

January 22, 1890.] 



Garden and Forest. 



39 





and any one who has arranged in them long running branches 

 of yellow and maroon Nasturtiums, or the yellow glory of the 

 Black-eyed Susan, will understand their value. 



Endless examples of beautiful arrangements of flowers 

 might be given, and endless rules for such arrangements, but 

 it must be remembered that, to make a house or a room beau- 

 tiful with flowers, every peculiarity of furnishing, color and 

 light must be taken into account, and that any arrangement, 

 beautiful in itself, may loseall its value from an inharmonious 

 settin°" 



New York. Ccindace Wheeler. 



The Nettle Tree. 



THE Nettle-tree (Cellis occidentalis), known also as the 

 Sugarberry, Hackberry and False Elm, is one of 

 the widely distributed trees of the American forest ; in- 

 deed, with the exception of the Red Cedar and of the Box 

 Elder, there is no other American 'tree which grows over 

 such a wide territory or flourishes under such varied cli- 

 matic conditions. It is very common in some parts of the 

 country, and in others is so rare that to most people its name 

 conveys no idea whatever. In New England, where 

 it is found only in localities remote one from another and 

 never anywhere in large numbers, very few persons know 

 of or can recognize this tree. It is more common on the 

 banks of the Hudson, where it grows quite commonly 

 along the roadsides and by fences, and is sometimes a 

 feature in the landscape ; farther west it grows to a larger 

 size and is much more common, and in the forests of the 

 lower Ohio Valley it is one of the largest and most com- 

 mon trees, and is as familiar to the people of that part of 

 the country as it is strange to the inhabitants of New Eng- 

 land. 



The Nettle-tree belongs to the same family as the Elms. 

 It differs from the Elms, however, in its fruit, which, in- 

 stead of the membranaceous dry samaras of those trees, is 

 a globular drupe with a thin pulp surrounding a stony 

 seed. The flowers are very much like those of the Elm, 

 except that the male and female organs are generally 

 produced separately, and that the females have one instead 

 of the two ovules of the Elm and that instead of appear- 

 ing before the unfolding of the leaves they open with 

 them. The flowers, crowned with their two long recurved 

 stigmas, are green and quite inconspicuous, and generally 

 escape the notice of persons who are not looking 

 specially for them. The fruit,* which hangs late into the 

 winter from long slender stems, is as large as a pea and 

 deep orange colored when fully ripe. The dry flesh be- 

 tween the thick outer skin and the stone or seed has an 

 insipid but rather agreeable flavor, and is devoured by 

 many birds. 



The Nettle-tree, as might be expected of a plant subject 

 to such varied conditions of soil and climate, varies greatly 

 in different parts of the country, and botanists have at dif- 

 ferent times believed that it represented several different 

 and distinct species. The reproductive organs, however, 

 are identical in all the various forms the tree assumes, and 

 the differences are differences in habit, and in the leaves, 

 which vary greatly in size, shape and texture. These differ- 

 ent forms, however, seen together in large numbers, all pass 

 from one into another, so that it is impossible to find 

 any fixed character of leaf by which it is possible always 

 to distinguish the different forms which have been con- 

 sidered different species. The bark of the trunk in all the 

 forms presents the same general appearance ; it is ashy 

 gray, and covered in the case of old individuals with thick 

 discontinuous corky ridges, sometimes an inch deep and 

 half an inch thick. 



The Nettle-tree, as it grows in New England, is a low, 

 round-headed tree, fairly well represented in the illustra- 

 tion on page 43, which is the portrait of a tree growing 

 close to the shore on Squantum, a point of land running 

 out from the city of Quincy into Massachusetts Bay. 

 This particular specimen has always grown with sufficient 



* i. — The fruit may b • seen, with the aid of a magnifying glass, hanging on the 

 branches of the tree in the illustration on page 43. 



room for the development of its lateral branches. This, 

 and the fact that it has been exposed to the sweep of the 

 wind, has changed its habit somewhat and shortened and 

 thickened its branches. On the banks of the Hudson the 

 Nettle-tree is an entirely different looking object, with a 

 short, slender trunk, and long, graceful, pendulous branches ; 

 west of the Alleghany Mountains, which is the true home 

 of the species, it reaches occasionally, according to Mr. 

 Robert Ridgway, whose paper on the native trees of south- 

 ern Indiana and Illinois (published in the Proceedings of 

 the National Museum for 1882), is one of the most inter- 

 esting and instructive contributions to American dendro- 

 logy ever written, a height of 120 to 130 feet, with a tall, 

 slender trunk, 80 feet sometimes to the first branches, and 



Celtis Occidentals : Mississippi Valley. 



often comprising three-quarters of the total height of the 

 tree. A little farther west, on the dry Ozark hills of Mis- 

 souri, it is reduced to a low shrub three or four feet high 

 only, but always with the same flowers and fruit ; in the 

 valley of the lower Rio Grande in Texas, and in the moun- 

 tain valleys of the Sierra Madre in the adjacent parts of 

 Mexico, the Nettle-tree has a short, stout trunk, with a wide 

 head composed of long and exceedingly pendulous 

 branches, the whole forming a tree which no one looking 

 at it from a distance could believe was the species of the 

 Massachusetts coast or of the Indiana forests. Farther 

 west again, in the arid region of western Texas, in Arizona, 

 and in Sonora, it generally has short, stout, upright 

 branches and a totally different habit. 



