Japanese persimmon trees, whose fruit is larger and better in every respect than our native species, have been successfully introduced into California and the Southern states. These persimmons look like great ripe tomatoes as we see them on the fruit stands, but these, too, must wait until they are thoroughly ripe before they are fit to eat.
THE CHANGING COLOUR OF THE AUTUMN WOODS
All through the autumn, when the wonderful colours come in the forest leaves, we shall see the green of these leaves creeping back along the veins. The horse chestnut leaves tell a very interesting story. They turn brown first upon the edges. If we watch a single leaf for a whole week in September, we may see the green gradually draw in towards the central stem, and the brown papery borders widen, just as if something were squeezing and crowding the pulp of the leaf, inch by inch, back through the leaf stem into the twig. The last traces of green linger along the sides of the veins, and before it falls, even these leaf channels will be drained dry.
When the leaves of a sugar maple give up their pulp there are wonderful changes inside each leaf. A yellow liquid fills the cells where the green pulp used to be. Chemical changes in the mineral substances deposited in the leaf cells produce wonderful shades of red and yellow, which glow where once the leaf was solid green. Iron is one of the minerals brought up in the soil water, left in the leaf, and changed to produce the bright red when the leaf mask of green is taken away.
The scarlet maple remembers its name in the autumn days. It puts on a cloak more brilliant perhaps than the sugar maple, which has a good deal of orange as well as red in its autumn foliage. The scarlet oak is amazingly brilliant; so is the sassafras and the sweet gum. The tupelo, or sour gum, also called the pepperidge, has foliage that is splashed and streaked with various shades of red and yellow. Each little leaf is so brilliantly polished that the tree’s beauty and colour seem to be doubled by reflection. The sumachs of the roadside thickets wear foliage of scarlet, each leaf drooping away from the fruit pyramid which rises, a deeper crimson, on the end of each upright shoot. The foliage and the fruit together make a colour harmony that is dazzling, indeed.
In contrast with its umbrellas of red leaves are the scarlet berry clusters of the flowering dogwood. This tree has the habit of snuggling up against the trunk of large forest trees and reaching its white flowery arms out to us in spring. How wonderful they are, on the edge of the woods, with the green leaves of the larger trees making a background for their flowers! In the autumn the same surprise awaits us, when under a towering tree with yellow or russet foliage, the dogwood leaps up like a scarlet flame, against its dark background, holding straight out its platformed branches of red leaves, tipped with berries, like rubies, set on the upturned twigs.
Often the trees are stripped by birds before the berries are ripe. It is in woods where the trees are numerous that we shall find the fruit reaching its perfection of ripeness and colour.
Among the trees that turn to purple in the autumn we may name the white oak and the ashes. Many oaks turn from green to russet, without showing any red or yellow. The lindens and the tulip trees and the beeches turn yellow; so do the poplars and willows, the hickories, and walnuts. Up and down the street you may see the yellow crowns of the silver and the Norway maples, and on the lawns the white birches have also turned to gold. The deepest red is on the black and red oaks. The brightest red is on the scarlet oak.
The flowering dogwood covers its bare branches with blossoms in May