A sweet gum is very rugged looking in the dead of winter, with its warts and ridges breaking out on each limb. We know it by this sign alone, but are doubly sure when we see the seed balls dangling from the twigs. The sycamore, blotched with white on trunk and limb, also carries a load of dangling seed balls throughout the winter. There is no danger of confusing these two trees, for the bark of each is so distinct.
Warty, ridged bark of the sweet gum, the swinging seed balls and winged seeds
Blotched bark of sycamore, and its seed balls that hang all winter
A little tree with alligator skin bark grows North and South, and chiefly in the eastern half of the country. This is the flowering dogwood, whose grey bark breaks into small squarish plates. There is no such ruggedness in its trunk as there is in the sweet gum’s, for it is always a little tree, and the bark corresponds in its checking to the tree’s size. When we see this peculiar type of bark in the winter woods we may look also for little flattened, box-like flower buds, each enclosed in four scales. We shall also find the twigs set opposite, and with these three signs be sure we know the tree.
A little tree, no larger in girth than the dogwood, but often taller, has bark that strips and loosens somewhat as the bark of the shagbark hickory does. This is the hop hornbeam, one of the ironwoods. Its bark strips are always thin and narrow, no matter how old the tree becomes. It is never as loose upon the trunk as the shagbark’s. The great buds and stout twigs of the hickory are entirely different from the slender spray and the very small buds this ironwood wears in winter. We may find on these twigs some remnant of the hop-like seed clusters which give this little tree its name, hop hornbeam. Inside its shaggy bark the lumbermen find wood so hard that it is very difficult to work, and when made into tools it lasts almost forever.
When we have learned to know at sight a dozen trees by their bark alone, we are ready to go further. A great many trees with furrowed bark like chestnuts and elms and maples, are not so distinct as those already learned, and we must study the tree’s form, its winter buds, the arrangement of these buds, and the shape of the leaf scars in connection with the bark, in order to be sure we know the tree’s name. The chestnut from which we gathered so many nuts last fall, and whose furrowed trunk we saw at every visit, we come to know through this familiarity. The trunks of other chestnut trees look like this one, and though we may not know just how we do it, we have added the chestnut to the list of trees we recognise by their bark alone. The sugar maples which we tap in spring for their sugary sap, have dark, furrowed bark, not very distinctive. And yet, by going from tree to tree, emptying the sap pails, we gradually learn to recognise the bark of the sugar maple, and add it to our growing list.
The Lombardy poplar stands like an exclamation point in the landscape