66 TREES 



like a candle flame. (See illustration, page 5^.) Eacli 

 flower of the pyramid has its throat-dashes of yellow and 

 red, and the curving yellow stamens are thrust far out of 

 the dainty ruffled border of the corolla. 



Bees and wasps make music in the tree-top, sucking the 

 nectar out of the flowers. Unhappily for us humans, 

 caterpillars of the leopard and tussock moths feed upon 

 the tender tissues of this tree, defacing the fohage and 

 making the whole tree unsightly by their presence. 



Sidewalks under horse-chestnut trees are always littered 

 with something the tree is dropping. In early spring the 

 shiny, wax-covered leaf buds cast off and they stick to slate 

 and cement most tenaciously. Scarcely have the folded 

 leaflets spread, tent-like, before some of them, damaged by 

 wind or late frosts or insects' injury, begin to curl and drop, 

 and as the leaves attain full size, they crowd, and this 

 causes continual shedding. In early autumn the leaflets 

 begin to be cast, the seven fingers gradually loosening from 

 the end of the leaf -stalk; then comes a day when all of the 

 foliage mass lets go, and one may wade knee deep under 

 the tree in the dead leaves. The tree is still ugly from 

 clinging leaf -stems and the slow breaking of the prickly 

 husks that enclose the nuts. 



With all these faults, the horse-chestnut holds its popu- 

 larity in the suburbs of great cities, for it lives despite 

 smoke and soot. Bushey Park in London has ^lyq rows of 

 these trees on either side of a wide avenue. When they are 

 in bloom the fact is announced in the newspapers and all 

 London turns out to see the sight. Paris uses the tree ex- 

 tensively; nearly twenty thousand of them line her streets, 

 and thrive despite the poverty of the soil. 



The American buckeyes are less sturdy in form and less 



