374 ] Trees and How to Know Them 



WITCH HAZEL AND ITS POPGUN SEED 



You can look for witch hazel blossoms long after those of 

 other plants have disappeared. Sometimes the witch hazel blossoms 

 open in late September, but more often it is October or November 

 before the yellow, starlike flowers open. As most flowers have 

 fallen by that time, the long-petaled flowers are particularly effec- 

 tive in enhancing the landscape. If you keep watching a bush, 

 you will see that once the flower petals fall, the calyx forms a little 

 urn in which a nut will develop. 



At first the small nut is green, but later it turns brown. It re- 

 quires a year to mature. Then, if you take it indoors, the heat 

 will soon cause the edges of the seed cup to curl inward, shooting 

 the seeds out as it does so. When this shooting device functions 

 out-of-doors, the seeds are propelled many feet from the parent 

 bush to new growing grounds. 



LOVELY MOUNTAIN LAUREL 



By fall the flowers of mountain laurel have long since 

 died away, but you still find this lovely shrub a beautiful part of 

 the landscape. The lustrous leaves do not die with the onset of 

 cold weather but remain green throughout the winter. With the 

 coming of spring, leaves grow on the new wood, arranged below 

 the clusters of flowers in formal bouquet design. You can easily 

 recognize the new wood: It is greenish and rough while the older 

 wood is brownish red. Mountain laurel is a woodland shrub, 

 with a special adaptation for rocky mountain sides and sandy soil. 



STAGHORN SUMAC BRILLIANT SCARLET 



In open fields and on hillsides you are likely to come upon 

 staghorn sumac. This is how you can recognize it: In early fall 

 the leaves are usually the most brilliant scarlet of any on the 

 landscape. These leaves are of the kind that has a number of 

 separate blades attached to both sides of the long leaf stalks, 

 though they are not always set exactly opposite each other. The 

 number of these blades varies from eleven to thirty-one. 



