Pleasant Talk About Fruits, Flowers and Farming

by Henry Ward Beecher

XXII.

PLANT TREES!

April is the time for planting trees. Too much cannot be said to induce people to fill their villages, and the great roads between village and village, with fine shade trees, and private grounds with the choicer kinds. To write a good hymn or plant a good tree makes one a benefactor to his generation.

It is hardly to be expected that the old men, hard-working, and with enough to do at any rate, will trouble themselves to plant trees along public roads. But we may hope for such service from enterprising young men, and even more from the public spirit of young women. Several instances have come to our knowledge in which women have formed associations for beautifying towns and villages by tree-planting, and in a few years have transformed the places. Nor is it unworthy of mention that this has been done by the influence of articles in the New York Ledger. A tree-planting week might be made a festival week; or persons might agree to secure a given number during the season.

And here it may be well to say, that, although spring and fall are the best seasons for transplanting, yet trees may be moved in any month in the year,—in the middle of August, if need be. A long row of maples, in Peekskill, were moved—in consequence of grading and fence-building—during the month of July, and only two of them experienced any permanent injury.

But it should be borne in mind that only small trees should be removed in hot months, and after the foliage is expanded, unless one has a mind to go to great expense.

But trees six or eight feet high, if taken with ample roots, and especially if moved in damp or wet weather, may be safely transplanted in midsummer. Of course, it will require twice the care and labor which the same tree would need in spring, to produce the same result.

The three or four trees usually planted in grounds are maples, elms, horse-chestnuts, and locusts. These are very well. But there are many kinds of maple seldom seen that deserve a place; such as the English field maple (Acer compestre), and notably the American red maple, called swamp maple (Acer rubrum), the former for its finely cut leaves, and the latter for early blossoms and for the exquisite scarlet autumn hues of its leaves.

The cut-leaf or fern-leaf white birch is now common in nurseries. It grows rapidly, is extremely graceful, has leaves delicate as a fern, and in winter throws against the sky a tracery of twigs which is beautiful to look upon. It ought to be in every small collection. The liquidomen has a very beautiful leaf, star-like, and changes in autumn to a purplish bronze, quite distinct from all other leaves. If one can get the tupelo, which abounds in New England, and may be found in some nurseries, he will secure a tree much neglected, but which ought to be universally diffused.

Few people know how beautiful is the sassafras-tree, when well grown. In the woods it is hardly more than a shrub, or scrawny tree; but when planted young in an open space, and in good soil, it has a peculiar beauty of its own which is not repeated in any other tree.