THE OAK. 13 



the ivy, which, beginning its career like a little centipede, creeps slowly 

 and tenderly up the surface, making sure of its wiry footing at every 

 step, and decks the massive trunk with sweet wandering and zig-zag 

 sprays of green, variegated, if they get light enough, with pretty and 

 unaccustomed hues. While young, and until quite among the branches, 

 the leaves are angular. There are no flowers, and perhaps none ever 

 appear, for the ivy is peculiar in this respect, unconcerned to bloom so 

 long as it has anything to cling to, and producing its flowers only at 

 the very extremities of its growth, where they roll out from the sup- 

 porting boughs of the tree, and the leaves become oval and pointed. 

 This is more remarkable when ivy clambers up some ancient building, 

 a castle, or the relics of some roofless abbey ; but it shows enough in 

 the case of trees, if the plant be of sufficient age. There is something 

 peculiarly fine in the spectacle of a venerable tree with its encircling 

 ivy. At every season of the year ivy gives an air of richness ; the gloss 

 of the leaves, the easy and graceful swing of the masses of foliage, the 

 chiar* oscuro caused by the long petioles, and above all, the pleasing 

 sense of the stay and security which it affords, at every season of the 

 year these are present to the eye and mind, and render a pilgrimage 

 into the forest one of those animating poems which nature is ever ready 

 to recite to us. Bracing up the old tree with its friendly clamps, so 

 far from being, as many suppose, an enemy, it is in reality a protection ; 

 and when we see leafless and withered boughs rising above its verdure, 

 like gigantic antlers, it is not because of the ivy, but from inanition. 

 Still less is the ivy a parasite, as often imagined. It is not even an 

 epiphyte. To be a parasite, a plant must send sucker-like roots into 

 the very substance of its victim, and draw from it all that portion of its 

 sustenance which other plants are accustomed to derive from the soil by 

 means of genuine roots. Ivy does not do this. Although attaching itself 

 to the bark of the tree by ten thousand little holdfasts, it has its roots 

 in the earth below, and from the earth it derives its nourishment ; and 

 if the stem be severed, it will die like any other plant, unless, as has 

 happened in some rare instances, it can manage to sustain life by 

 absorption from the atmosphere. For this reason also, ivy is not, as 

 we say, even an epiphyte, an epiphyte being a plant that simply rests 

 upon the branch of another, as a bird builds its nest, and that lives 

 upon the decaying matter that accumulates around, and upon the water 

 and carbon of the aerial sea. 



The oak is tenanted, not only by the ivy, but by epiphytes and a 

 parasite as well. The parasite is the famous mistletoe, the plant 



