Trees, Shrubs and Vines 



green foliage is airily overlaid with its floral tracery of 

 white lace, produced by the countless multitude of long, 

 thread-like petals. The delicate effect is best seen at 

 short distance, a charming device of nature in contrast 

 with the type of bloom displayed by the June-berry, 

 black haw, and thorn-trees. The leaf is dark and firm, 

 keeping its color far into the autumn. The affix " tree ' ' 

 is more for euphony than otherwise, as in its northern 

 growth it is only eight to twelve feet high, though in 

 the Southern States, where it chiefly grows, reaching the 

 northern limit of its range in Pennsylvania, it attains 

 a height of twenty to twenty-five feet. 



It is a general characteristic of trees to become dwarfed 

 and shrubby toward the boundaries of their habitat ; and 

 not only so in the case of the more tropical growth of 

 the South, which would naturally become stunted in 

 northern latitudes, but also of such as spread from North 

 to South and from West to East. Thus the yellow birch, 

 a hundred feet high in Canada, is hardly forty feet with 

 us ; whereas the red birch is largest in the South, and 

 dwindles northward. The white oak has its greatest 

 height in the lower basin of the Ohio, and the hop- 

 hornbeam, a small tree in the East, is fifty feet high in 

 Texas. The nettle-tree, rarely seen in the seaboard 

 States (though I discovered two growing wild in New 

 Jersey), and only sixty feet high in Ohio, exceeds a 

 hundred in the far southwest. Rhododendron, mountain- 

 laurel, and witch-hazel, only shrubs in the North, attain 

 arboreal dimensions in the Carolinas and Georgia ; and 

 the linden of the Ohio valley soars 130 feet, but is only 

 half as high near the Atlantic coast ; while the spindle- 



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