XVIII. THE DECIDUOUS SHRUBS OF THE FARM 



"There the spice-bush lifts 

 Her leafy lances; the virburnum there, 

 Paler of foliage, to the sun holds up 

 Her circlet of green berries. In and out 

 The chipping sparrow, in her coat of brown, 

 Steals silently, lest I should mark her nest." 



— Bryant {The Fountains). 



The lesser woody plants of the farm have not been held in 

 much favor by the farmer. They have not been very useful 

 to him, and they have tended to overrun his fence-rows, to 

 close up his roadways, and to fill every untilled opening in his 

 woodlot with unusable and unsalable stuff. Next to the 

 trees, they are, in new soils, the greatest impediment to 

 tillage; and unlike the trees, they yield no valuable products 

 to repay the labor of clearing the ground. What we call 

 shrubs, the pioneer knew by the uncomplimentary name of 

 "brush." 



Still, shrubs have many uses, as every woodsman knows. 

 An important use, once made of them by the redmen, is 

 indicated by the sirrviving name, arrow-woods. Before the 

 days of manufactured metal nicknacks, the farmer punched 

 out the huge pith from pieces of elder and sumac and made 

 sap-spouts for his sugar-trees ; and in the same way his boys 

 obtained tubes for pop-guns and squirt-guns and v/histles. 

 Annual shoots of willow — ^willow rods — have long been and 

 are still the basis of a great basket industry. Many clean 

 growing stems of shrubs make beautiful walking-sticks; but 

 this is of no consequence, since few members of our species 

 really need three legs to walk on. And there is one use, now 

 almost obsolete, but once in high esteem — an educational use, 

 that was supposed, by the disciplinarians of the old school, to 

 be ser\^ed by the straight "switches" of a number of shrubs, 



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