130 LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 



fourteen persons.* On the margins of the great western 

 rivers it sometimes rises up seventy feet, and then expands 

 into a fine, lofty head, surpassing in grandeur ail its 

 neighbors of the forest. The large branches of the plane 

 shoot out in a horizontal direction ; the trunk generally 

 ascending in a regular, stately, and uninterrupted manner 

 The blossoms are small greenish balls appearing in spring, 

 and the fertile ones grow to an inch in diameter, assuming 

 a deep brownish color, and hang upon the tree during the 

 whole winter. A striking and peculiar characteristic of 

 the plane, is its property of throwing off or shedding 

 continually the other coating of bark here and there in 

 patches. Professor Lindley (Introduction to the Natural 

 System, 2d ed. 187) says this is owing to its deficiency 

 in the expansive power of the fibre common to the bark 

 of other trees, or, in other words, to the rigidity of its 

 tissue : being therefore incapable of stretching with the 

 growth of the tree, it bursts open on different parts of the 

 trunk, and is cast off. This gives the trunk quite a lively 

 and picturesque look, extending more or less even to the 

 extremity of the branches ; and makes this tree quite 

 conspicuous in winter. Bryant, in his address to Green 

 River, says : 



" Clear are the depths where its eddies play, 

 And dimples deepen and whirl away, 

 And the plane tree's speckled arms o'ershoot 

 The swifter current that mines its root." 



The great merit of the plane, or buttonwood, is its 



* A buttonwood on the Montezuma estate, Jefferson, Cayuga Co., N. Y., 

 is forty-seven and a half feet in circumference ; and the diameter of the 

 hollow two feet from the ground, is fifteen feet. (N. Y. Med. Repository, 

 IV. 427.; 



