A north countryman, reading Clough's beautiful lines, is pretty sure to apply them to the wrong tree, because, when a Scots forester speaks of a plane tree, he is understood to mean what in the south is called a sycamore. But even that is a misnomer, the true sycamore, mentioned in Holy Writ, being a fig-tree (Ficus sycamorus).
SYCAMORE (Acer pseudo-platanus)
In Summer
The sycamore and the plane are quite distinct, belonging to separate natural orders, the sycamore being a maple (Aceraceæ), the largest of all the maples, and the plane constituting a single group in the order Platanaceæ. The confusion of names has arisen from the success with which the sycamore masquerades as a plane, imitating its foliage and aping it in its habit of shedding the bark in thin flakes. Botanists have given recognition to this peculiarity by the scientific title they have conferred on the sycamore, viz. Acer pseudo-platanus, or the false plane. But in its flower and fruit the sycamore cannot disguise its true affinity. Its flowers are arranged in triplets on long hanging scapes, of a yellowish green, only requiring a dash of brighter hue to render the sycamore one of the loveliest objects in the spring woodland. The flowers are followed by fruits which stamp the tree unmistakably as a maple. The seed-vessels are composed of what in botany are termed samaræ or keys, each containing a large seed or two. These samaræ are attached to each other in pairs, and, as each carries a beautifully-formed membranous wing, the result is a pair of wings to each pair of seed-vessels, securing wide distribution of the seeds by autumnal winds. On the other hand, the flowers of the true plane (Platanus) are very minute, and the fruit consists of a mass of thin seeds set among closely-pressed hairs and bristles, forming a hard, perfectly round ball nearly an inch in diameter. These balls, from two to six on each fruiting stalk, hang conspicuously on the branches all winter, until the dry March winds burst them and allow the seeds to float away.
Neither sycamore nor plane are natives of the United Kingdom. The plane, though it excels all other trees for planting in smoky towns like London, does not take kindly to the cooler atmosphere of Scotland and northern England. Not so the sycamore, which, although naturally a product of the mountain ranges of Central and Southern Europe, nowhere flourishes more freely and sows itself more abundantly than in North Britain. Indeed, it is a conspicuous instance of the careless prodigality of Nature how thickly every bare spot in a wood becomes covered with seedling sycamores, not one in a million of which have the faintest chance of surviving two or three seasons.
The life period of the sycamore is a long one, probably three times that of the beech and equal to that of the oak. At Truns, in the Swiss Oberland, a great sycamore, already in ruin, was destroyed by a storm in 1870. As it was under this tree that the Grey League, originators of the canton of Grisons, took the oath in 1424, it can scarcely have been less than 600 years old when it ceased to exist. Mr. Elwes gives the dimensions of another mighty sycamore in Switzerland, growing at an elevation of more than 4000 feet in the canton of Unterwalden, which must be coeval with the tree of the Grey League. It measures 29 feet in circumference at 5 feet from the ground. We cannot quite equal that in Scotland, although in that country and northern England there are some enormous sycamores. Behind the Birnam Hotel stand two very large trees, an oak and a sycamore. The oak, lesser of the two, is shown to visitors as the last survivor of that forest whereof it was said
Macbeth shall never vanquished be
Until great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.
SYCAMORE
In Winter
The other is a giant sycamore, reported in Hunter's Woods and Forests of Perthshire (1883) to be one thousand years old, which, of course, is impossible. I measured the girth of this great tree in 1903, and made it 19 feet 8 inches at 5 feet from the ground. It was not until long after that I found that Hunter had given exactly the same measurement twenty years earlier. This girth is exceeded by one at Castle Menzies, which, in 1904, gave 20 feet 4 inches. The loftiest sycamore reported in Scotland is also in Perthshire, at Blair Drummond. This tree Dr. Henry ascertained to be 108 feet high, with a girth of 10 feet.