26 



a leaf which somewhat resembles the leaf of the Amer- 

 ican buttonwood, often called sycamore, hence the name 

 of sycamore maple. The botanical name, pseudo pla- 

 tanus, means false-platanus, platanus being the generic 

 botanical name of the buttonwood. Why a thing which 

 is not something else should be called false because it is 

 not that thing, is one of the queer things of botanical 

 nomenclature. Why could not some name meaning 

 resembling be chosen to indicate such similarity? The 

 leaves of the sycamore maple are rather thick, gener- 

 ally five-lobed, downy on the undersides, and with leaf 

 stems or petioles long and distinctly reddish. In the 

 spring, after the leaves have appeared on the tree, it 

 flowers in long, conspicuous pendulous racemes which 

 make you think of little hanging green baskets, such 

 as the children make with burs. The flowers change to 

 crowded clusters of winged seeds of keys, or samaras, 

 as the botanists call them. The wings of these seeds 

 are almost at right angles with each other, and the keys 

 hang on the tree long after the leaves have fallen, often 

 remaining on until well into the winter, and are one of 

 the means of easily knowing the tree at that season of 

 the year. The Walk bends around here to the north- 

 ward, and as you follow its easy sweep, you pass up the 

 hill a little, on the right, a black cherry, whose very 

 rough bark is almost enough to identify it. But if that 

 is not sufficient for you, look amid its lustrous green 

 leaves for the raceme that in June showed so conspicu- 

 ously white and later held little clusters of small, crim- 

 son-purple berries. A few feet further on, along this 

 Walk, you come to a lamp-post on your right, and on 



