Buttonwood

“ The names buttonwood, buttonball, sycamore, and plane tree, as the same tree is called in different parts of the country, all apply to that fine American tree which sheds its bark as well as its leaves, leaving a ghostly monarch of tree life, which produces an enormous crop of buttonballs so well known to country boys and girls. ”

“ The strong-colored pine, the grass of trees, in the midst of which other trees are but as weeds or flowers,—a little exotic.
In the row of buttonwood trees on the banks of the Merrimack in Haverhill, I saw that several had been cut down, probably because of their unsightly appearance, they all suffering from the prevalent disease which has attacked the buttonwood of late years, and one large one still resting on its stump where it had fallen. ”

“ Most of these winged people seemed to have their domicile in a robust and healthy buttonwood-tree. It aspired upward, high above the roof of the houses, and spread a dense head of foliage half across the area. ”

“ Its extraordinary size renders it a conspicuous object in the forest, the more so because we usually find it associated with a variety of other trees of quite different aspect. Michaux, who has told us much about the forest flora of the eastern United States, could find no tree among the deciduous kinds, except the buttonwood, that would bear comparison with it in size, and he calls it “one of the most magnificent vegetables of [Pg 26] the temperate zone.” Its columnar trunk continues with unusual straightness and regularity nearly to the summit of the tree. ”

“ Not content with the forest itself, some families—I think they were ruby-crowned wrens and bluebirds—had made their nests in the creepers that matted the roof of the hut with green; and the great buttonwood was a positive metropolis, densely populated with titmice, warblers, and flycatchers of every description. If anybody lived in the stone hut, he would not want for company, what with the birds and the squirrels, and the woodchucks that came and went across the little green as unconcernedly as if it were their own front dooryard. ”

“ On a little island in the Ohio, fifteen miles above the mouth of the Muskingum, Michaux mentions a buttonwood which, at five feet above the ground, was forty feet and four inches in circumference, and consequently more than thirteen feet in diameter. The American species is generally thought, in Europe, to possess a richer foliage, and to afford a deeper shade than the Asiatic plane: its leaves are of a beautiful green, alternate, from five to fifteen inches broad, and formed with more open angles than those of the plane of the eastern continent. ”

“ THE BUTTONWOOD, THE TUPELO, AND THE MULBERRIES Families Platanaceæ, Cornaceæ, and Moracæ There is but one genus in the family Platanaceæ, and but one species in the genus found growing in the Northeastern States, the buttonwood, or sycamore. ”

“ No other tree in the American forest is as white. The nearest approach to it is the paper birch of the North, or the white birch of New England.
Notwithstanding the tree’s individuality, it has a good many names. It is generally known as sycamore throughout the states of the Union, but it is frequently called buttonwood in Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Nebraska, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Ontario ”

“ Late trees, like the ash, the white oak, the butternut, are still delaying to put forth their full foliage; veiled in tender, transparent green, or flushed with faint pink, they stand as if they were waiting for a set time; and the tiny round buds on the laurels, clustered in countless umbels of bright rose among the dark green, glistening leaves, are closed, hiding their perfect beauty until the day appointed. It is the season of the unfulfilled desire, the eager hope, the coming surprise. To-day the world is beautiful ”

“ The beautiful dog-wood's sweeping sprays and broad leaves, the maiden-hairs glossy wreathes and pearly buds, and the soft emerald moss, clothing the old fallen trees with its velvet tapestry, and hiding their decay with its cool rich beauty, while the sun light falls in golden tracery down the birch trees silver trunk, and the sparkling water flashes in the rays, or sings on its sweet melody unseen amid the luxuriant vegetation that conceals it. ”

“ Flanking the cottage, and near the kitchen garden, should be the fruit trees. The elm, maples, oak, and hickory, in all their varieties, black-walnut, butternut—the last all the better for its rich kernel—are every one appropriate for shade, as large trees. ”

“ You will see the little tender leaves, and often the blossoms, ready to break out in beauty when the [Pg 45] warm days come and flood the world with color. Men try to photograph nature, but no photograph could do justice to the clustered buds of the red maple or the downy buds of the slippery elm. The long green gray buds of the butternut, pistillate flowers in some, staminate flowers in others; the saffron buds of the butternut hickory; the ruby buds of the bass wood; the varnished bud scales of the sycamore and the poplar; the big gummy scales which protect the pussy catkins of the aspen ”

“ Other instances have also demonstrated to me this deleterious power of butternut trees over evergreens. For years, I watched a struggle between a small butternut tree and a large Mugho pine. Gradually the Mugho pine was succumbing. At last, when the pine had lost over half its branches on the side near the butternut, I decided to take an active part in the fight. I cut off the trunk of the butternut and pruned off all of its sprouts. The butternut surrendered and died. The Mugho pine took new heart, lived and again flourished. ”

“ They lie between the wedge-like blocks of wood, and as they have a lighter colour than the wood, they are evident on an oblique section [7] of any stem, and are called the silver grain. Their colour and number suffice to enable anyone to distinguish various kinds of wood, and greatly increase their beauty. They cannot, of course, exist before the wood is formed, and are therefore not met with in very young trees. They commence to exist with the first deposited layers of wood, and continue to grow outwardly, or nearest to the bark, so long as the wood continues to be deposited. ”

“ In the autumn the same surprise awaits us, when under a towering tree with yellow or russet foliage, the dogwood leaps up like a scarlet flame, against its dark background, holding straight out its platformed branches of red leaves, tipped with berries, like rubies, set on the upturned twigs.
Often the trees are stripped by birds before the berries are ripe. It is in woods where the trees are numerous that we shall find the fruit reaching its perfection of ripeness and colour. ”

“ The bark is light brown, the limbs grayish green, the twigs and leaves all ooze a clammy, waxy, aromatic sap, and are covered with fine hairs of velvety abundance.
Because it is low and rather wayward in growth, late to leaf out in spring, and early to shed its leaves in summer, the butternut is not a good street tree. It breaks easily in the wind, and crippled trees are more common than well-grown specimens. Insect and fungous enemies beset the species, and take advantage of breaks to invade the twigs through the chambered pith. ”

“ Now, however, with these unhappy butternuts in my eye, I began to look, not at the forest, but at the trees, and I found that the spared butternuts were in no sense exceptional. All the trees were deformed. They had grown as they could, not as their innate proclivities would have led them. A tree is no better than a man; it cannot be itself if it stands too much in a crowd.
I set it down, unwillingly, to the discredit of the Weymouth pine,—a symptom of some ancestral taint, perhaps,—that it suffers less than most trees from being thus encroached upon. ”

“ There is a difference in color between the outer and inner wood, the older wood becomes darker and is called the heart-wood, the outer is the sap-wood. In Birds-eye Maple, and some other woods, the abortive buds are seen. They are buried in the wood, and make the disturbance which produces the ornamental grain. In sections of Pine or Spruce, no ducts can be found. The wood consists entirely of elongated, thickened cells or fibres. In some of the trees the pith rays cannot be seen with the naked eye. ”

“ Not only good things can be said of the butternut tree and it would be wrong to avoid mentioning the deleterious effect that a butternut tree may have on other trees planted within the radius of its root system. I have had several experiences of this kind. One butternut tree on my farm, having a trunk six inches in diameter, killed every Mugho pine within the radius of its root system. ”

“ In most hard pines, like the long-leaf, the dark summer-wood appears as a distinct band, so that the yearly ring is composed of two sharply defined bands—an inner, the spring-wood, and an outer, the summer-wood. But in some cases, even in hard pines, and normally in the woods of white pines, the spring-wood passes gradually into the darker summer-wood, so that a darkly defined line occurs only where the spring-wood of one ring abuts against the summer-wood of its neighbor. ”

“ As we approached the neighbourhood of the White Earth River the aspect of the country became very striking: groves of spruce and pine crowned the ridges; rich, well-watered valleys lay between, deep in the long white grass of the autumn. The track wound in and out through groves and wooded declivities, and all nature looked bright and beautiful. Some of the ascents from the river bottoms were so steep that the united efforts of Battenotte and the Cree were powerless to induce Rouge or Noir, or even Jean l'Hcreux, to draw the cart to the summit. ”

“ Scattered through the wooded part, we placed signs for the principal trees, which signs we had invented ourselves from our observation of the character of the trees. The basswood, for example, we found most numerous in the lower parts, the butternut on the ridges. The ironwoods we noticed to be small but thrifty, shade not being so detrimental to these weeds of the forest as to many other species. ”

“ Wood is formed by the leaves [9] during the growing season, and passes down towards the root between the bark and the wood of the previous year; and, as the leaves more or less surround the whole stem, the new layer at length completes a zone, and perfectly encloses the wood of all former years. This is the explanation of the term exogenous, which is derived from two words signifying to grow, outwardly, for the stem increases in thickness by successive layers on the outer side of the previously formed wood. ”

“ Here and there an orange or reddish branch of maple leaves — a yellow-headed butternut, partly bare — a ruddying dogwood or dogwood's family connection, — a hickory shewing suspicions of tawny among its green. A fresh and rich wall-side of beauty the woody bank was. Elizabeth pulled slowly along, coasting the green wilderness, exulting in her freedom and escape from all possible forms of home annoyance and intrusion ”

“ In certain kinds of trees, for instance, species of pines and leaf-shedding oaks, after the wood has attained a certain age, it darkens in color, so that when a crosscut of a 100-year-old part of the trunk is taken, the darker older central wood contrasts as heartwood with the surrounding pale sapwood. ”

“ The most striking are not, perhaps, so much those in their prime, as the old ruined trees at Boldrewood, their bark furrowed with age, their timber quite decayed, now only braced together by the clamps of ivy to which they once gave support and strength. ”

“ Tests show that butternut wood, when thoroughly dry, is somewhat stiffer than black walnut; but it is light and weak. It is about two-thirds as heavy and two-thirds as strong as black walnut. The growing tree betrays the wood’s weakness. ”

“ By all but hilarious picnic parties, the solitude and seriousness of a wood is admitted; and this wood is one of the most unique I have ever visited. But, since then, it is no simple congregation of trees and rocks and mysterious paths,—no longer a sylvan asylum of perfect repose, inviting to reverie, to pleasure, or the interviews of love, sweetened by the security that shadows of leaves throw upon the blushing hieroglyphic of the cheek, or the deeper and softer and better understood language of the eyes. ”

“ The flowering dogwood is one of our smaller trees, but is exceptionally favored with all manner of beauty. Although it is very common in many of the States, and is not without its special uses, it occupies a subordinate position in the eyes of the forester, being often no more than a mere shrub in form. And yet, while some of the larger trees by their majestic presence lend grandeur to the forest, the dogwood brings to it a charm not easily forgotten. ”

“ A large tree, 50 to 120 feet high, with spreading branches and rough bark, darker in color than that of the butternut. The buds are gray instead of light brown like those of the butternut, and they are shorter. The twigs are smooth in winter, without hair, and the pith is chambered. Alternate, conspicuous leaf-scars. ”

“ The heartwood is distinctly red, and the sapwood white, this color combination making very striking effects when finished for cedar chests, closets, and interior woodwork. The wood is aromatic, soft, strong, and of even texture, and these qualities make it most desirable for lead pencils. It is very durable in contact with the soil, and on that account is in great demand for posts, poles and rustic work. ”

“ Maturity is the period when the sap-wood bears a small proportion, and the heart-wood has become uniform and compact. Sir John Evelyn writes, “It should be in the vigour and perfection of trees, that a felling should be celebrated.” It must be obvious, however, that it is a worse fault to fell wood before it has acquired thorough firmness, than when it is just in the wane, and its heart may exhibit but the first symptoms of decay; for in the former there is no perfect enduring timber to be got, while in the latter the greater part is in the zenith of its strength. ”