622 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



with small purple spots. Not a par- 

 ticularly pleasing odor, but a showy 

 white display to view in the green forest. 

 Interesting because of its remote 

 antiquity as the friend of man, is the 

 ash family. AVithout ash spears and 

 bows, ash arrow^s, tool handles, paddles 

 and snowshoe rims, we would have been 

 a long time fighting our way up from the 

 level of the beasts. The history of the 

 tree reeks wdth human gore, and more 

 than one remote ancestor of our race 

 has worshipped it as the tree which 

 upheld the earth — which it did so far 



The Locust, 

 these bloom in profusion .\nd are a most attractive flower. 



as he was concerned! All the ash 

 varieties flower in May, and all have 

 deep blood-red bunches of flowerets, like 

 blobs of blood, scattered along the 

 branches. The fertile and sterile flow- 

 erets are not greatly different, the former 

 having a long red stigma which super- 

 poses the ovary, and later gives way 

 to the samara or key, similar to the 

 maple key, but long and thin like a 

 javelin. These keys ripen in the fall and 

 persist until midwinter when the violent 

 gales, sweeping through the bare trees, 



tear them from the stems and drive 

 them headlong through the forest, and 

 thus Nature accomplishes the wide 

 dissemination of the ash, for the tree 

 uses so heavily of the soil that a grove 

 of them would be an impossibility. 

 Wolf of the forest though it is, and 

 cousin of the peaceful olive though it is, 

 give me one naughty, gory ash tree 

 for all the olives in the world! 



Another large family of trees flowering 

 in May is the birch tribe. Not much 

 to look at, but oh! what a debt mankind 

 owes to the birch! so we will just give 

 the green catkins of the family 

 a look for curiosity's sake. 

 Sterile and fertile, as is Na- 

 ture's way with important 

 trees; the sterile ones being 

 showy catkins with tiny flow- 

 erets imbedded in a fuzz of 

 green filaments, the fertile 

 flowers, short stumpy catkins, 

 made up of sheaves of what 

 are later to be the wings of the 

 tiny birch seeds. These will 

 turn brown in autumn, the 

 flower "blows," and the 

 winged seeds fly far and wide 

 on the October breezes. 



Last of the May flowers to 

 be examined, though inany a 

 lesser species must be passed 

 by for lack of space, are the 

 two gums and the beech tree. 

 Liquidambar, the sweet gum, 

 has a most peculiar flower, 

 a sort of conglomerate of seed 

 sacks, which starts in the 

 early spring as a small, green, 

 fuzzy button on a stem, and 

 grows to a green, prickly 

 sphere a little smaller than a 

 golf ball. The sterile flower 

 is an erect, compound bunch of flowerets 

 which perish soon after the work of 

 pollenization is done. Not so the other, 

 which turns red-purple and then brown 

 in the fall, and is finally blown off in the 

 winter, so that any large clump of 

 sweet gums is sure to have a grove of 

 little ones surrounding it, the preponder- 

 ance of them lying to the northeast 

 because of the prevailing southwest 

 breezes of autumn. 



The tupelo, or sour gum, has an 

 insignificant green flower scheme which 



