Sassafras wood is dull orange-yellow, soft, weak, light, brittle, and coarse-grained, but it is amazingly durable in contact with the soil, as the pioneers learned when they used it to make posts and fence rails. It is largely used also in cooperage, and in the building of light boats. Oil of sassafras distilled from the bark of the roots is used for perfuming soaps and flavoring medicines.
With all its practical uses listed above, we must all have learned to know the tree if it grows in our neighborhood, and if we observe it closely, month by month throughout the year, we shall all agree that its beauty justifies its selection for planting in our home grounds, and surpasses all its medicinal and other commercial offerings to the world.
In winter the sassafras tree is most picturesque by reason of the short, stout, twisted branches that spread almost at right angles from the central shaft, and form a narrow, usually flat, often unsymmetrical head. The bark is rough, reddish brown, deeply and irregularly divided into broad scaly plates or ridges. The branches end in slim, pale yellow-green twigs that are set with pointed, bright green buds, giving the tree an appearance of being thoroughly alive while others, bare of leaves, look dead in winter.
What country boy or girl has not lingered on the way home from school to nibble the dainty green buds of the sassafras, or to dig at the roots with his jack-knife for a sliver of aromatic bark?
As spring comes on the bare twigs are covered with a delicate green of the opening leaves, brightened by clusters of yellow flowers (see illustration, [page 150]) whose starry calyxes are alike on all of the trees; but only on the fertile trees are the flowers succeeded by the blue berries, softening on their scarlet pedicels, if only the birds can wait until they are ripe.
Midsummer is the time to hunt for "mittens" and to note how many different forms of leaves belong on the same sassafras tree. First, there is the simple ovate leaf; second, a larger blade oval in form but with one side extended and lobed to form a thumb, making the whole leaf look like the pattern of a mitten cut out by an unskilled hand; third, a symmetrical, three-lobed leaf, the pattern of a narrow mitten with a large thumb on each side. Not infrequently do all these forms occur on a single twig. Only the mulberry, among our native trees, shows such a variety of leaf forms as the sassafras. There is quite as great variation in the size of the leaves. One law seems to prevail among sassafras trees: more of the oval leaves than the lobed ones are found on mature trees. It is the roadside sapling, with its foliage within easy reach, that delights boys and girls with its wonderful variety of leaf patterns. Here the size of the leaves greatly surpasses that of the foliage on full-grown trees, and the autumnal colors are more glorious in the roadside thickets than in the tree-tops far above them.
Sassafras trees grow readily from seed in any loose, moist soil. A single tree spreads by a multitude of fleshy root-stalks, and these natural root-cuttings bear transplanting as easily as a poplar. Every garden border should have one specimen at least to add its flame to the conflagration of autumn foliage and the charming contrast of its blue berries on their coral stalks.
THE WITCH HAZEL
Eighteen genera compose the sub-tropical family in which hamamelis is the type. Two or three Asiatic species and one American are known.
The witch hazel (Hamamelis Virginiana, Linn.) is a stout, many-stemmed shrub or a small tree, with rough unsymmetrical leaves, strongly veined, coarsely toothed, and roughly diamond-shaped. The twigs, when bare, are set with hairy sickle-shaped buds. Nowhere in summer would an undergrowth of witch hazel trees attract attention. But in autumn, when other trees have reached a state of utter rest, the witch hazel wakes and bursts into bloom. Among the dead leaves which stubbornly cling as they yellow, and often persist until spring, the tiny buds, the size of a pin-head, open into starry blossoms with petals like gold threads. The witch hazel thicket is veiled with these gold-mesh flowers, as ethereal as the haunting perfume which they exhale. Frost crisps the delicate petals but they curl, up like shavings and stay till spring. At no time is the weather cold enough to destroy this November flower show.