54 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



ready to hang for a few days, and then fall in hundred- 

 weights from the high branches. Best of them all, 

 the abele catches the sunlight on its silver trunk 

 as though on mirrors, and the thick fingers have 

 woven a canopy overhead that glows in certain 

 lights almost as warmly as the elms. To them 

 the message of the wind is of more vital importance 

 than to the other trees, most of which produce both 

 stigmas and catkins, for these have all the stamens 

 on one tree and all the stigmas on another. The 

 nearest female abele is nearly a mile away, and if 

 it does not get pollen from the ornament of our 

 low meadow, the stigmas must go unfertilised or 

 take dust from some eugenically inferior black or 

 grey poplar. No one who lives in a poplar country 

 can fail to note that there is some hybridism between 

 these trees, and even the book-naturalists are doubtful 

 as to how many species to write down. 



The sad Lombardy poplar is a widower here, and, 

 as far as we can find, throughout the British Isles. 

 Never have we seen a female tree, or the woolly 

 fruit, which falls freely in autumn from the other 

 poplars, decorating the branches of this species. But 

 our tall tree, descendant by sucker in the tenth or 

 twelfth remove from the first tree brought from 

 Persia or thereabouts, annually flings out its catkins, 

 the pollen of which can never come home. We see 

 no signs of its blood in the small aspens or poplars, 

 black, white, or grey, that occasionally appear in the 

 ditches. Still, if all its pollen is to be written down 

 as wasted, so must 99*9 per cent, of the other organic 

 dust that makes the spring air so aromatic, and gives 

 unwonted colour to the sunsets. 



