Fallen tree

“ At this place there was an accumulation of bark-bits from the trunk, together with fallen twigs and needles from the dead tree-top. Thus a dead, inflammable tree in the woods is kindling which at any moment may become a torch and set fire to the surrounding green forest. Although fires frequently sweep through and destroy a green forest, they commonly have their start among dead trees or trash. ”

“ Nowhere could they see anything green, save a few scattered ferns. Everywhere gaunt, ragged, blackened trees thrust their sorrowful looking trunks aloft. The earth was littered with blackened débris--burned and partly charred limbs and fallen trees. ”

“ But likely enough there are some young and hardy plants caught beneath the tops or branches of the fallen trees within a foot or two of the ground, and not much hurt but just held down. Sometimes these little trees are pressed flat to the ground, and when they are, they usually die. But if they are only bent over a few inches, or a foot or two from the ground, they don't always die. ”

“ And farther on, where some wood has been swept down, some ten years gone, by the ax, the new growth, heavy with the luxuriant foliage of spring, covers wide spots of the slanting land; while some dead tree in the midst still stretches out its bare arms to the blast—a solitary mourner over the wreck of its forest brothers. ”

“ Full many a blast had spent, in vain,
Its force, for, ever like a rock,
It stood each persevering strain,
And long defied the tempest's shock.
But yesternight it crashing fell,
And now, this morn, I see it lie.
I knew the brave old tree so well,
A tear almost bedims my eye.
But brave old trees, like brave old men,
Must feel at last the fatal stroke,
That dashest them to earth again,
Tho' lofty pine, or mighty oak.
I'll miss, old tree, thy lofty stem
Outlin'd against the distant sky,
But 'tis no gain to fret for them—
For men, or trees, that fall and die. ”

“ As long as she could remember the dead tree had stood there, gaunt and ghostly, with the tangle of living trees behind it. They were clad with their shifting, whispering garment of leaves all the year round, and decked with flowers in the springtime. But the dead tree was naked. It might have been an avenging spirit of the wilderness, it stood with an air of such tragic desolation by the wayside. ”

“ Sometimes the air shook with the thunderous concussion of some great falling tree which, long since bled to death by parasitical plant growths, now at last toppled crashing back into the dank soil whence it had forced its way up into a place in the sun. ”

“ The blasts are quivering, wild winds strike it from all sides, the mid-winter horror of heavy air congeals with cold; and that you may marvel the more, the ground is strewn with the rest of the leaves everywhere flowing down, and, with its locks laid low, the tree is stripped of its grace ”

“ The "Fool i' the Forest" moralised not more quaintly over the wounded deer, than I could sometimes over those prostrate and mangled trees. I remember, in one of the clearings to-day, one particular tree which had been burned and blasted; only a blackened stump of mouldering bark—a mere shell remained; and from the centre of this, as from some hidden source of vitality, sprang up a young green shoot, tall and flourishing, and fresh and leafy. I looked and thought of hope! Why, indeed, should we ever despair? Can Heaven do for the blasted tree what it cannot do for the human heart? ”

“ The wood and foliage of coniferous trees like spruce, fir, and pine are so full of turpentine and resin that they burn like tinder. The heat is almost beyond the power of words to express. The fire does not seem to burn in a steady manner, the flames just breathe upon an immense tree and it becomes a blackened skeleton which will burn for hours. ”

“ No flowers could he see, but once or twice a wood anemone, and now and then a tiny grove of wood-sorrel.
Huge oak-trees now began to mingle and show themselves more and more frequently among the other timber; and gradually the forest became a great oak wood unintruded upon by any less noble tree. Vast trunks curving outwards to the roots, and expanding again at the branches, stood like enormous columns, striking out their groining boughs, with the dark vaulting of a crypt. ”

“ As a tree that is crumbling to dust under the gnarls of its bark seems, the moment ere it falls, proof against time and the tempest, so, within all decayed, stood that image of strength-so, air scarcely stirring, it fell. ”

“ The roaring anger of the wind and the sharp cry of anguish in the resisting branches soon pass and die away, and the tree, unclasped by the demon Storm, comes back to peace, only a few leaves lost, a few branches twisted. ”

“ Through some deep-cut oriel of the trees have I watched the sun begin to sink, each moment burning brighter, and then suddenly its great brand of fire would fall, reddening each tree trunk, and crimson billows of clouds come rolling eastward. ”

“ Leaving the hundred other mysteries which the trees of the tropics might unfold, let us consider for a moment the danger which the tall, successful tree invites,—the penalty which it pays for having surpassed all its other brethren. It preeminently attracts the bolts of Jove and the lesser trees see a blinding flash, hear a rending of heart wood, and when the storm has passed, the tree, before perfect in trunk, limbs, and foliage, is now but a heap of charred splinters. ”

“ It is rather a curious sight, because the hills are choked with timber that has never known an axe, and the storm has rent a way through this timber, so that a hundred thousand trees lie matted together in swathes; and since each tree lies where it falls, you may behold trunk and branch returning to the earth whence they sprang—exactly as the body of man returns—each limb making its own little grave, the grass climbing above the bark, till at last there remains only the outline of a tree upon the rank undergrowth. ”

“ One day the woodman comes with his axe, and the tree quivers in all its branches, under his sturdy blows. "I am being destroyed," it cries. So it seems, as the great tree crashes down to the ground. And the children are sad because they can play no more beneath the broad branches; the birds grieve because they can no more nest and sing amid the summer foliage. ”

“ That is the only thing in the world worth caring for,” the fir tree sighed.
In the autumn the woodcutters always came and cut down several of the tallest trees, and the young fir, which had now grown to a very good height, shuddered as the noble trees fell to the ground with a crash. After the branches were lopped off, the trunks looked so slender and bare that they could scarcely be recognized. Then the trees were placed, one upon another, on wagons, and dragged by horses out of the forest. ”

“ The shaft rose, without a curve or a branch, to the height of perhaps forty feet, where it had been abruptly shivered, probably in some storm. The tree was a chestnut, and the bark of a clear, unsullied gray; walking round it, we saw an opening near the ground, and to our surprise found the trunk hollow, and entirely charred within, black as a chimney, from the root to the point where it was broken off. It frequently happens that fire steals into the
heart of an old tree, in this way, by some opening near the roots, and burns away the inside, leaving merely a gray outer shell. ”

“ The continued rushing sound of the fire, and the sighing of the hot wind, sounds monotonously on the ear, or interrupted only by an occasional crash, as from time to time some mighty tree succumbs to its fate, and the forest trembles at the fall of its verdant patriarchs. ”

“ For many hundreds of miles we passed through the midst of these enduring spruce forests, the narrow track whose path has been roughly cleared by burning, extending with its thin thread of iron through their densest growth, lost through their trackless depths. On either side of the clearing though these, mighty forests, there is a belt of blackened stumps of grey, armless stems, where the fire has passed over them. Sometimes even there will be one green living tree left standing among the dead. ”

“ If the trees were sympathetic beings, not a poor crippled specimen of humanity would have their pity, but the gnarled and half-rotten giants of the forest, threatening to topple down with every breeze; whilst to our eyes the dying tree, covered with moss and ferns, and, maybe, clasped by climbing vines, is a picturesque and pleasing sight. ”

“ May we not suffer our impurities gradually to evaporate in sun and wind with the superfluous juices of the body, and so wither and dry up, at last, like a tree in the woods, which possesses a sort of embalmed life after death, and is as clean as the sapling or fresh buds of spring? Let us die by dry rot at least. The dead tree still stands erect without shame or offense amidst its green brethren, the most picturesque object in the wood. The painter puts it into the foreground of his picture, for in its death it is still remembered. ”

“ Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold—the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels ”

“ Beneath, are young trees, vigorous and full of promise, hoping, as it were, some day to push their highest branches above the general plane of tree tops and share the life-giving sun, though, during the struggle, many will surely weaken and die in the pale and inefficient light beneath the older trees. Then there are the larger trees in the full glory of their prime, with massive trunks, straight and tall, giving promise of many years of life yet to come; and finally, the giants of the forest, their branches torn off by storms or their trunks rent and scarred by lightning. ”

“ Impossible to draw subsistence from below, it stands up from a burned, naked, slender foundation. But another tree fell against it twenty-five or thirty feet above the ground, in some far past storm, and lost its top; this tree pours its sap into the veins of the other to support its noble top. The twin cripples have become a single healthy tree. ”

“ Finally, we notice another kind of grandeur when coniferous forests are visited by storms. First comes the moaning of the wind, mysterious and unsearchable, and different from the roar and rush that sweeps through the broadleaf woods. Then follows the uneasy communication from tree to tree, a trembling that spreads from section to section. When the rush of the wind finally strikes the tall, straight forms they do not sway their arms about as wildly as do the maples, elms, or tulip trees, but bend and sway throughout their length and rock majestically. ”

“ In one place, upon a precipitous height, stands an isolated fir. It is an old tree; its branches on one side hang over a deep precipice, in whose fissures, here and there, are tufts of ferns or juniper shrubs; and down below, a stream hurries along over rocks, forming cataracts and waterfalls. I don't know myself how it happened, but whenever some grief oppressed my mind, or some misfortune befell me, I always found my way to that spot. ”

“ These hollow trees, according to woodcraft, ought to come down by the axe without further loss of time. Yet it is fortunate that we are not all of us, even in this prosaic age, imbued with the stern utilitarian spirit; for a decaying tree is perhaps more interesting than one in full vigour of growth. ”

“ The great trees are girdled, men ascend their smooth clean trunks a hundred feet or more and daringly lop away their branches and stems that the life of the tree may be destroyed and the sunlight be admitted to the earth below. ”

“ The old tree with its bleached and skeleton arms has a fearful name, and stout of heart must the man be who would pass within sight of it when the sun is set behind the hill, and the trees cast their lengthened shadows on the grass. It is called the ‘haunted oak,’ the ‘spirit’s blasted tree,’ or the ‘hobgoblin’s hollow tree,’ and dismal is the tale to which the name refers. ”

“ There is a supple lift and ease in the twigs of a tree asleep in winter. Green living buds are everywhere huddling close in their drowsy defences. Even the Fruit Merchant could distinguish between the dreaming and the dead, or, at any rate, between the unripe and the rotten. ”

“ Broken limbs and dead bodies of great trees lie scattered through the forests; there are spots where the winds seem to have battled with the woods—at every step one treads on fallen trunks, stretched in giant length upon the earth, this still clad in its armor of bark, that bare and mouldering, stained by green mildew, one a crumbling mass of fragments, while others, again, lie shrouded in beautiful mosses, long green hillocks marking the grave of trees slowly turning to dust. ”

“ They are gone—all gone: a wind has blown upon the tree shattering down all its leaves, and showing it to us quite bare, and shaken from its very root; for so great has been the violence of the blast, that it has given a shock to all these fibres of the tree and threatens to tear it up from the roots. ”

“ Encompassing vines and creepers, colossal in strength and overwhelming in weight, which have strained the tree to breaking point, ease their burden down, muffling its descent, though now and again the primal rupture of trunk or branch rings out a sharp protest, and following the fall is silence—that varying, elusive sensation not to he expressed by the absence of actual noise. ”

“ But the trees which remain, whether in forest or in homestead, are sadly mangled. The winters are sharp in these high uplands, and firing scarce; and the country method of obtaining it is to send a woman up a tree, where she hacks off, with feeble arms and feeble tools, boughs halfway out from the stem, disfiguring, and in time destroying by letting the wet enter, splendid southern oaks, chestnuts, and walnuts. ”