husks dropping away from the angled nuts. There is no waiting, as with walnuts, for husking time to come. The tree is prompt about dropping its fruit. Spread for a few weeks, where they can dry, and thieving squirrels will let them alone, hickory nuts reach perfect condition for eating. Fat, proteid, and carbohydrates are found in concentrated form in those delicious meats. We may not know their dietetic value, but we all remember how good and how satisfying they are. No tree brings to the human family more valuable offerings than this one, rugged and ragged though it be.

The big shellbark, like the little shellbark, is a common forest tree in the Middle West and Middle Atlantic states. It has a shaggy trunk, stout limbs, picturesquely angular, and it bears nuts that are sweet and of delicious flavor. In winter the orange-colored twigs, large terminal buds, and persistent stems of the dead leaves are distinguishing traits. These petioles shed the five to nine long leaflets and then stay on, their enlarged bases firmly tied by fibre bundles to the scar, though the stems writhe and curve as if eager to be free to die among the fallen blades.

"King nuts," as the fruit of this tree is labelled in the markets, do not equal the little hickory nuts in quality, and their thick shells cover meats very little larger. But the nut in its husk on the tree is often three inches long--a very impressive sight to hungry nut-gatherers.

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