The Romance of Plant Life

strength of trees-Tall trees and long seaweeds-Eucalyptus, big trees-Age of trees-Venerable sequoias, oaks, chestnuts, and olives-Baobab and Dragontree-Rabbits as woodcutters-Fire as

ng pines and

with beards that rest on

sworth's well-known lines. (If the animal had, however, obeyed the poet's wishes and eaten "mellow cowslips," it would probably have b

and almost inaccessible mountain valleys; even a tourist travelling by train cannot but be impressed by their sombre, g

Pacific

t Doug

rmous height in British Columbia. It is

thirty miles through one unending black forest of Coniferous trees; there are no towns, scarcely a village or a fo

nches of Pines and Spruces, and their sombre, dark g

ermined Northern races whose life is one long, continuous strain of i

resin and turpentine that no animal could possibly injure them. How thorough is the protection thus afforded to the young seeds, can only be understood if one takes a one-year-old unopened cone of the Scotch Fir and tries to

ne grows so that the scales are separated, and the see

t beautiful and exq

e screw or propeller of a steamer. This wing or screw is intended to give the seed as long a flight in the air as possible before it reaches the ground. If you watch them falling from the tree, or throw one up into the air and observe it at

e water; in the case of the pineseed, the pressure of the air on the flying wings makes the seed twirl or turn round and rou

d leaves break out of the tough seed coat, and the seedling is now a small tree two inches high. It may have to grow up through grass or bramble, or through bracken, which last is perhaps still more dangerous and difficult. It will probably be placed in a wood or plantation where hundreds of thousands of its cousins are all competing together. "In this case, the struggle for life is intense: each tree seeking for sunlight tries to push

the trees in such forests have "extra" dangers and difficulties to fight against. Even scientific foresters admit that they are very igno

ake a most perfect though complicated absorbing system. With his large hand the man grasps a tree and lifts it to a shallow groove which he has cut in the soil. Then his very large, heavy-nailed boot comes hard down on the tender root-system. The

f its leading shoots. Cattle will rub against its bark, and the roedeer, a very beautiful creature, and yet a de

Take a knife and cut into the bark of a pine tree, and immediately a drop of resin collects a

s in the wood of tree-trunks. In those regions the entire country is in the winter covered with snow and ice for many months. Insects must find it difficult to li

f a tree and deposits her eggs with a store of food at the end of the burrow. A drop of resin or turpentine, which would clog her jaws, makes this a difficult task, but, as we find i

nks. Some are caterpillars of moths, such as the well-known Goat moth; others are beetles, such as one which burrows between the bark and the wood of apple trees. The mother beetle lays a series of eggs on each side of her own track. Each egg produces a grub which eats its way sideways aw

stance, or rather series of substances. It is valuable because

It would be difficult to find any obvious connexion between music and the Giant Sawfly. Yet the rosin used by Paganini and Kubelik has probably been developed in Conifers to keep away sawflies and other enemies. This very district, the Landes in France, was once pract

empted the solution of the problem satisfactorily solved by trees. A factory chimney only 51 feet in height will have a diameter at the base of at least three feet. This means that the height is about seventeen times its diameter. But the Ryeplant, with a diameter at base of 3 millimetres, may be 1500 mm. high! That is, the height is five hundred times its diameter, and the Ryeplant has leaves and grain to support as well as its own stem! In Pine forests on exposed

ar was of "toughest ash grown on a windy site" (Keats). The prosaic chemical analyses of German botanists have, in fact, confirmed the theory there su

storms, the height to which some trees grow and the age to

ertain Eucalyptus of Australia, which have ob

is not more than two inches.[12] There are also certain Seaweeds in the Southern Ocean, off the coast of Chile, which attain a prodigious length of 600 feet (Macrocystis pyrifer

more easily realized. Thus a coach with four horses and covered by passengers is (or used to be) driven through a gateway made in one of them. The trunk of another has been cut off some feet from the ground, and a dancing-saloon has been made on the stump. It is at least doubtful if dancing would be very agreeable upon such a cross-grained sort of floor! A complete section of one of them was carried across the United States to make a

c provinces of Russia, was supposed to be about 1000 years old. Other millennial trees are or were another oak and two chestnuts: the oak grew in the Ardennes, the chestnuts still flourish, one at Sancerre (France), and the o

to visited the Cape Verde islands in 1749 and found inscriptions made by English travellers on the trunk 300 years before his time. F

ee in the C

out eight hun

e Dragon tree of Orotava

. (The wood was then made into walking-sticks and snuffboxes.) The age has been estimated at 10,000 years, or by other authorities at 8000 years only. The "dragon's blo

which guarded the golden fruit in the island of the Hesperides was noth

s, oaks, and larches, which are mature in a few hundred years. In a thousand years, ten generations of larch or pine can be produced, and, as each is probably better than its predecessor, a distinct improvem

erils to which trees are exposed, the existence of

ark,[14] I visited the scene of destruction and discovered what had apparent

fungus spores had entered at the injured places, and part of the roots had become decayed and rotten. When the gale began to sway them backwards and forwards and a se

the daily life of mankind is a most rom

in the darkness all round them the firelight is reflected from eyes of wolves, bears, and even more terrible and dangerous brutes which have now happily vanished from the world. For protection at night fire was an absolute necessity. Even at that long-distant period, therefore, man had commenced to attack the forest. Unless one has had to tend a wood fire for twelve hour

was a sacred duty to watch this fire, and the woman (usually old) who was entrusted with the task was very probably put to

ul account of how man first thought of using a floating log.[16] They hollowed out the log and "dug out" the canoe, by first lighting a fire on it and then scraping away the cinders; then the sides

hern United States; those Indians who discovered that the light, waterproof cork-bark could be fashioned into a canoe

neighbours of his own or other tribes were more ferocious and more dangerous than wild beasts. Some neolithic genius imagined an artificial island made of logs in the mids

efence. The wood of some of the piles supporting the great villages in Switzerland seems to be still sound, though

ing that he used, bows and arrows, she

e stored. In seasons of famine, they used even to e

). The growing trees and the branches of older ones are nibbled away whilst they are young and tender. The days of the forest were nearly over when cultivation commenced. Dr. Henry describes the process of "nomadic" culture in China as follows: "They burn down

e Hozu Rapi

spite of their fragile nature the lumbermen are so fearless and agil

stated by black cattle, goats, and other animals, and it was regularly

ck estate in Ireland. The Silva Caledonica of the Romans is said to exist in Scotland at the Blackwood of Rothiemurchus, at Achnacarry, and in a few othe

iated with that genial bandit Robin Hood. One huge oak (called the Major) has or used to have a keeper always on guard and paid by Lord

so far as the New Forest is concerned, it seems that this was formed either by Can

unty south of these.[19] The deer forests and grouse moors, now desolate, whaup-haunted muir-land and peat mosses, were flourishing woods of mag

ing was apparently the first to artificially protect the woods as a hunting preserve. He was followed by William the Conquer

f their right hands, and we do not cut off the forepaws

, but when, as is the case in England, the comfort of pheasants is thought of more impo

owever, too important a matter to