FIELD AND STUDY 



I can discover for scattering its seed, and yet it 

 appears to compete successfully with its more lusty 

 neighbor. One is about as abundant and trouble- 

 some to the gardener as the other. The seeds of the 

 yellow dock are like small, brown, polished buck- 

 wheat. I have never seen birds or squirrels eat them, 

 and what secret way they have of keeping up with 

 the burdocks I do not know. The burdock plants it- 

 self deeper in the ground, and defies your spading- 

 fork the more successfully. 



I have always been curious to know why the birch 

 is the only one among our many forest-trees that 

 seems to have an ambition to plant itself upon a 

 rock. Other trees do so occasionally, but in the woods 

 I am familiar with I see ten birches upon rocks to 

 one of any other tree. They sit down upon the rock 

 as if it were a chair, and run their big roots off into 

 the ground, apparently entirely at home. How in 

 the first place they get enough foothold in the thin 

 coat of leaf mould that covers the rocks to develop 

 their roots and send them across the barren places 

 and down into the soil is a puzzle. I have seen a 

 small birch sapling that had obtained a foothold in 

 a niche on the side of a cliff send one large root 

 diagonally down across the face of the bare rock two 

 or more yards to the ground, where it took hold and 

 saved the situation. It was like a party going out 

 from a starving camp for relief. To equip and pro- 

 36 



