The live oak of the South is usually hung with long skeins of the weird, grey Spanish moss
Trees do not change their clothes, and they do not move away. Day after day, if we use our eyes and notice what is going on in the tree tops, as the seasons follow each other, we come to know our trees by name; we recognise them in winter by their bark, and by the framework of their tops, in summer by leaves and flowers, in autumn by their changing colour and by their fruits. It is not hard work for those who love trees. It is like getting acquainted with other neighbours whom we are glad to count among our friends.
TREES WE KNOW BY THEIR SHAPES
The life of every tree depends upon its success in holding its leaves out into the sunlight. The tree which exposes the greatest amount of leaf surface to the sun makes the greatest growth. The shape of their tops is a character in which trees differ widely. We shall come to know many of them in winter time better than in summer, by the distinct shapes revealed when the foliage is gone. In any bare tree, the purpose of all of the branching and branching again, is plainly seen. Each twig and branch reaches out toward the outer surface of the dome, or pyramid. Here the buds in winter are waiting to open, when spring comes, into leafy shoots. These will cover the tree top with a dome of green greater than the one of the previous summer. Their work through the growing season will lengthen every branch and every root, and add a layer of wood under the bark of trunks and branches and roots.
The most remarkable tree shape is that of the Lombardy poplar. The tall trunk is clothed with many short, close-branched limbs, which do not spread, as in ordinary tree forms, but grow upright, so as to lie almost against the main trunk. The upper branches are overlapped and crowded by those below them, and so on down the trunk. The result is a tree shaped like a capital I. In summer time, the heart-shaped leaves cover the twigs on the outside of this spire, but the beauty of the tree top is marred by the dead branches which have been smothered by the crowding.
A young Lombardy poplar is handsome as it stands covered with its twinkling leaves. It grows rapidly, and is especially striking and effective in clumps of round-headed trees. It is like an exclamation point. Architects always like to have a few of these trees dotted about the grounds to keep company with tall chimneys and distant church spires. There is no shade under trees of this form, though miles of them are planted along roadsides where they stand like tin soldiers, all alike. The older trees look very ragged, for they are unable to shed their dead limbs, and as old age comes on they send up suckers from the roots that form a little forest around the parent tree.
Scattered over fallow fields of worthless ground, the red cedars are allowed to grow. They are the evergreen counterparts of the slim Lombardy poplars. Sometimes the red cedar broadens into a pyramid, wide at the base, but we are all familiar with the green exclamation points, dotted over the hillsides, wherever birds have dropped the blue berries full of seeds.
The pointed firs with their horizontal branches becoming longer and longer towards the ground, are good examples of the pyramid form so common among evergreens. This is the shape of the spruces, and the pines, and the hemlocks, until storms have broken their branches, and taken away the symmetry of the top. The pin oak and the honey locust send out horizontal branches of graduated lengths from the central shaft, imitating the evergreens in shape.
The evergreen magnolia of the South has a dome like an old-fashioned beehive, pyramidal, and regular when it grows in sheltered places. Such a dome is the hard maple’s in the North.