70 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1895. 



that we know will be a delight and a solace, not only to ourselves, 

 but to succeeding generations — the trees that have sheltered our fore- 

 fathers and inspired our poets. Lowell was too genuine an American 

 to- have had any exotic tree in his mind when he wrote, 



" Who does his duty is a question 

 Too complex to be solved by me, 

 But he, I venture the suggestion, 

 Does part of his who plants a tree." 



Perhaps a little account of the classification and relationships of 

 our trees will not be out of place. Instead of belonging to a single 

 order or family of plants, as is sometimes supposed, they are dis- 

 tributed among no less than sixteen different families ; and if we in- 

 clude the introduced species, we find we have representatives of nine 

 families more. The largest order, by far, is the CujniUferce., the 

 great oak family, which is now made to include besides the oaks, the 

 birches, the alders, the hornbeams, the chestnut and the beech, 

 seventeen species in all, or nearly one-third of the whole number of 

 our native trees. We are very rich in oaks. We have white oaks and 

 black oaks, red oaks and scarlet oaks, chestnut oaks, and swamp oaks, 

 all to be found easily in and about our city. They grow slowly and 

 reach the greatest age of any of our trees. We are too new a country, 

 and our efforts have been too long directed toward cutting down trees 

 instead of preserving them, for us to have any reliable data as to their 

 age ; but in England there are oaks known to be a thousand years old. 

 There is little doubt that the white oak standing in the fence at the 

 east of the Thomas Street School is a genuine aborigine. Here was 

 the first burial-place of the early settlers, and it is on record that the 

 spot was shaded by a beautiful grove of oaks, of which this is prob- 

 ably the sole survivor. We are also rich in birches, having five 

 native and three foreign species. The commonest of all, the little 

 white or gray birch, is very generally known, but not half enough ad- 

 mired, lam convinced. There is no season in which it is not an im- 

 portant factor in the beauty of our New England landscape. The 

 true white birch is the paper or canoe birch, often supposed to be 

 confined to higher latitudes than ours ; but as a matter of fact found 

 all through this State and sparingly as far south as Long Island. Of 

 course it does not attain the size here that it does farther north, but 

 we have one specimen, that on the farm of Mr. F. J. Kinney at Tat- 

 nuck, which would compare favorably with the best of the great 

 birches of the New Hampshire forests. Looking at this splendid 

 tree, with its gleaming white trunk and branches, a birch-bark canoe 



