DECIDUOUS TREES. 
413 
which carries a sweet smile in the sun that must be observed to be 
appreciated. It is especially radiant when the setting sun gilds 
its top. All trees are in fact most beautiful in such a light, but 
the crown of the sassafras is pre-eminently so. 
The tree requires a deep, warm, rich soil, and will do itself no 
credit in any other. Woodsmen know that soil to be excellent where 
groves of sassafras abound. In the woods it sometimes reaches an 
altitude of fifty feet, but in open ground forty feet height and 
breadth, and two feet diameter of trunk, is about its greatest size. 
The annual growth after it reaches a height of ten feet is about 
one foot a year. Its earlier growth is rapid. Cattle and hogs are 
exceedingly fond of rubbing against the fragrant bark, and young 
trees must be protected from possible danger from this cause 
more carefully, and for a longer time than most trees. 
The Benzoin Laurel or Benjamin Tree. Laurus benzoin. 
—A deciduous shrub or tree, native of Virginia. Leaves from four 
to six inches long, like the unlobed leaves of the sassafras. It 
grows in an exposed location on the brow of a hill in the New 
York Central Park, and is there ten feet high, with abundant glossy 
foliage. It will become a tree from fifteen to twenty feet high. 
One of the finest large shrubs in the Park. 
Loudon says of it: “In British gardens it forms rather a 
tender peat-earth shrub, handsome from its large leaves, but seldom 
thriving, except where the soil is kept moist, and the situation 
sheltered.” It may not be safe to recommend it for trial in the 
northern States to any but very careful cultivators, notwithstanding 
its success in the Central Park. 
THE PAULOWNIA. Paulownia imperialis. 
A Japanese tree introduced into France in 1837, and into this 
country about ten years later. The enormous size of its leaves, 
which sometimes measure nearly two feet in length and eighteen 
inches in diameter, and its rank growth, occasionally making canes 
from eight to twelve feet long in a single season, were qualities so 
