WILLOW FAMILY 
Fruit.—Oblong-conical capsules, two-valved, thin-walled, light 
green and nearly one-fourth an inch long, borne in drooping aments 
about four inches long. Seeds obovate, light brown and surrounded 
with long, soft, snowy white hairs. May and June. 
Nature chooses wisely her place for spew /remudoides at the edge of a wood, 
with darker, higher trees behind as a background. 
—Epirn Tuomas, 
The entire Poplar family are a restless folk and the Aspen 
the most so of the group. The reason lies in a personal 
peculiarity. The character of the petiole or leaf stem has 
much to do with the movement of the foliage of every tree. 
In the beech and elm, for example, the petiole is short and 
stiff and as a consequence the leaves have little independent 
motion but sway with the branch. ‘The Poplars, on the other 
hand, have long slender petioles to begin with, and these are 
laterally compressed—pinched sidewise, not flattened—and 
this compression being vertical to the plane of the leaf, 
counteracts the ordinary waving motion which a leaf has in 
the wind and causes it to quiver with the slightest breeze, 
whence the proverbial comparison, “ ‘Trembling like an aspen 
leaf.””. From Homer to Tennyson the race of poets have 
noted this peculiarity of all aspens. 
Some wove the web, 
Or twirled the spindle, sitting, with a quick 
Light motion like the aspen’s glancing leaves. 
—ODYSSEY. 
His hand did quake 
And tremble like a leaf of aspen green. 
—SPENSER. 
A perfect calm, that not a breath 
Is heard to quiver through the closing woods, 
Or rustling turn the many twinkling leaves 
Of aspen tall. 
—TuHomson. 
Willows whiten, aspens quiver, 
—TENNYSON. 
The small Aspen is a very common tree, little prized and 
rarely planted. Often an undergrowth in an oak wood, it is 
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