Rowland Watts.
BEAUTIFUL VINES TO BE FOUND IN OUR WILD WOODS.
II.
A vine of great beauty in our autumn woods, with its great masses of scarlet berries, is the Celastrus scandens—Climbing Bittersweet or Wax-work.
It belongs to the order Celastraceae—Staff tree family—to which family belongs the wahoo or burning-bush, with which we are all familiar, from seeing its abundant red berries in the autumn woods and in the parks.
The flowers of the Celastrus or Bittersweet are small, greenish and regular, growing in clusters at the end of the branchlets, the staminate and pistillate forms usually on separate plants, which accounts for the fact that we often see a beautiful vine that has bloomed profusely bearing no flowers; the flowers have five distinct spreading petals, inserted with the alternate stamens on the edge of the disk that lines the base of the calyx. Its five united sepals form a cup-shaped calyx. It has five stamens, one thick style and a three-celled ovary, with three to six seeds. It can be found in full blossom about the first of June.
The leaves of the Bittersweet are from two to three and a half inches in length, simple alternate, slightly fine-toothed, and are found from egg shaped and oblong to the reversed of egg shaped, the apex always pointed, while the base is sometimes pointed and sometimes rounded. The fruit of the Bittersweet is about one-third of an inch in diameter, round and a deep orange color, three-celled with two seeds in each cell; when it is ripe, it opens into three parts, showing six bright scarlet berries within.
The Celastrus is a strong, woody climber, twining upon itself in coils and swirls, over fences and walls and bushes to great distances, often to the top of immensely high trees.
It is immensely showy and beautiful in the very late fall when its leaves are all fallen off and its woody branches are left thickly studded with its orange and scarlet fruit. I remember especially one Christmas eve, in Kentucky, that we gathered great bunches of it; we found it growing over an old stone ruin in great masses and gathering it, with large bunches of mistletoe, it made ideal decorations for our Christmas festivities.
J. O. Cochran.