Gardens in the Tree Tops 
sugar districts in our country. Somerset farmers will 
tell you that a sugar tree is worth as much as a cow. 
While we are looking into the treetops the buttonwoods 
are worth attention now. Like thrifty farmers, who do 
not part with the whole of a crop until another is in sight, 
these trees have been holding fast to some of their brown 
seed-balls, apparently until certain that this year’s weather 
conditions would be right for ripening a fresh lot. They 
are dropping the last of their seeds now, and if we look 
sharply among the new leaves we shall see, dangling from 
their midst, hundreds of queer little fat balls on long 
stems. These are the great tree’s modest flowers, which 
are the least sensational of blossoms, each hardly as big 
as a shoe peg, and scores of them packed into those spheri¬ 
cal heads of Doric simplicity of form. Some of the balls 
are dark red, and they are male blossoms, which, their 
pollen spent, disappear from view as a man who has run 
through his money drops out of sight of his quondam com¬ 
panions. Others of the balls are green, with a rosy 
tinge to their greenness; these are the female flowers, 
destined to become seed-bearers, and so, if all go well, to 
persist till next year. In some parts of our country this 
tree is called the sycamore, but it is a misnomer—the 
real sycamore, that of the Syrian lowlands and of the 
Bible, being a very much smaller and different tree, related 
to the fig and the mulberry. 
May 12.—As the tulips on the lawns drop their petals 
and settle down to the homely condition of seed bearing 
nature prepares a second tulip show among the treetops. 
The blossoms of the tulip poplar—one of the cleanest, 
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