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WAYSIDE AND WOODLAND TREES. 
Mountain Ash, or Rowan (Pyrus aucuparia). 
Little description of the Mountain Ash is needed, for in recent 
years it has come so much into favour that it is now one of the 
commonest of the trees planted in little suburban gardens and 
fore-courts. Its hardiness, its indifference to the character of 
the soil, the fact that other plants will grow beneath it, and the- 
absence of need for pruning — all these points unite to make it 
suitable and popular for growth in restricted spaces. But the 
wood on the hillside is the natural home of the Mountain Ash, 
and in the Highlands its vertical range extends to 2600 feet 
above sea-level. 
The Mountain Ash attains a height of from thirty to fifty feet, 
and has a straight clean bole, clothed in smooth grey bark, 
scarred horizontally as though it had been scored with a knife. 
All the branches have an upward tendency, and the shoots 
bear the long feathery leaves, whose division into six or eight 
pairs of slender leaflets suggests the Ash, from which part of its 
name has been borrowed. Gazing on this tree either in flower 
or fruit, it would be quite unnecessary to explain that it is not 
even remotely allied to Fraxinus excelsior, and that the 
similarity of leaf-division is the only point of resemblance between 
them. These leaflets have toothed edges, are paler on the 
underside, and in a young condition the midrib and nerves 
are hairy. The creamy-white fragrant flowers are like little 
Hawthorn blossoms, though only half the size, and they appear 
in dense clusters (cymes) in May or June. The fruit are 
miniature apples, of the size of holly-berries, bright scarlet 
without and yellow within. They ripen in September, and are 
then a great attraction to thrushes, blackbirds, and their kind, 
who rapidly strip the tree of them. Though this at first sight 
may appear like frustrating the tree’s object in producing fruit, 
it is not really so, the attractive flesh being a mere bait to induce 
the birds to pass the seeds through their intestines, and thus 
