THE WESTERN PLANE.
When journeying through the older towns of New England, the melancholy forms of the ill-fated Planes attract our attention by their superior size, and still more by the marks of decay which are stamped upon all. This appearance is most remarkable in the early part of summer; for the trees are not dead, but some hidden malady caused the first crop of foliage to perish for several successive years. The trees, after putting forth a new crop of leaves from a second growth of buds, had not time to ripen their wood before the frosts of winter came and destroyed their recent branches. This disaster was repeated annually for ten or fifteen years, causing an accumulation of twigs at the extremities of the branches, making a broom-like appendage, and greatly deforming the spray of the tree.
The Western Plane, or Buttonwood, is a well-known tree by the waysides in New England and in the forests of the Middle and Western States. It belongs to a genus of which there are only three known species, and this genus constitutes a whole natural family. It may, therefore, be something more than a fanciful hypothesis, that all its noble kindred have perished and disappeared from the face of the earth, with other plants of a distant geological era, and that the three remaining species are destined to share the same fate, as signalized by the mysterious fatality which has attended both the Western and Oriental Plane. The Buttonwood is remarkable for its great height and magnitude, its large palmate leaves, and its globular fruit. The foliage is rather sparse, of a light, rusty green, and resembles in many points that of the common grapevine. Near the insertion of every leaf, and a little above it, is a stipule forming a plaited ruff that encircles the growing branch. These ruff-like appendages are among its generic marks of distinction.
“The Buttonwood,” says Michaux, “astonishes the eye by the size of its trunk and the amplitude of its head. But the white elm has a more majestic appearance, which is owing to its great elevation, to the disposition of its principal limbs, and the extreme elegance of its summit.” He considers the Buttonwood “the largest and loftiest tree of the United States.” He mentions one growing on a small island in the Ohio River, which at five feet from the ground measured forty feet and four inches in circumference; and he found another on the right bank of the Ohio that measured, at four feet from the ground, forty-seven feet in circumference, or nearly sixteen feet in diameter, and showed no marks of decay. He states that the Buttonwood is confined “to moist, wet grounds, where the soil is loose, deep, and fertile, and it is never found upon dry lands of irregular surface.”
It was probably the rapid growth and great size of the Buttonwood that caused our ancestors to plant it so extensively as a shade-tree. It rises also to a great height before it sends out any branches, thereby affording the inmates of houses the advantage of its shade, without intercepting their prospect, and without interfering with passing objects when planted by roadsides. But these noble trees, so conspicuous and so thrifty thirty years ago, have been slowly perishing from some mysterious cause which no theory can satisfactorily explain. It is generally supposed to be connected with a want of hardihood in the constitution of the tree, that renders it unable to endure all the vicissitudes of a Northern climate.
In England the same misfortune has fallen upon both the American and Oriental Plane. The late spring frosts are mentioned as the probable cause of the phenomenon, though there is but little resemblance between our climate and that of England. This tendency of the two species has prevented the general planting of them for shade and ornament. English writers give their preference to the American Plane, which they assert equals the other in size, and surpasses it in beauty of foliage. In England the American Plane has frequently attained a very great magnitude. Selby mentions one which, at forty years from the time it was planted, measured a hundred feet in height. The specific differences between the two Planetrees consist chiefly in the size and shape of their leaves, those of the Oriental Plane being smaller, and more deeply lobed or divided into segments. Both species have the same habit of annually shedding their bark, leaving the trunk with a smooth and whitish surface.