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LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 
fourteen persons.* On the margins of the great western 
rivers it sometimes rises up seventy feet, and then expands 
into a fine, lofty head, surpassing in grandeur ail its 
neighbors of the forest. The large branches of the plane 
shoot out in a horizontal direction ; the trunk generally 
ascending in a regular, stately, and uninterrupted manner 
The blossoms are small greenish balls appearing in spring, 
and the fertile ones grow to an inch in diameter, assuming 
a deep brownish color, and hang upon the tree during the 
whole winter. A striking and peculiar characteristic of 
the plane, is its property of throwing off or shedding 
continually the other coating of bark here and there in 
patches. Professor Lindley ( Introduction to the Natural 
System, 2d ed. 187) says this is owing to its deficiency 
in the expansive power of the fibre common to the bark 
of other trees, or, in other words, to the rigidity of its 
tissue : being therefore incapable of stretching with the 
growth of the tree, it bursts open on different parts of the 
trunk, and is cast off. This gives the trunk quite a lively 
and picturesque look, extending more or less even to the 
extremity of the branches ; and makes this tree quite 
conspicuous in winter. Bryant, in his address to Green 
River, says : 
“ Clear are the depths where its eddies play. 
And dimples deepen and whirl away, 
And the plane tree’s speckled arms o’ershoot 
The swifter current that mines its root.” 
The great merit of the plane, or buttonwood, is its 
* A buttonwood on the Montezuma estate, Jefferson, Cayuga Co., N. Y., 
is forty-seven and a half feet in circumference ; and the diameter of the 
hollow two feet from the ground, is fifteen feet. (IV. Y. Med. Repository , 
IV. 427 .; 
