Plantain tree

“ Soon after leaving the village we entered a dense forest, the growth of which was wonderfully beautiful. Tall pandanus trees, some of them supported by a hundred and more long stilted roots, which rose many feet above our heads, reared their crowns of ribbon-like leaves above even some of the giants of the forest. Palms of all shapes and sizes, dwarfed, tall, slender and thick, surrounded us on every side, and at least three different species of climbing palms scrambled over the tallest trees. The tree trunks were hidden by climbing ferns and by a white variegated fleshy-leafed pothos. ”

“ However, the growing of osage orange timber for posts is on the increase. Systematically maintained, plantations pay well. The wood is exceptionally durable in soil. Good prices are paid for posts in local markets. Twenty-five posts can be grown to the rod in rows of a plantation; they grow rapidly and send up new shoots from the roots.
The brilliant, leathery leaves and conspicuous green fruits make this native bow-wood a very striking lawn tree. It holds its foliage well into the autumn and turns at length into a mass of gold. ”

“ Many millions of trees shade the Valley. Belle of them all is the Royal Poinciana, a gorgeous, flowering tree with deep red blossoms. More than fifteen varieties of palm trees thrive here, ranging from the three or four foot ornamental palmetto to the stately date and the majestic one hundred foot tall Royal Palms. To plant a palm is to insure a share in eternity, since palms are said to live forever. ”

“ It has only a perennial root which, once planted, needs hardly any care, and yet produces the most abundant crop of any known tropical plant. On the average, a plantain annually bears nearly twenty kilogrammes, and sometimes a hundredweight, of most nutritious fruit, which at the same time possesses a delicious flavor. The stem then dies and the root gives out new shoots. No doubt the American race, closely allied as it is with the Mongolian, carried with it, when it migrated to America, the plantain as a cultivated plant from Asia where it grew wild. ”

“ The modern Pandanus or screw-pine of the tropical regions, which is not a pine, however, but a humble relation of the palms, is a stiffly branching tree, of a candelabra-like form, and with tufts of long leaves on its branches, and nuts or great hard berries for fruit, borne sometimes in large masses, and so protected as to admit of their drifting uninjured on the sea. The stems are supported by masses of aërial roots like those which strengthen the stems of tree-ferns. ”

“ The wood of the pitch-pine is of comparatively little value for the joiner, but it is useful for very many purposes. Its rapidity of growth in even poor soils, its hardihood, and its abundant yield of resinous products, entitle it to much more consideration, as a plantation tree, than it has hitherto received in Europe or America. ”

“ The wood takes a good polish and is used for making furniture, ox yokes, and for the interior finish of houses.
The generic name, Platanus, comes from the Greek word for broad, and has reference to the wide-spreading leaves and branches of the tree. The specific name, occidentalis, was given to the sycamore as distinctive from Platanus orientalis, the oriental plane tree of Europe. The oriental plane is planted occasionally in this country, and may be distinguished from our native species by its broader head and by the fruit, which frequently hangs in clusters instead of singly on the tree. ”

“ The plantain jets upwards with a copious stem, and the fountain returns in broad rippled pennants, falling outwardly, refined to points, when the impulse is lost. A world could not be old on which such a plant grows. It is sure evidence of earth’s vitality. To look at it you would not think that growing is a long process, a matter of months and natural difficulties. The plantain is an instant and joyous answer to the sun. The midribs of the leaves, powerful but resilient, held aloft in generous arches the broad planes of translucent green substance. ”

“ After determining the sexes the cutting out of the surplus male trees should take place. Those which are to remain should be left as much on the windward side of the plantation as possible, so that the pollen may be carried by the wind to the pistils of the female trees. In this respect the parks are similar to our apple orchards. If a surplus number of male trees be left growing, they are topped, or headed down and grafted with scions from the female tree. ”

“ It has the leaf of an elm, and it resembles that tree in bark, and somewhat in general form. The layman detects the first important difference when he examines the seeds. Those of the elms have wings, but the planertree’s are without those appendages, and they would be useless if it had them, unless they were as large as the parachute of the basswood seed. The planertree bears a sort of nut, a third of an inch long, and too heavy to be transported far on the ordinary membranous wings of tree seeds. Water is doubtless the principal agent in carrying the seeds from place to place. ”

“ Up from the sea the scrub pine climbs, ascending the Coast Ranges and western slopes of the Cascade Mountains, changing its habit to a tree twenty to thirty feet tall with thick branches and dark red-brown bark, checked into oblong plates. Gummy exudations of this pitch pine make it peculiarly liable to running fires. Thousands of acres are destroyed every summer, but they seize the land again and soon cover it with the young growth. This happens because the burned trees drop their cones, which open and set free the seeds which have never lost their vitality. ”

“ Under all conditions, sheltered or storm-beaten, well-fed or ill-fed, this tree is singularly graceful in habit. Even at its highest limit upon exposed ridge-tops, though compelled to crouch in dense thickets, huddled close together, as if for mutual protection, it still manages to throw out its sprays in irrepressible loveliness; while on well-ground moraine soil it develops a perfectly tropical luxuriance of foliage and fruit, and is the very loveliest tree in the forest ”

“ Look at the plantain when its flowering time comes; each particular plant growing with its leaves so close down on the surface as to be safe from the busy, searching mouths, then all at once throwing up tall, straight stems to flower and ripen its seeds quickly. ”

“ All vegetation here is not merely luxuriant, it is composite. There are no solitary trees, no hermits, in the vegetable world. Every trunk is but a trellis for vines, some of them, like the matapalo, strangling the fostering tree, or a nest for plants that do not seem able to get up in the forest on their own stems. If I find a branch in blossom, I must make sure that it is of the tree itself, and not part of some mistletoe-like hanger-on. I have seen single trees bearing on their trunk and branches enough orchids and other choice plants to stock a hothouse. ”

“ In the Royal Gardens, Kew, the best of plants may be seen and, to a considerable degree, the best ways of using them in gardens.
GROUPING OF SHRUB AND DAFFODIL.
The one-thing-at-a-time planting is always a safe guide, but as the planter gains a firmer grasp of his subject, so he may exercise more freedom in its application. Nearly every garden, shrubbery, and ornamental tree plantation is spoilt or greatly marred by too great a mixture of incongruous growths. Nothing wants more careful consideration. ”

“ The flat fragrant plumes are exceedingly beautiful: no waving fern-frond is finer in form and texture. In its prime the whole tree is thatched with them, but if you would see the libocedrus in all its glory you must go to the woods in midwinter when it is laden with myriads of yellow flowers about the size of wheat grains, forming a noble illustration of Nature’s immortal virility and vigor. The mature cones, about three-fourths of an inch long, born on the ends of the plumy branchlets, serve to enrich still more the surpassing beauty of this winter-blooming tree-goldenrod. ”

“ The straight rows in the plantation, with every tree at an equal distance from its neighbours, and its lower branches dead, may be very pretty from the timber-merchant's point of view, but one likes to think of the tree as a living thing of beauty rather than as a detail in a factory where scaffold-poles and telegraph-posts are being grown to regulation size and shape. ”

“ As a picturesque tree, for park and ornamental plantation, it is among the best of the conifers, its colour and form contrasting yet harmonizing with the olive green and rounded outline of oaks and beeches, or with the red trunk and glaucous foliage of the pine. When young its spreading boughs form good cover for game. The fresh branches, with their thick mat of foliage, are useful to the gardener for sheltering wall-fruit in the spring. In a good soil and position the tree sometimes attains an enormous size: one in Studley Park, Yorkshire, attained nearly 140 ft. ”

“ THE PALMS Lumbermen in this country could get along very well without the palms, as they are little used for ordinary lumber. Their wood does not grow in concentric rings, like that of the ordinary tree. The stems are usually single, cylindrical, and unbranched. The fruit is berry-like, and is usually one seeded, though sometimes there are two or three. When a seed sprouts, it puts out at first a single leaf, like a grain of corn. About 130 genera of palms are recognized in the world, most of them in the tropics, but several in the United States are of tree size. ”

“ But the plantain does not grow wild, though in tropical America it finds the same conditions of vegetation as in its native country, and hence thrives there. The wild plantain in India has small stony seeds, and is distributed widely by monkeys, bats, and insects. which like the fruit but cannot destroy the seeds. In Asia wild, seed-bearing plantains are usually found growing in groups. In America, which has a much greater area of wilderness, the plantain must have spread far and wide, seeing that it has persisted in the wild state in the far more densely-inhabited East Indies. ”

“ A plantation once started goes "on for ever," with scarcely any care or attention from the proprietor, as the palm propagates itself by numerous off-shots, which take the place of the parent tree when it is cut down for the purpose of being converted into food, or when it dies, which, unlike most other palms, it does after it has once flowered and seeded, i.e., after it has attained the age of ten or fifteen years. ”

“ In the south of Europe it is grown in plantations by itself, like willows and fruit trees; also in hedge-rows, and as hedges, as far north as Frankfort-on-the-Oder. When allowed to arrive at maturity, this tree is not less beautiful than the fairest elm, often reaching thirty or forty feet in height. When cultivated to furnish food for the silk-worms, the trees are never allowed to grow higher than three or four feet being cut down to the ground every year in the same manner as a raspberry plantation. In France and Italy the leaves are gathered only once a-year ”

“ The men ascend the trees to some ten or twelve feet of height, just where the stem narrows, supporting themselves by a flexible vine branch twisted hoop-fashion round the tree and their waist. They then chop away at the timber, and slip nimbly to the ground just as the upper part of the tree is falling. The trunks and branches are then gathered together until the dry season is just over, when the whole mass is lighted, and on the ground thus cleared of trees and brushwood the women plant their manioc, plantains, and maize. ”

“ All the acts for encouraging plantations of forest-trees are, I am told, extremely defective; which, with great submission, must have been owing to a defect of skill in the contrivers of them. In this climate, by the continual blowing of the west-south-west wind, hardly any tree of [Pg 212] value will come to perfection that is not planted in groves, except very rarely, and where there is much land-shelter. I have not, indeed, read all the acts; but, from inquiry, I cannot learn that the planting in groves is enjoined. ”

“ Its rusty summer foliage turns yellow in autumn, and as the leaves begin to fall, the tree bursts into delicately-scented golden flowers, the most visible part of each consisting of four petals which float out like streamers. At the same time that flowers are scenting the air, the seeds are discharging. A full year is required to ripen them; and when dry, cold weather comes, the contraction of their envelopes shoots them with sufficient force to send them fifteen or twenty feet. They depend on neither wings, birds, nor squirrels to scatter them. ”

“ Yet the bruised leaves still have some reputation as a styptic and healing plaster among country herbalists, and perhaps the alleged virtues are not altogether fanciful.
As a garden plant the Plantain can only be regarded as a weed and nuisance, especially on lawns, where it is very difficult to destroy them. ”

“ The side branches, which are angular or curved, yield the most fruit. For this reason, the limbs should be trained in curves, and perpendicular twigs should be cut off, if there be need of pruning. The last of June is the time for this. Grass should never be allowed to grow within four feet of a large tree, and the soil should be kept loose, to admit air to the roots. Trees in orchards should be twenty-five feet apart. The soil under the top soil, has much to do with the health of trees. If it be what is called hard-pan, the trees will deteriorate. ”