Where the Sheep Have Been
II
FOREST ADORNMENT
Though there can be no forest without trees, it may be asserted with equal truth that trees alone would make but an incomplete forest.[5] Under the old trees we find the young saplings that are in future years to replace them and in their turn are to form a new canopy of shade. In their company is a vast variety of shrubs, ferns, and delicate grasses and flowers that decorate the forest floor. Vines and creepers gather about the old trees and clamber up their furrowed trunks. In autumn the ground is strewed with fallen leaves, motionless or hurrying along before the wind. These gather into deep beds, soft to the tread, and at last molder away in the moist, rich earth. In the needle-bearing forests of the mountains brilliant green mosses replace the shrubs and flowers and deck the bare brown earth.
There are lifeless sources of beauty in the woods, too, that are not easy to pass by unnoticed: rocks with interesting forms and surfaces; forms that are lifeless, yet take on distinct expression by their different modes of cleavage, and surfaces that drape themselves in the choicest paraphernalia of drooping moss and rare lichen; prattling mountain streams; cascades; and glassy pools. These are “inanimate” things with a kind of life in them, after all.
Courtesy of the Bureau of Forestry
A Passageway through Granite Rocks
Lastly, there are the true owners of the forest: the bird that hovers round its borders; the free, chattering squirrel; the casual butterfly that leads us to the flowers; and the large game that inhabits the hidden recesses and adds an element of wildness and strange attraction to these quiet haunts.
All this wealth of detail gives life to the forest. The shrubs, above the rest, should here interest us somewhat more minutely. They are often the most conspicuous objects in the embellishment of the forest; and since our investigation was to be guided to some extent by considerations of usefulness, it ought to be added that shrubs not infrequently exercise a beneficial influence on the vigor and well-being of the trees themselves. Trees, shrubs, and certain of the smaller plants—so long as their root systems are not too dense and intricate—are of value on account of their ameliorative effects on temperature and moisture. This is more important in this country, so extreme in its climatic variations, than in northern Europe. In the dry and parching days of summer the shrubbery of the woods, by its shade, helps to keep the earth cool and moist. This mantle of the earth, moreover, conducts the rain more gradually to the soil, exercising an efficient economy. In the fall and winter the shrubs, which are densest near the forest border, help to break the force of the sweeping winds which might otherwise carry away the fallen leaves, so useful in their turn because they are conservators and regulators of moisture and contain valuable chemical constituents which they return to the soil.