214 OUR NATIVE TREES AND SHRUBS. 
stood up in escarpments on either side, man came and called 
it the Bluff formation, because it composed or capped the 
bold bluffs of the river-banks. It is often, however, only a 
facing to the rocky cliffs, which are the true walls of these 
valleys, and which are monuments of an age long anterior 
to the date of its deposition. — Annals of the Lyceum of | 
Natural History of New York, 1869. 
OUR NATIVE TREES AND SHRUBS. 
BY REV. J. W. CHICKERING, JR. 
Ir has long been a favorite aspiration of the writer, at 
some time in life, to have an arboretum collected from our 
woods and waysides. But despairing of that, I would in this 
article give a list of those native shrubs and trees, which 
seem to promise to repay transplanting, and which would in 
beauty, and many of them in novelty, to any but the bota- 
nist, vie with those imported. 
the trees of early spring, it is a pity that the Silver 
Maple (Acer dasycarpum), and the Sugar Maple (A. sac- 
charinum), were not more generally known and valued, as 
flowering trees. The former is the earliest tree I know in 
this latitude, and the beauty of the long, yellow tassels of 
the latter, commends itself to every observer. Then for 
grounds of any extent the different Birches, the White (Be- 
tula alba), the Paper (B. papyracea), the Yellow (B. ex- 
celsa), and the Black (B. lenta), are in early spring most 
attractive ornaments, for the grace and variety of the spray 
of their delicate catkins. Then the Tulip Tree ( Lirioden- 
dron tulipifera), and the Cucumber Tree (Magnolia acum- 
inata), both perfectly hardy in New York and New England, 
should be seen much more frequently in cultivated grounds. 
The Barberry (Berberis vulgaris) forms a pleasing clump 
