Vlll 



INTRODUCTION 



white willow are familiar examples. This character of the trees is especially easy 

 to study in winter because the trunk is readily seen through the leafless branches. 

 Many of the pictures of dormant trees on the plates in this book illustrate this 

 phase of tree growth. In looking at them, as in looking at the trees outdoors, you 

 soon find that more trees are deliquescent than excurrent and you also discover 

 that it is not always easy to tell to which type some trees belong, for Nature seldom 

 has hard and fast dividing lines to make our classification easy. 



Next to the outlines as revealed against the sky the most striking features 

 of the winter trees are found in the bark of the trunks. The mottled blacks and 

 whites of the birches are more familiar to many people through the pictures of the 



TREES BECOME OF GREATEST INTEREST IN SPRING 



artists than from the trees themselves. For numberless photographs and paintings 

 have recorded the play of light and shade upon these trees and the results are to 

 be seen wherever pictures hang on walls. Among our native species the canoe 

 or paper birch stands preeminent in this respect : the shimmering light upon the 

 white bark is reflected in a thousand directions from the ragged rolls that peel off 

 along the surface of the trunk and larger branches. The English white and our 

 own gray birches have this beauty to a less degree, while the trunks of the red, 

 the yellow and the black birches each have distinctive though less striking features. 

 Perhaps the beech, almost as great a favorite with the artists as the birch, should 

 rank next in one's affection. The smooth, light-reflecting gray bark enables one 

 to know a beech of any size as far as it can be seen. 



