How Trees are Multiplied 



offers an opportunity. They spring up vigorously — a poplar 

 forest. But under them are other slower, longer-lived trees 

 loving the shade in their first years, but prepared to replace their 

 poplar nurses in due season. 



Look at the thin, round disc of the elm seed and you will 

 see how the trees cater to their distributing friend, the wind. 

 How copiously the tree sheds its seeds in early summer! Notice 

 the young elms that come up about the neighbourhood, if Nature 

 is let alone. Observe the keen-pointed, winged dart an ash tree 

 bears. What a burden of seeds one tree yields! Watch the 

 tree on a windy day in October and on into winter. Study the 

 winged key of the maples, the catalpa's thousands of thin, papery 

 seeds in its hundreds of long pods that the wintry breezes shake 

 and loosen and scatter every year. How much the willows' 

 fuzzy seeds look like the poplars' — for willows and poplars are 

 own cousins! 



How different is the wing on the basswood's cluster of woody 

 balls. The wind whirls them abroad and basswoods come up 

 unexpectedly here and there. Sycamores bang their balls, and 

 every loosened seed sails away on its own hairy parachute. The 

 abundant ailanthus seed is balanced on a tipsy raft, that the 

 wind carries long distances. The hornbeam seed sails in a shallop. 

 The hop hornbeam seed is shut into an inflated balloon. The 

 wind is the staunch ally of the forest in its policy of expansion. 



So are the birds. The trees with fleshy fruits depend upon 

 them. All the berries with small seeds, the sassafras, haws, 

 Juneberries, hackberries, dogwoods, mountain ash, hollies and 

 the cedars are in this group; cherries, too, and apples are dis- 

 tributed by birds to some extent. The larger fruits must wait for 

 the larger creatures of the woods; they carry off the plums for 

 the flesh and thin nut-like pits. There are the acorns and nuts 

 that fall heavily, rolling down hillsides, if the parent tree is on 

 the slope, but lodging soon, and waiting for squirrels and their 

 kin to come and carry them off. The animals are selfish in this 

 hoarding of nuts. They do not mean to leave one. But those 

 that are hidden in the runways and not eaten, after all, sprout 

 the next spring, and so the old nut tree is parent to scattered 

 offspring, as well as to many that come up under its own shadow. 

 The locusts fling their pods abroad to go careening over snow- 

 banks in winter, and so to break open at length and spill their 



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