Trees, Shrubs and Vines 
green foliage is airily overlaid with its floral tracery of 
white lace, produced by the countless multitude of long, 
thread-like petals. The delicate effect is best seen at 
short distance, a charming device of nature in contrast 
with the type of bloom displayed by the June-berry, 
black haw, and thorn-trees. The leaf is dark and firm, 
keeping its color farintothe autumn. The affix ‘‘ tree’”’ 
is more for euphony than otherwise, as in its northern 
growth it is only eight to twelve feet high, though in 
the Southern States, where it chiefly grows, reaching the 
northern limit of its range in Pennsylvania, it attains 
a height of twenty to twenty-five feet. 
It is a general characteristic of trees to become dwarfed 
and shrubby toward the boundaries of their habitat ; and 
not only so in the case of the more tropical growth of 
the South, which would naturally become stunted in 
northern latitudes, but also of such as spread from North 
to South and from West to East. Thus the yellow birch, 
a hundred feet high in Canada, is hardly forty feet with 
us; whereas the red birch is largest in the South, and 
dwindles northward. The white oak has its greatest 
height in the lower basin of the Ohio, and the hop- 
hornbeam, a small tree in the East, is fifty feet high in 
Texas. The nettle-tree, rarely seen in the seaboard 
States (though I discovered two growing wild in New 
Jersey), and only sixty feet high in Ohio, exceeds a 
hundred in the far southwest. Rhododendron, mountain- 
laurel, and witch-hazel, only shrubs in the North, attain 
arboreal dimensions in the Carolinas and Georgia; and 
the linden of the Ohio valley soars 130 feet, but is only 
half as high near the Atlantic coast; while the spindle- 
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