What a disaster then is the newly arisen bark disease that has already killed every chestnut tree throughout large areas in the Eastern states. Scientists have thus far struggled with it in vain and it is probable that all chestnuts east of the Rockies are doomed.
Chinquapins grow to be medium-sized trees in Texas and Arkansas, but east of the Mississippi they are smaller, and east of the Alleghanies, mere shrubby undergrowth, covering rocky banks or crouching along swamp borders. They are smaller throughout, but resemble the chestnut in leaf, flowers, and fruit. The bur contains a single nut.
The chestnut tree grows large and attains great age, its sturdy, rough gray trunk crowned with an oblong head of irregular branches, hidden in summer by the abundant foliage mass. (See illustration, [page 23].) The ugly cripple that lightning has maimed covers its wounds when May wakes the late-opening buds and the leaves attain full size.
Each leaf tapers at both ends, its length three or four times its width. Strong-ribbed and sharp-toothed, and wavy on the midrib, dark, polished, like leather, these units form a wonderful dome, lightened in midsummer by the pencil-like plumes of the staminate flowers, with the fertile ones at their bases. As autumn comes on the leaf crown turns to gold, and the mature fruits are still green spiny balls. The first frost and the time to drop the nuts are dates that every schoolboy knows come close together.
When a chestnut tree falls by the axe, the roots restore the loss by sending up sprouts around the stump. The mouldering pile nourishes a circle of young trees, full of vigor, because they have the large tree's roots gathering food for them. No wonder their growth is rapid.
Besides this mode of reproduction, chestnut trees, growing here and there throughout a mixed forest, are the offspring of trees whose nuts were put away, or dropped and lost by squirrels. When spring relieves the danger of famine, many of the rodent class abandon their winter stores before they are all devoured. Such caches add many nut trees to our native woods.
THE OAKS
This is the great family of the cup-bearers, whose fruit, the acorn, is borne in a scaly cup that never breaks into quarters, as does the husk that holds a chestnut, beechnut, or hickory nut. All oak trees bear acorns as soon as they come to fruiting age. This is the sign by which they are known the world over. Seldom is a full-grown oak without its little insignia, for the cups cling after the nut falls, and one grand division of the family requires two seasons to mature its fruit. For this reason, half-grown acorns are seen on the twigs after the ripe ones fall.
We cannot say of oak trees that they all have sturdy trunks, rough bark, and gnarled limbs, for not all of them have these characteristics. But there is a certain likeness in oak leaves. They are simple, five-ranked, generally oval, and the margins are generally cut into lobes by deep or shallow bays. Most oak leaves have leathery texture, strong veins, and short petioles. They are leaves that out-last the summer, and sometimes persist until spring growth unseats the stalks; sometimes, as in the "live oaks," they hang on three to five years.
The twigs of oak trees are more or less distinctly five-angled, and the winter buds cluster at the ends. This insures a group of young shoots, crowded with leaves, on the ends of branches, and a dense outer dome of foliage on the tree.