XVIII. THE DECIDUOUS SHRUBS OF THE FARM 
“There the spice-bush lifts 
Her leafy lances; the virburnum there, 
Paler of foliage, to the sun holds up 
Her circlet of green berries. In and out 
The chipping sparrow, in her coat of brown, 
Steals silently, lest I should mark her nest.” 
—Bryant (The Fountains). 
The lesser woody plants of the farm have not been held in. 
much favor by the farmer. They have not been very useful 
to him, and they have tended to overrun his fence-rows, to 
close up his roadways, and to fill every untilled openingin his 
woodlot with unusable and unsalable stuff. Next to the 
trees, they are, in new soils, the greatest impediment to 
tillage; and unlike the trees, they yield no valuable products 
to repay the labor of clearing the ground. What we call 
shrubs, the pioneer knew by the uncomplimentary name of 
“brush.” 
Still, shrubs have many uses, as every woodsman knows. 
An important use, once made of them by the redmen, is 
indicated by the surviving name, arrow-woods. Before the 
days of manufactured metal nicknacks, the farmer punched 
out the huge pith from pieces of elder and sumac and made 
sap-spouts for his sugar-trees; and in the same way his boys 
obtained: tubes for pop-guns and squirt-guns and whistles. 
Annual shoots of willow—willow rods—have long been and 
are still the basis of a great basket industry. Many clean 
growing stems of shrubs make beautiful walking-sticks; but 
this is of no consequence, since few members of our species 
really need three legs to walk on. And there is one use, now 
almost obsolete, but once in high esteem—an educational use, 
that was supposed, by the disciplinarians of the old school, to 
be served by the straight ‘switches’ of a number of shrubs, 
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