The American pioneer turned his hogs into the beech woods to fatten on the beech-mast, and Thanksgiving turkeys were always finer if they competed with the wild turkey on the same fare.
Birds and lesser mammals do much to plant trees when they carry away, for immediate or future use, seeds that are not winged for flight. Beechnuts are light enough to profit, to some extent, by a high wind. And beech trees in their infancy do well under the shade of other trees. So each fruiting tree is the mother of many young ones. But the seedling trees are not so numerous and important as the sapling growth that rises from the roots of parent trees. By these alone, a few isolated beeches will manage to take possession of the ground around them and to clothe it with so dense a foliage screen that all young growth, except certain ferns and grasses, dies for lack of sun. Before we can realize what is going on, the tract is a pure forest of beech, rapidly enlarging on all sides by the same campaign of extension.
THE CHESTNUTS
Chestnut and Chinquapin
Castanea dentata, Borh., and C. pumila, Mill.
Our native chestnut and its little brother, the chinquapin, are the American cousins of the sweet chestnut of southern Europe. Japan has contributed to American horticulture a native species which bears large but not very sweet nuts, that are good when cooked. Our two trees bear sweet nuts, of a flavor that no mode of cooking improves. In truth, there is no finer nut; and the time to enjoy it to the highest degree is a few weeks after the frost opens the burs and lets the nuts fall. "Along about Thanksgiving," they have lost some of their moisture and are prime.
In foreign countries the chestnut is a rich, nourishing food, comparable to the potato. Who could go into ecstasies over a vegetable that is a staple food for the peasants of Europe, Asia, and North Africa? Our chestnut is no staple. It is a delicacy. It is treasure trove from the autumn woods, and the gathering of the crop is a game in which boys and squirrels are rivals.
Ernest Thompson Seton, always a boy, knows the impatience with which the opening of the burs is watched for, as the belated frosts keep off, and the burs hang tantalizingly closed. The cruel wounds made by the spines and the raw taste of the immature nuts are poor recompense for the labor of nutting before Nature gives the sign that all's ready.
Here is Mr. Seton's estimate of the chestnut of "brown October's woods."
"Whenever you see something kept under lock and key, bars and bolts, guarded and double-guarded, you may be sure it is very precious, greatly coveted. The nut of this tree is hung high aloft, wrapped in a silk wrapper, which is enclosed in a case of sole leather, which again is packed in a mass of shock-absorbing, vermin-proof pulp, sealed up in a waterproof, ironwood case, and finally cased in a vegetable porcupine of spines, almost impregnable. There is no nut so protected; there is no nut in our woods to compare with it as food."