288 THE OCCIDENTAL PLANE. 



would be no recommendation of it in a picturesque light, 

 if the removal of these encumbrances did not substitute as 

 great a beauty in their room. These scales are very irre- 

 gular, falling off sometimes in one part, and sometimes in 

 another ; and as the under bark is, immediately after its 

 excoriation, of a lighter hue than the upper, it offers to 

 the pencil those smart touches which have so much effect 

 in painting. These flakes, however, would be more 

 beautiful if they fell off in a circular form, instead of a 

 perpendicular one. They would correspond and unite 

 better with the circular form of the bole. No tree forms 

 a more pleasing shade than the Occidental Plane. It is 

 full-leaved, and its leaf is large, smooth, and of a fine 

 texture, and is seldom injured by' insects. Its lower 

 branches, shooting horizontally, soon take a direction to 

 the ground, and the spray seems more sedulous than that 

 of any tree we have, by twisting about in various forms, 

 to fill up every little vacuity with shade. At the same 

 time, it must be owned, the twisting of its branches is a 

 disadvantage to this tree when it is stripped of its leaves 

 and reduced to a skeleton. It has not the natural ap- 

 pearance which the spray of the Oak, and that of many 

 other trees, discovers in winter. Nor, indeed, does its 

 foliage, from the largeness of the leaf and the mode of 

 its growth, make the most picturesque appearance in 

 summer." 1 



The leaf of the Plane exhibits one of those exquisite 

 arrangements for the preservation of the bud, which 

 confirms the exclamation of the poet : 



" Each leaf and bud 

 Doth know I AM." 



Trees, for the most part, produce new buds in the axil, 

 or angle between the leaf-stalk and the stem ; and in many 

 cases these buds attain a large size nearly a year before 

 they expand. The Plane appears to be an exception to 



1 Gilpin's " Forest Scenery." 



