Trees, Shrubs and Vines 
most picturesque and interesting appurtenances of a tree, 
in no two species quite alike, not obtrusive yet assertive, 
to which we are more indebted for the exsemé/le of effect 
than most people ever imagine. It is this dark, rigid 
covering of trunk and branch, peeping through foliage, 
that gives stability, vigor, and expression, as every painter 
knows. Color and texture vary endlessly: browns and 
grays of every shade, with here and there a reddish and 
yellow, fill out the gamut from the Turkey oak’s deep 
black to the silvery and chalky white of the gray and 
paper birches ; and, overall this, stripes, bands, blotches 
and reticulations of infinite variety that so plainly char- 
acterize the tulip-tree, shadbush, chestnut, sophora, but- 
tonwood, paulownia, Chinese mulberry, etc. 
Observe, too, the texture and surface-finish of bark ; 
deeply corrugated in sassafras and osage orange, smooth 
in birch and locust, unyielding in hickory and hornbeam, 
loose and friable in white oak and elm, etc.; also the 
three sorts of bark-exfoliation—in shagbark hickory, bald 
cypress and red cedar longitudinal, in all birches lateral, 
in buttonwood ragged and irregular; the speckled, 
warty or blistered surface in sweet gum, nettle-tree, 
balsam fir, etc.,and the diabolical spines of Hercules’ 
Club and honey locust. Every nature-artist tries vainly 
to reproduce the bold and picturesque conceits in black 
and gray and green upon the birches’ white ground. 
In all botanical life there is scarcely a greater mystery 
than the infusion of such varied character and beauty 
into what are really the cracked and worn-out garments 
of the trees—dead husk converted into ornament. 
Of the many tree-students I have seen, not one has 
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