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Trees

By WALTER PRICHARD EATON Author of "Barn Doors and Byways," etc.

Illustrations by Walter King Stone

As far as possible, all of us demand trees

about our dwellings, for their shade, we say, or their charm, their protection, their architectural value. But at bottom, I believe, all our reasons are the same: we demand trees about our dwellings because deep within us-deep, perhaps, as the primal instincts of the race-is a great and trustful affection humorously akin to the dog's trust in the table beneath which he lies, whether to escape the heat of summer or the Fourth of July fire-crackers. For all the centuries of upward development, for all our tall cities and snug

dwellings, we are close to the ancient mother still. Go out some day into the wild places, let night come on, or a storm, and see how you turn like a homing bird to the shelter of the hemlock thicket! Even on my own little place of a few acres there is a grove of pines near the house, murmurous like the sea, and beside it three gnarled old apple-trees which put a green roof over that bit of the lawn; and to them I return a dozen times a day out of the sunshine or the moonlight on the garden, as a man returns to the welcome of his roof and hearth.

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"The sycamore . . . is large, dignified, masculine, and totally unaware of the

picturesque effect created by its tortuous branches "

Trees, of course, are the most beautiful as well as, perhaps, the most useful of growing things, not because they are the largest, but because they attain often to

the finest symmetry and because they have the most decided and appealing personalities. Any one who has not felt the personality of trees is oddly insensitive.

cannot, indeed, imagine a person wholly incapable of such feeling, though the man who plants a Colorado blue spruce on a trimmed lawn east of the Alleghanies, where it is obliged to comport itself with elms and trolley-cars, is admittedly pretty callous. Trees are peculiarly the product of their environment, and in a natural state their personalities have invariably a beautiful fitness.

Take the white pine, for example, noblest of all our common North American trees. The pine by nature is gregarious in the extreme. One old patriarch, if left alone, will in a few years breed about its feet a family of seedlings half an acre in extent, and this little stand of seedlings, if they, too, are left alone, will in turn, in a single generation, begin to breed more seedlings out to windward, and thus in a hundred years the patriarch, the grandfather of the forest, will perhaps be almost hidden in the depths of an extensive wood. As they begin to grow, the young trees are crowded thickly together, and very soon their lateral branches begin to touch, completely shading the ground beneath. As soon as this happens, of course, all the lateral branches below the upper layers are shaded, too, and begin to die. Only the tops of the trees get the sun; so they give up the natural effort to spread, and devote most of their attention to racing upward after more and more sunshine. The weaker trees, crowded in between the strong, sooner or later give up the struggle and die; but the strong ones keep going up and up, till all signs of their lower lateral branches have completely disappeared, and the lofty trunks tower as straight as ruled lines for fifty, seventyfive, and in primeval forests even for one hundred feet in air, before the trees throw a single limb. It takes many generations to make such a forest, though, alas! only a few months to destroy it.

What man who has ever entered the hushed cathedral aisles of a mighty pine grove, fragrant with that indescribable incense, murmurous overhead with the whisper of surf upon a lonely shore, mysterious with the tiny patter of pitch, illumined

through vistas that look like blue daggers of light between the solemn uprights, can ever forget it? It is like nothing else on earth. Yet the isolated pine, which has not fought upward in the crowded phalanx of its fellows, but has expanded laterally as well, is a totally different tree, with a totally different personality, a very noble and sturdy personality, too.

How characteristic of our Northern mountains is the ragged upland pasture, where the cattle wander through hassocks of grass and sweet-fern, and by some bit of gray stone wall a single pine stands up alone, its branches extended in angular parallels like a cedar of Lebanon, broken and stunted on the side toward the prevailing winter storms, streaming away more gracefully to leeward, and the massive trunk, comparatively short and gnarled instead of tall and mast-like, inclined a little from the winter gales, as if it had stood its ground and taken their buffets for a hundred years without more than bending backward from the hips when the blows rained thickest! I know such a pine on a hilltop which has been carved by the storms of a century into a quaint and splendid replica of the Winged Victory, and there is no passer who sees it but pauses a moment to admire its rugged beauty, its suggestion of triumphant, dogged strength. To deny that pine personality is to prove one's utter lack of imagination.

The American elm is another common native tree possessing both great beauty and a strongly marked personality. It is recognized as the standard for town planting because its personality so exactly comports with geometrical street vistas, with the formal lines of architecture, with the orderliness and dignity of university campuses and civic squares. The elm is essentially a self-sufficient tree. It does not thrive in groves. It has a standard type of its own, and it either attains this type or is lost to view. The elm which comes to maturity is usually the one which has lodged in a favored spot where there is no competition, such as a river meadow, where the spring freshets have dropped

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"These same trees [the elms] are scarcely less beautiful in winter"

the seed on fertile soil, and the roots can get down to water.

We all know the type, the noble trunk of massive girth tapering very gradually upward to the first spring of branches,

and then dissolving in those branches as a water jet might dissolve in many upward and out-curving streams, till the whole is lost in the spray of the foliage. Like many other trees that grow alone, it

develops an exquisite symmetry; but with the elm this symmetry is not only one of general contour, but of individual limbs. Not only is the silhouette symmetrical, but the skeleton also, branch balancing branch. That is what gives it its remarkable fitness to comport with architectural lines, with geometrically designed vistas. It has a formal structure and a consequent dignity which make it the logical shade for a village street, a chapel, a library, the scholarly procession in cap and gown. Add to that dignity its arched and airy lightness and its splendid size, and you have the king of urban trees.

Yet I sometimes think the elm is never so lovely as when it grows along the river bends where nature planted it. We all know such river bends; every American cherishes in memory the picture of a green intervale, of browsing cattle, of a winding stream, with vervain and wild cucumber on the banks, and now and then, rising like graceful green fountains, or like great vases on slender stems, the noble elms, the wardens of the peaceful landscape. The valley of the Housatonic, in the Berkshire Hills, is peculiarly rich in splendid trees of many kinds, especially willows. Yet its elms stand out with a certain aristocratic aloofness, and demand, or, rather, compel, the chief attention. Over the well-kept village streets they spread magnificently, with the spring of a Gothic arch in their massive limbs, and oriolenests depending like tiny platinum eardrops from the outer twigs. But along the river you see the whole tree; you are not aware of it as the under side of an arch, but rather as a complete and beautiful design, a mammoth vase rising on its graceful stem from the emerald meadows. There are five such elms in a row near my home. They grow along the bank of a swale close to the river, with space enough between them to permit each tree its standard of form; and yet each, too, has conceded a little something to its neighbor, and made up for the loss by a fringe of foliage close about the trunk, as well-fed elms sometimes do. They are of almost exactly the same height and

girth, and yet, if you look closely, no two are really alike. They differ as the great doors of Notre Dame in Paris differindividual, yet harmonious. When the bulwarks of willow around the river bends are turning to soft, grayish silver in the low afternoon light, when the shadows are creeping like long amethyst fingers over the grass, these five trees rise in radiant lightness against the west, every detail of their lovely symmetry outlined sharply against the sky. They are like a row of figures by Botticelli arrested in a lacy dance.

These same trees are scarcely less beautiful in winter. Some lovers of trees, indeed, delight in the body more than in the raiment. A nude tree may be pathetic in its suggestion of vanished summer, but it is seldom or never unlovely. Did not Ruskin somewhere speak of the wonderful life in the line of a twig or branch? Certainly no line in nature is so vital, whether it be the straight taper of a Norway spruce trunk or the radiating forked lightning of an aged locust top.

Did you ever look carefully at an old, neglected apple-tree in winter? Of course it always makes the arms of the true agriculturist yearn for a pruning-saw, as Grizel's arms rocked for a sponge and water when she saw a dirty baby; but, forgetting farmers' bulletins for a moment, did you ever pause to admire the veritable spray of "suckers" such a tree has sent up, like a shower-bath nozle turned upside down? The pattern they make is tangled and formless, but what a testimony they are to the vitality of the tree, what eloquent witnesses of its will to live! The end of a dead limb may have rotted back to make a flicker's or a bluebird's nest, the trunk may be ringed with the sapsucker's bores, the tree may be lopsided, perishing with scale, but al over it sprout the suckers, its symbol of continued struggle. The poor old appletree beside some abandoned farm-house, or cellar hole where perchance no house has stood for generations, still fighting for life, still striving to function, is to me a brave and beautiful thing.

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