A CHAPTER ON HEDGES. 368 



and give the plant something of an ornamental appearance. The 

 roots are unusually black in color, and are very numerous. 



The buckthorn is a native of the north of Europe, Asia, and 

 North America. It is not a common shrub in the woods in this 

 country, but we find it very frequently in this neighborhood and in 

 various parts of Dutchess county, N. Y., as well as on the borders of 

 woods in Massachusetts.* 



The bark and berries of the buckthorn are powerful cathartics. 

 The sap of the berries, mixed with alum, makes the color known to 

 painters as sap-green, and the bark yields a fine yellow dye. 



As a hedge plant, the buckthorn possesses three or four points 

 of great merit. In the first place, its bark and leaf are offensive to 

 insects, and the borer, the aphis, and others, which are so destructive 

 to all hawthorns in many parts of our country, will not touch it. 



In the second place, it is remarkable for its hardiness, its ro- 

 bustness, and its power of adapting itself to any soil. It will bear 

 any climate, however cold, for it grows wild in Siberia ; hence it 

 will never suffer, as the English thorn has been known to do, with 

 an occasional winter of unusual severity. We have seen it growing 

 under the shade of trees, and in dry and poor soil, as well as thriv- 

 ing in moist and springy soil; and in this respect, and in its 

 natural rigid thicket-like habit, it seems more admirably fitted by 

 nature for the northern hedge plant than almost any other. In the 

 third place, it bears the earliest transplanting, has great longevity, 

 and is very thrifty in its growth. We have already remarked that it 

 is well supplied with roots. Indeed its fibres are unusually numer- 

 ous even in seedlings of one year's growth. Hence it is transplant- 

 ed with remarkable facility, and when treated with any thing like 

 proper care, not one in five thousand of the plants will fail to grow. 

 It is scarcely at all liable to diseases, and no plant bears the shears 

 better, or gives a denser and thicker hedge, or is longer lived in a 

 hedge. Its growth is at least one-third more rapid than that of the 

 hawthorn, and the facility of raising it, at least half greater. 



* Some botanists consider it a foreign plant, introduced and naturalized 

 in this country. But we have found it in solitary and almost inaccessible 

 parts of the Hudson Highlands, which forbids such a belief on our part 



