Wayside and Woodland Trees: A pocket guide to the British sylva. Step Edward

and Sweet Chestnut at twenty-five years. Some produce seed every year after that period is reached, others every second, third, or fifth year; others, again, bear fitfully except at intervals of from six to nine years, when they produce an enormous crop. Most tree-seeds germinate in the spring following their maturity, but they are not all distributed when ripe. The Birch, the Elm, and the Aspen, for examples, retain their seeds until spring, and these germinate soon after they have been dispersed.

      The seeds contain sufficient nutriment to feed the seedling whilst it is developing it roots and first real leaves. We can, of course, go further back in starting our observations of the life progress of the monarch of the forest. We can dissect the insignificant greenish flower of the Oak when the future seed (acorn) is but a single cell, a tiny bag filled with protoplasm. From that early stage to the period when the tree is first ripe for conversion into timber we span a century and a half, equal to two good human lives, and the Oak is but at the point where a man attains his majority. The Oak is built up after the fashion by which man attains to his full stature. It is a process of multiplication of weak, minute cells, which become specialized for distinct offices in the economy of the vegetable community we call a tree. Some go to renew and enlarge the roots, others to the perfecting of that system of vessels through which the crude fluids from the roots are carried up to the topmost leaf, whence, after undergoing chemical transformation in the leaf laboratory, it is circulated to all parts of the organism to make possible the production of more cells. Each of these has a special task, and it becomes invested with cork or wood to enable it to become part of the bark or the timber; or it remains soft and develops the green colouring matter, which enables it, when exposed to sunlight, to manufacture starch from carbon and water.

      This is very similar to what takes place in the human organism, where the nutriment taken in is used up in the production of new cells, which are differentiated into muscle-cells, bone-cells, epidermal-cells, and so forth, building up or renewing muscles or nerves, bones or arteries; but the mechanism of distribution is different, the heart-pump doing the work of capillary attraction and gravitation. The ancients believed in the Dryads, spirits that were imprisoned in trees, and whose life was coterminous with that of the tree; and it will be seen that they had stronger physical justification for their belief than they knew. Shakespeare relates how Sycorax, the witch-mother of Caliban, imprisoned Ariel in a tree; and Huxley finely tells us that "The plant is an animal confined in a wooden case; and Nature, like Sycorax, holds thousands of 'delicate Ariels' imprisoned in every oak. She is jealous of letting us know this; and among the higher and more conspicuous forms of plants reveals it only by such obscure manifestations as the shrinking of the Sensitive Plant, the sudden clasp of the Dionæa, or, still more slightly, by the phenomena of the cyclosis."

      The tree, as we have indicated, gets its food from the air and the soil. The rootlets have the power of dissolving the mineral salts in the soil in which they ramify; some authorities believing that they are materially helped in this respect—so far as organic matter is concerned—by a fungus that invests them with a mantle of delicate threads. However that may be, the fluid that is taken up by the roots is not merely water, but water plus dissolved mineral matter and nitrogen. At the same time as the roots are thus absorbing liquid nutriment, the leaves, pierced with thousands of little stomata, or mouths, take in atmospheric air, which is compounded chiefly of the gases oxygen and carbon. The leaf-cells containing the green colouring matter (chlorophyll) seize hold of the carbon and release the oxygen. The carbon is then combined with the fluid from the roots by the vital chemistry of the leaves, and is circulated all over the system for the sustenance of all the organs and tissues.

      The flowering of the trees varies so greatly that it can only be dealt with satisfactorily as each species is described. It may be stated, however, that all the true forest trees are wind-fertilized, and therefore have inconspicuous greenish blossoms. By true forest trees we mean those that alone or slightly mixed are capable of forming high forest. The smaller trees, such as Crab, Rowan, Cherry, Blackthorn, Hawthorn, Buckthorn, etc., belong more to the open woodland, to the common and the hedgerow. These, from their habitat, can be seen singly, and therefore can make use of the conspicuous flowers that are fertilized by insects.

WAYSIDE AND WOODLAND TREES.

       Table of Contents

PART I.

       NATIVE TREES AND SHRUBS.

       Table of Contents

The Oak (Quercus robur).

       Table of Contents

      When good John Evelyn wrote his "Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees," he was greatly concerned lest our "wooden walls" should diminish in strength for want of a succession of stout Oaks in our woodlands, and therefore he put the Oak in the forefront of his discourse. To-day steel and teak have largely supplanted oak in the building of our navy, and our walls of defence are no longer of wood. Yet in spite of these changes, and the consequent reduction of the Oak's importance, we must still look upon it as the typical British tree, and, regardless of its place in botanical classifications, we shall follow the lead of our master and place it first on our list.

      There is no necessity for entering upon a minute description of the botanical characters of so well known a tree. The sturdy, massive trunk, firm as a rock; the broad, rounded outline of its head, caused by the downward sweeping extremities of the wide-spreading lower limbs; the wavy outline of the lobed leaves, and the equally distinct egg-and-cup-shaped fruit—these are characters that cannot be confused with those of any other tree, and are the most familiar objects in the landscape in most parts of our islands. To my mind, no wood is so awe-inspiring as one filled with old oaks, all so much alike, yet each with a distinct individuality. We regard with reverence a human centenarian, who may have nothing beyond his great age to commend him to us; but we think of the long period of history of which he has been a spectator, possibly an active maker of history. The huge Oak has probably lived through ten or twenty such periods. Compared with the Oak, man is but of mushroom growth. It does not produce an acorn until sixty or seventy years old, and even then it is not mature. Not till a century and a half have passed over its head is its timber fit for use, and as a rule it is not felled under the age of two hundred years. Many trees are left to a much greater age, or we should not have still with us so many venerable specimens, and where they have not been left until partially decayed, the timber is found to be still very valuable when finally cut down. Of one of these patriarchs of the forest, cut down in the year 1810, we have figures of quantity and value from a contemporary record. It was known as the Gelenos Oak, and stood about four miles from Newport, Monmouthshire. When felled, it yielded 2426 cubic feet of sound timber, and six tons of bark. It was bought just as it stood for £405, and the purchaser had to pay £82 for labour for stripping, felling, and converting into timber. Five men were employed for twenty days in stripping the bark and felling the tree, and after that a pair of sawyers, working six days a week, were five months cutting it up. But the bark realized £200, and the timber about £400. The timber and bark from this one tree were about equal to the average produce of three acres of oak coppice after fifteen years growth.

      

Pl. 2. Oak—summer.

      

Pl. 3. Oak—winter.

      Full-grown oaks vary in height from sixty to one hundred and thirty feet, the difference depending upon situation; the tallest, of course, being those that have been drawn up in forests, at the expense of their branches. Trees growing freely in the open are of less height, and are made to appear comparative dwarfs by the huge proportions of the bole. In the forest this may be no more than ten feet in girth, but in isolated specimens may be as much as