iv TEMPERATE FOREST REGIONS 83 



If we compare the European set of trees with that of the 

 forest region of Eastern America we find a wonderful differ- 

 ence. Instead of a total of eighty-five, we have there no less 

 than 155 different kinds of trees, and a large number of 

 these are very distinct from those of Europe, constituting 

 altogether new types of vegetation, many of which, how- 

 ever, we have long cultivated for ornament. Among these 

 are magnolias, tulip-trees, red and yellow horse-chestnuts, 

 the locust or common acacia, the honey-locust (a far 

 handsomer tree), the liquidambar, the sassafras, the 

 hickories, the catalpa, the butter-nut and black walnut, 

 many fine oaks, the hemlock spruce, the deciduous cypress, 

 and a host of others less generally known. Most of these 

 differ from our native trees by their more varied and beau- 

 tiful foliage, by many of them being flowering trees often 

 of the most magnificent kind, and, what is equally import- 

 ant, by the glorious tints which a large proportion of them 

 assume in autumn. Every one has heard of the rich 

 autumnal tints in Canada and the United States as some- 

 thing of which our woods, beautiful as they are, give hardly 

 any idea. Instead of the yellows and browns of our trees, 

 there is in the American forest every tint from the richest 

 scarlet and crimson to yellow, which, combining in endless 

 varieties, give a splendour to the autumnal landscape which 

 is worth a journey across the Atlantic to behold. The 

 Virginian creeper, which drapes our houses with a crimson 

 mantle even amid the smoke of London, the red maple and 

 the sumach of our shrubberies, give us some notion of 

 these tints, but hardly any idea of the effect they produce 

 when their colours are lavishly spread over a varied land- 

 scape. Most of the trees which acquire these brilliant 

 hues grow as well with us as in their native country. 

 Some American trees, strange to say, seem to grow even 

 better, for the beautiful ash-leaved Negundo is a small 

 tree in its native country, rarely exceeding thirty feet high, 

 while London tells us that it grows to forty feet in 

 England ; the white maple reaches only forty feet in 

 America and fifty feet here ; and a similar difference oc- 

 curs with many other trees. So favourable, indeed, is our 

 climate to the growth of trees generally, that, according 



G 2 



