1 14 WAYSIDE AND WOODLAND TREES. 
usually sweet-scented, occasionally give forth a very unpleasant 
odour. The familiar fruits, too, instead of their usual crimson, 
are yellow occasionally, as in the Holly. In favourable years 
these are so plentiful that they quite kill the effect of the 
dark-green leaves, and when such a tree is seen in the 
October sunshine, it appears to be glowing with fire to its 
centre. Beneath the ripe mealy flesh there is a hard bony 
core, in whose cells the seeds are protected from digestion 
when the fruit has been swallowed by a bird. 
The Hawthorn is said to live from a century to two cen- 
turies, growing very slowly after it has reached a height of 
about fifteen feet. Its wood is both hard and tough, and 
the name of the genus has reference to that fact, being 
derived from the Greek kratos, strength. 
The Strawberry-tree {Arbutus unedo). 
Not in the woods or by waysides in Great Britain will the 
Strawberry-tree be found, though it may be seen in parks 
and gardens ; but in parts of the Emerald Isle it is native. 
Killarney, Muckross, and Bantry are given by Hooker as its 
Irish stations, but we have also found it in the woods at 
Woodstock, Co. Kilkenny, in a situation where it seemed 
unlikely such a tree would be planted. It does not attain a 
large size — ordinarily about ten or twelve feet — though in 
cultivation it may attain to twenty or even thirty feet. The 
bark is rough and scaly, tinged with red, and twisted. The 
leathery leaves are more or less oval, two or three inches 
long, with toothed edges and hairy stalks. Although arranged 
alternately on the shoots, they present the appearance at a 
little distance of being clustered, rosette fashion, at the tips 
of the twigs. The creamy-white flowers are clustered in 
drooping racemes at the ends of the twigs, and are about 
one-third of an inch across, bell-shaped. When the seed-eggs 
