Part 10 (2/2)

In Europe the white willow has long been used for the making of wooden shoes, artificial limbs, and carriage bodies. Its wood makes the finest charcoal for gunpowder. Willow wares, such as baskets and wicker furniture, are as old as civilization, and that in its primitive stages. It is a common sight in Europe to see groves of trees from which the long twigs have been taken yearly for these uses.

The stumps are called ”pollards” and the trees ”pollarded willows”

whose discouraging task has been to grow a yearly crop of withes for the basket-makers; yet each spring finds them bristling with the new growth.

The hosts of Caesar invading England in the First Century found the Britons defending themselves behind willow-woven s.h.i.+elds, and living in huts of wattled willows, smeared with mud. From that time to the present the uses of these long shoots have multiplied.

The roots of willows are fibrous and tough as the shoots. For this reason they serve a useful purpose in binding the banks of streams, especially where these are liable to flood. Nature seems to have designed these trees for just this purpose, for a twig lying upon the ground strikes root at every joint if the soil it falls on is sufficiently moist. The wind breaks off twigs and the water carries them down stream where they lodge on banks and sand bars, and these are soon covered with billows of green.

Willows start growth early in spring, putting out their catkins, the two s.e.xes on different trees, before the opening of the leaves. Before the foliage is full grown, the light seeds, each a minute speck, floats away in a wisp of silky down. Its vitality lasts but a day, so it must fall on wet ground at once in order to grow. But the willow family is quite independent of its seeds in the matter of propagation.

Chop the roots and twigs into bits and each will grow. Chop a young willow tree into sticks and fence posts and each one, if it is stuck green into the ground, covers itself with a head of leafy twigs before the season is over.

=Weeping Willow=

_Salix Babylonica_

The weeping willow, much planted in cemeteries and parks, came originally from Asia and is remarkable for its narrow leaves that seem fairly to drip from the pendulous twigs. (_See ill.u.s.tration, page 55._) The foliage has a wonderful lightness and cheerfulness of expression, despite its weeping habit.

=The p.u.s.s.y Willow=

_S. discolor_, Muehl.

The p.u.s.s.y willow is the familiar bog willow, whose gray, silky catkins appear in earliest spring. A walk in the woods in late February often brings us the charming surprise of a meeting with this little tree, just when its gray p.u.s.s.ies are pus.h.i.+ng out from their brown scales. We cut the twigs and bring them home and watch the wonderful color changes that mark the full development of the flowers. Turning them in the light, one sees under the sheen of silky hairs the varied and evanescent hues that glow in a Hungarian opal. In midsummer a p.u.s.s.y willow tree is lost among the shrubby growth in any woods. It is only because it leads the procession of the spring flowers that every one knows and loves it. (_See ill.u.s.trations, pages 86-87._)

THE HORNBEAMS

Two genera of little trees in the same family with the birches are frequently met in the woods, often modestly hiding under the larger trees. One is the solitary representative of its genus: the other has a sister species.

The hornbeams grow very slowly and their wood is close-grained, heavy, and hard. In flexibility, strength, and ability to stand strain, it rivals steel. Before metals so generally became compet.i.tors of woods in construction work, hornbeam was the only wood for rake teeth, levers, mallets, and especially for the beams of ox yokes. It outwore the stoutest oak, the toughest elm. Springiness adapted it for fork handles and the like. Bowls and dishes of hornbeam lasted forever, and would never leak nor crack. ”Ironwood” is the name used wherever the wood was worked.

=American Hornbeam=

_Carpinus Carolinianum_, Walt.

The American hornbeam has bluish gray bark, very fine in texture, from which the name ”blue beech,” is common in some localities. ”Water beech” points out the tree's preference for rich swamp land.

The trunk and limbs are strangely swollen, sometimes like a fluted column, oftener irregularly, the swelling under the bark suggesting the muscular development of a gymnast's arm.

In favorable places the hornbeams grow into regular oval heads, their branches dividing into a mult.i.tude of wiry, supple twigs. Crowded under oaks and other forest growth, they crouch and writhe; and their heads flatten into tangled ma.s.ses of foliage.

The delicate leaves, strong-ribbed, oval, pointed, turn to red and orange in autumn. (_See ill.u.s.tration, page 87._) The paired nutlets are provided with a parachute each, so that the wind can sow them broadcast. This wing is leafy in texture, shaped like a maple leaf, and curved into the shape of a boat. After they have broken apart, the nutlets hang by threads, tough as hornbeam fibres always are. At last, away they sail, to start new trees if they fall in moist soil.

The European hornbeam was a favorite tree for making the ”pleached alleys,” of which old-world garden-lovers were proud. A row of trees on each side of a promenade were pruned and trained to cover an arching framework, and to interlace their supple branches so that at length no other framework was needed, and one walked through a tunnel of green so closely interlaced as to make walls and roof that shut out light and wind and rain! Hedges, fences, and many fancies of the gardener were worked out with this hornbeam, so willingly did it lend itself to cutting and moulding into curious forms.

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