50 TREES 



storms that destroy or maim other kinds. Strength and 

 tenacity in the fibre of root and branch make it possible for 

 individuals to live to a great age, far beyond the two cen- 

 turies required to bring it to maturity. Such trees stir 

 within us a feeling of reverence and patriotism. They are 

 patriarchs whose struggles typify the pioneer's indomitable 

 resistance to forces that destroyed all but the strong. 



White oak trees in the forest grow tall, lose their lower 

 branches early, and lift but a small head to the sun. The 

 logs, quarter-sawed, reveal the broad, gleaming "mir- 

 rors" that make a white oak table beautiful. The 

 botanist calls these the medullary rays — thin, irregular 

 plates of tissue-building cells, that extend out from the 

 central pith, sometimes quite to the sap-wood, crowding 

 between the wood fibres, which in the heart-wood are no 

 longer alive. A slab will show only an edge of these mir- 

 rors. But any section from bark to pith will reveal them. 



The pale brown wood of the white oak distinctly shows 

 the narrow rings of annual growth. Each season begins 

 with a coarse, porous band of ''spring wood," followed by a 

 narrower band of fine, close-grained ''summer wood." 

 White oak is streaked with irregular, dark lines. These 

 are the porous lines of spring wood, discolored by foreign 

 matter. Count them, allow a year for each, and you know 

 how long one white oak tree required to make an inch of 

 wood. 



The supreme moment in the white oak's year comes in 

 spring, when the gray old tree wakes, the buds swell and 

 cast off their brown scales, and the young leaves appear. 

 The tree is veiled, not with a garment of green, but mth a 

 mist of rose and silver, each twig hung with soft Hmp 

 velvety leaves, red-lined, and covered with a close mat of 



