Getting Acquainted with the Trees

by J. Horace McFarland

Flowers of the black locust

I want Americans to prize the American locust for its real beauty. The French know it, and show with pride their trifling imported specimens. We cannot exterminate the trees, and there will be plenty for posts, too; but let us realize its sweetness and elegance, as well as the durability of its structure.

Young trees of the black locust

There are fashions in trees, if you please, and the nurserymen set them. Suddenly they discover the merits of some long-forgotten tree, and it jumps into prominence. Thus, only a few years ago, the pin-oak came into vogue, to the lasting benefit of some parks, avenues and home grounds. Then followed the sycamore, but it had to be the European variety, for our own native "plane tree," or "button-ball," is too plentiful and easy to sing much of a tree-seller's song about. This Oriental plane is a fine tree, however, and the avenue in Fairmount Park that one may see from trains passing over the Schuylkill river is admirable. The bark is mottled in green, and especially bright when wet with rain. As the species is free from the attacks of a nasty European "bug," or fungus, which is bothering the American plane, it is much safer to handle, commercially.

But our stately American sycamore is in a different class. One never thinks of it as a lawn tree, or as bordering a fashionable roadway; rather the expectation is to find it along a brook, in a meadow, or in some rather wild and unkempt spot. As one of the scientific books begins of it, "it is a tree of the first magnitude." I like that expression; for the sycamore gives an impression of magnitude and breadth; it spreads out serenely and comfortably.

The sycamore, or button-ball

My friend Professor Bailey says Platanus occidentalis, which is the truly right name of this tree, has no title to the term sycamore; it is properly, as his Cyclopedia gives it, Buttonwood, or Plane. Hunting about a little among tree books, I find the reason for this, and that it explains another name I have never understood. The sycamore of the Bible, referred to frequently in the Old Testament, traditionally mentioned as the tree under which Joseph rested with Mary and the young child on the way to Egypt, and into which Zaccheus climbed to see what was going on, was a sort of fig tree—"Pharaoh's Fig," in fact. When the mystery-plays of the centuries gone by were produced in Europe, the tree most like to what these good people thought was the real sycamore furnished the branches used in the scene-setting—and it was either the oriental plane, or the sycamore-leaved maple that was chosen, as convenient. The name soon attached itself to the trees; and when homesick immigrants looked about the new world of America for some familiar tree, it was easy enough to see a great similarity in our buttonwood, which thus soon became sycamore.

So much for information, more or less legendary, I confess; but the great tree we are discussing is very tangible. Indeed, it is always in the public eye; for it carries on a sort of continuous disrobing performance! The snake sheds his skin rather privately, and comes forth in his new spring suit all at once; the oak and the maple, and all the rest of them continually but invisibly add new bark between the splitting or stretching ridges of the old; but our wholesome friend the sycamore is quite shamelessly open about it, dropping off a plate or a patch here and there as he grows and swells, to show us his underwear, which thus at once becomes overcoat, as he goes on. At first greenish, the under bark thus exposed becomes creamy white, mostly; and I have had a conceit that the colder the winter, the whiter would be those portions of Mr. Buttonball's pajamas he cared to expose to us the next spring!