A great part of the territory of North America is still a wilderness; but the forests have been so extensively invaded that we see the original wood only in fragments, seldom forming unique assemblages. Especially in the Western States, the woods are chiefly sections of the forest, scattered in and around the spacious clearings, without many natural groups of trees to please the eye with their spontaneous beauty. They surround the clearing with palisades of naked pillars, unrelieved by any foliage below their summits. They remind me of city houses which have been cut asunder to widen an avenue, leaving their interior walls exposed to sight. These fragments of forest, and the acres of stumps in the recent clearings, are the grand picturesque deformity of the newly settled parts of the country. But when a wall of these forest palisades, a hundred feet in height, bounds the plain for miles of prospect, it forms a scene of unexceptionable grandeur.
It is chiefly in the old States that we see anything like a picturesque grouping of trees. There the wood assumes the character of both forest and grove, displaying a beautiful intermixture of them, combined with groups of coppice and shrubbery. Thickets generally occupy the low grounds, and coppice the elevations. The New England system of farming has been more favorable to the picturesque grouping of wood, and other objects, than that of any other part of the country. At the South, where agriculture is carried on in large plantations, we see spacious fields of tillage, and forest groups of corresponding size. But the small, independent farming of New England has produced a charming variety of wood, pasture, and tillage, so agreeably intermixed that we are never weary of looking upon it. The varied surface of the land has increased these advantages, producing an endless succession of those limited views which we call picturesque.
When a considerable space is covered with a dense growth of tall trees, the assemblage represents overhead an immense canopy of verdure, supported by innumerable pillars. No man could enter one of these dark solitudes without a deep impression of sublimity, especially during a general stillness of the winds. The voices of solitary birds, and other sounds peculiar to the woods, exalt this impression. Indeed, the grandeur and solemnity of a magnificent wood are hardly surpassed by anything else in nature. A very slight sound, during a calm, in one of these deep woods, has a distinctness almost startling, like the ticking of a clock in a vast hall. These feeble sounds afford us a more vivid sense of the magnitude of the place, and of its deep solemnity, than louder sounds, which are attended with a confused reverberation. The foliage, spread out in a continuous mass over our heads, produces the effect of a ceiling, and represents the roof of a vast temple.
In an open grove we experience different sensations. Here pleasantness and cheerfulness are combined, though a sense of grandeur may be excited by some noble trees. In a grove, the trees in general are well developed, having room enough to expand to their normal proportions. We often see their shadows cast separately upon the ground, which is green beneath them as in an orchard. If we look upon this assemblage from an adjoining eminence, we observe a variety of outlines by which we may identify the different species. A wild wood is sometimes converted into a grove by clearing it of its undergrowth and removing the smaller trees. Such an assemblage displays but few of the charms of a natural grove. A cleared wild wood yields shade and coolness; but the individual trees always retain their gaunt and imperfect shapes.
Artificial plantations display the characters of a grove; but all spontaneous growths are bordered and more or less interspersed with underwood. Hence a limited growth of forest, like a wooded island, surrounded by water or by a meadow, surpasses any artificial plantation as a picturesque and beautiful feature of landscape. The painter finds in these spontaneous collections of wood an endless variety of grouping and outline for the exercise of his art; and the botanist discovers, in their glens and hollows, hundreds of species that would perish in an open grove. Some woods are distinguished by a superfluity, others, like fir and beech woods, by a deficiency of undergrowth, and this differs in botanical characters as well as in quantity, according to the predominant species in the wood. In all woods, however, shrubbery is more abundant on the borders than in the interior. This border-growth contributes more than anything else to harmonize wood and field. It is the outside finish and native embellishment of every spontaneous assemblage of trees.
A wood in a valley between two open hills does not darken the prospect as if it covered the hills, though, if it be continuous, it hides the form of the ground. But when it has come up in scattered groups on a wide plain, without the interference of art, it surpasses every other description of wood-scenery. An assemblage of trees on a hillside is called a “hanging wood,” because it seems to overhang the valley beneath it. Thus situated it forms oppositions of a very striking sort, by lifting its summits into the sunshine while it deepens the shadows that rest upon the valley. Wood on steep declivities is an interesting sight, especially if an occasional opening reveals to us the precipitous character of the ground, and shows the difficulties which the trees have overcome in their struggle for life. Some of our pleasure comes from the evident utility of such a wood. We see at once that a rocky steep could not be occupied by any other vegetation, except under the protection of the trees, and that trees alone could resist the force of occasional torrents; that without them the ground would be barren, ugly, and profitless, and difficult and dangerous to those who should attempt to climb it.
THE WHITE OAK AND OTHER SPECIES.
The most important, though not the largest, of the American trees of the Oak family, and the one that is most like the English tree, is the American White Oak. It puts forth its branches at a comparatively small height, not in a horizontal direction, like the white pine, but extending to great length with many a crook, and presenting the same knotted and gnarled appearance for which the English oak is celebrated. Individual trees of this species differ so widely in their ramification that it would be difficult to select any one as the true type. Some are without a central shaft, being subdivided at a small height into numerous large branches, diverging at rather a wide angle from a common point of junction, like the elm. Others send up their trunk nearly straight to the very summit of the tree, giving out lateral branches from all points almost horizontally. There is a third form that seems to have no central shaft, because it is so greatly contorted that it can only be traced among its subordinate branches by the most careful inspection. The stature of the White Oak, when it has grown in an isolated situation, is low, and it has a wider spread than any other American tree.
The leaves of the White Oak are marked by several oblong, rounded lobes, without deep sinuosities. They turn to a pale chalky red in the autumn, remain on the tree all winter, and fall as the new foliage comes out in the spring. The tree may be readily distinguished from other oaks by the light color and scaly surface of the bark, without any deep corrugations. In Massachusetts very few standard White Oaks have escaped the axe of the “timberer,” on account of the great demand for the wood of this species. Were it not for the protection afforded by men of wealth to oaks in their own grounds, all the large standards would soon be utterly destroyed. Democracy, though essential to republican liberty, is fatal to all objects which are valuable for their poetic or picturesque qualities. It has no foresight, and no sentimental reverence for antiquity. It perceives the value of an object for present use; but it disdains to look forward to the interest of a coming generation. In regard to nature, what is called progress in America is only another name for devastation. How great soever the political evil of large estates, it is evident that in proportion to their multiplication will be the increased protection afforded to our trees and forests, as well as to the birds and quadrupeds that inhabit them.