Bayberry

“ Here cedar, spice bush, bayberry and oleander crowd one another in a struggle for upward supremacy in which the oleanders win, their trunks, as large as a man’s thigh at the base, dividing into long, aspiring branches that are pinnacled with pointed leaves and sprays of fragrant bloom. ”

“ For all the Indian winter which some nights ago brought us a temperature of twenty degrees and left ice a half-inch thick on shallow pools many of the pasture folk hold their summer attire well. The wild apple trees have hardly made a change, holding plentiful leaves whose green is dulled by a little, and otherwise defies the season. The bayberry has leaves as glossy green and unmarked by any sign of approaching winter as it held in August, and though the taller wild cherry trees show autumnal tints the younger ones are still in fresh green. ”

“ Here I skirted a purple cranberry bog, having tufts of dwarfed, stubby bayberry bushes scattered over it, each with its winter crop of pale-blue, densely packed, tightly held berry clusters.
Not a flower; not a bird. Not so much as a crow or a robin in one of the stunted savin trees. I remembered winter days here, a dozen years ago, when the alder clumps were lively with tree sparrows, myrtle warblers, and goldfinches. ”

“ Everywhere on Long Island grew the stunted bushes, and everywhere they were valued. The town of Brookhaven, in 1687, forbade the gathering of the berries before September 15, under penalty of fifteen shillings' fine.
The pungent and unique scent of the bayberry, [41] equally strong in leaf and berry, is to me one of the elements of the purity and sweetness of the air of our New England coast fields in autumn. It grows everywhere, green and cheerful, in sun-withered shore pastures, in poor bits of earth on our rocky coast, where it has few fellow field-tenants to crowd the ground. ”

“ Fig. 448.—The bayberry leaf looks like this. The Leaves
are oblong and from two to three and a half inches in length (Fig. 448) . They usually have several teeth, or notches, near [330] the tip and are quite narrow at the base. Sometimes they are scattered and again in close bunches. The young leaves are a pale green frequently tinged with red; when matured they are a bright green, glossy, and of a leathery texture and they are very fragrant when crushed in the hands. The bark is brownish gray and the young stems light, or golden brown. ”

“ Under your foot the sweet-fern breathes a resin that is “like pious incense from a censer old,” the bayberry [Pg 34] sniffs of the wax of altar candles lighted at high mass in fairy land, and over by the brook the sweet-gale gives a finer fragrance even than these. There are but three members of this family,—the Myrica or Sweet-Gale family,—yet it is one that the pasture could least afford to miss. The fragrance of their spirits descends like a benediction on all about them, and I have a fancy that it is steadily influencing the lives of the other pasture folk. ”

“ I would like to exchange some of the first American pennies and halfpennies, for foreign coins.
Arthur C. Ketcham,
Care of William P. Ketcham. P. O. Box 10,
Yonkers, N. Y.
I will exchange bayberry-tallow, for peacock coal, or postage stamps from Cape of Good Hope or Barbadoes.
A. M. Forman,
116 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn, N. Y.
Bayberry-tallow is greenish in color, and is obtained by boiling the berries of the bayberry, or wax myrtle (Myrica cerifera) . This shrub, which is very aromatic, grows in great abundance all along the Atlantic coast. ”

“ Mother dips perhaps eight of these wicks at a time into a pot of bayberry wax, and after they have been so treated six or eight times, they are of sufficient size, for our vegetable tallow sticks in greater mass than does that which comes from an animal. ”

“ Inland the pale drifts whelm red cedar and bayberry outposts of the forests that are as flat-topped and wind-crippled as any shrubs that hold the outer defenses of zero-bitten, northern hilltops, moated, portcullised, with barbican and glacis in snow-mounded simulation of fortresses built by man. Surely nature had hung Christmas decorations on the forefront of St. Augustine in lavish profusion. I thought at one glance that Santa Claus himself had arrived on all this make-believe snow landscape and was resting his reindeer a moment behind the white drifts inland. ”

“ There is a peculiar joy in using the raw material fresh from Mother Nature’s hands and starting at the beginning of things—a joy unknown to those who work only with materials that are manufactured—and to get the most out of the work of making bayberry candles you must begin with the bayberries. ”

“ Melt the Bayberry Wax
slowly, never allowing it to get hot enough to smoke, and fill each mould up to the hat pin. In a short time the wax will settle and leave a hollow at the top of the candle. Fill up the hollow each time this occurs until the wax remains even across the top.
Fig. 461.—Run a hat pin through the wick. ”

“ CHAPTER XI IN WHICH CAPTAIN EBEN RECEIVES A CALLER
At the edge of the bluff, just where the pines and the bayberry bushes were thickest, where the narrow, crooked little footpath dipped over the rise and down to the pasture land and the salt meadow, John Ellery and Grace had halted in their walk. It was full tide and the miniature breakers plashed amid the seaweed on the beach. The mist was drifting in over the bay and the gulls were calling sleepily from their perch along the breakwater. A night hawk swooped and circled above the tall “feather grass” by the margin of the creek. ”

“ The eggs are white, speckled with brown and lavender.
18
THE TREE SWALLOW
Tree Swallows nest both in hollow trees and in nesting boxes that man has erected for their use. The upper parts of this bird are of a blue-green color while the under parts are of a pure white. When going to the south they collect in huge flocks and, after having flown high into the air, they begin their journey in the daytime. At Long Beach, Long Island, thousands of them have been observed feeding upon the bayberry bushes just before they started south. ”

“ The dancing firelight shone out on no busier scene than on the grand candle-dipping. It had taken weeks to prepare for this domestic industry, which was the great household event of the late autumn, as soap-making was of the spring. Tallow had been carefully saved from the domestic animals killed on the farm, the honeyed store of the patient bee had been robbed of wax to furnish materials, and there was still another source of supply.
The summer air of the coast of New England still is sweet with one of the freshest, [Pg 304] purest plant-perfumes in the world—the scent of bayberry. ”

“ Along the coast during the milder winters there are many flies rising from the seaweed in sheltered spots on mild days even in January, and there are eggs of plant-lice and some hibernating insects to be found on the trees, but the principal food of the Myrtle Warbler in New England during the inclement season is the bayberry. They can exist, however, on the berries of the Virginia juniper or red cedar and these seem to form their principal food when wintering in the interior ”

“ In every cranny of the loose stone walls abound the most delicate ferns. Every bank is bright with the wood-strawberry; the gooseberry grows in the hedge; the tall wild cherry, so frequent in Auvergne, drops its dark sweet fruit in your lap as you sit under the trees; but you must climb the woods to find the thick growing raspberry-canes, rose-red with fruit, and the myrtle-like bilberry close set with round blue berries. In autumn, on every moor and height, the heather comes out among the second blossom of the broom. ”

“ Barren as this country is, it abounds with a variety of unknown plants, and gave sufficient employment to Mr Forster and his party. The tree, which produceth the winter's bark; is found here in the woods, as is the holy- leaved barberry; and some other sorts, which I know not, but I believe are common in the straits of Magalhaens. We found plenty of a berry, which we called the cranberry, because they are nearly of the same colour, size, and shape. It grows on a bushy plant, has a bitterish taste, rather insipid; but may he eaten either raw or in tarts, and is used as food by the natives. ”

“ Like the English haw, its fruit requires two years to vegetate.
The barberry, so very abundant in our vicinity, is supposed to be an introduced shrub. It corresponds exactly with the Berberis vulgaris of Europe. It has only a limited locality on the seaboard of New England, and is riot found anywhere else on this continent. The vigor of its growth is especially note-worthy. It rises by the way-side; it grows in the chinks and crevices of the rocks; it spreads over neglected pastures, and looks around with a saucy confidence that seems to say, "All the world was made for barberry bushes." ”

“ Here is another elegant shrub that does its growing in the winter, and takes the long dry summer to ripen its fruit and be beautiful in,—the Berberis aquifolium, or holly-leaved barberry, commonly known as the Oregon grape. It is looking as fresh and piquant in March as though it had all of April and May behind it. All around us, on every hand, are plants and shrubs or trees growing. ”

“ BEAR-BERRIES.—A small trailing plant of great repute as a medicine, but of no use in any other respect.
106. BERBERIS vulgaris. BARBERRY.—This has long been cultivated in gardens for its fruit, which is a fine acid, and it is used as a conserve, and also for giving other sweeter fruits a flavour. The common wild kind has stones in the fruit, which renders it disagreeable to eat. There is a variety without stones called the Male Barberry, which is preferred on this account. ”

“ Then, in the night we wandered abroad finding lily roots, and the sweet ferns, and camas, and mushrooms, with another visit to the river in the early morning and perhaps a trout to wind up with before the sun drove us under cover again. And above all there was the berry-patch.
The mere smell of a berry-patch at the end of summer, when the sun has been beating down all day, so that the air is heavy with the scent of the cooking fruit, is delicious enough, but it is nothing to the sweetness of the berries themselves. ”

“ Soon we had a fistful of the delicate plants with their evergreen leaflets and long, golden thread-like roots, that mixed with the red and green of the partridge berry in a finger-bowl makes a cheerful little winter bouquet. And here with the gold thread, about the butt of the pine, was the partridge berry, too, the dainty vines strung with the beads which seemed to burn holes in the snow that had covered and banked the tiny fires. ”

“ Will you go to the Highlands the flocks for to see,
It is health to my jewel to breath this sweet air,
And to pull the blackberries in the forest so fair.
To the Highlands, my jewel, I will not go with thee,
For the road it is long and the hills they are high,
I love those vallies and sweet corn fields
More than all the blaeberries your wild mountains yield.
Our hills they are bonnie when the heather’s in bloom,
It would cheer a fine fancy in the month of june,
To pull the blaeberries and carry them home,
And set them on your table when December comes on. ”

“ The barberry fruit when fully ripe, especially if the frost has mellowed it, has a faint, pleasant, vinous smell which, with the crimson beauty of the clustered berries, might well tempt our grandmothers to make barberry sauce, however much the men folk might declare that it was but shoe-pegs and molasses. ”

“ By divesting it of its lower branches, and carefully removing all the suckers which it so liberally throws up, the barberry may be diverted from its natural bush-like growth, and made to assume a tree-like form; a change which improves not only its appearance but even its produce, since, when its strength is spent in sending up many shoots, the berries are comparatively small and few in number. Those of the ordinary barberry, of a long oval in shape, contain two or even sometimes three seeds ”

“ It is used in fireworks, for the green color it gives off in burning.
10. “Bayberries.” The plant, called also wax myrtle, is a low, crooked shrub found throughout the United States, especially near the sea coast. It grows to a height of from three to eight feet. The naked flowers appear in April and May, in clusters, of which from four to nine ripen into dry berries. Plantations of them have long been cultivated in Europe, and they have been raised in Algeria. For many years they have been an article of commerce. A bushel of the berries will yield from four to five pounds of wax. ”

“ We came out from the thickets on a high, brushy field, sheeted in fine rain that dimmed even the near wood edges. Blackberries grew thick, and we made our way carefully among the briers, following the narrow and devious cow-paths. Suddenly we both stopped. Just ahead of us, under a blackberry bush, was a huge snapping-turtle. He was standing on his hind legs, with his fore legs resting on a branch loaded with fruit, his narrow dark head stretched far up and out, while he quietly ate berry after berry. He was a handsome fellow, with his big black shell all brilliant in the wetness of the rain. ”

“ There were both red and white raspberries—beautiful fruit. Gooseberries of all kinds abounded, and currants, too; but the loveliest sight of all was a cherry tree, so covered with bright red fruit shining in the sun that it almost hid the leaves.
Here we spent the long hot afternoon, and when we saw our friends’ buggy slowly making its way down the wide river-bed, we hailed them and helped to gather as much fruit as they wanted; and then they departed, leaving the valley empty once more, except for ourselves. ”