A year among the trees

by Wilson Flagg

But there is no end of the smaller plants that spring up everywhere, some in the open space, others under the protection of a tuft of sedge-grass or a broad-leaved fern. The sweet-scented pyrola is abundant in all shady thickets, and the cymbidium and arethusa decorate the low grounds among the nodding panicles of quaking-grass and the spreading flowers of meadow-rue. The loosestrife, with its long pyramidal spikes of yellow flowers, is always conspicuously grouped in the low grounds, side by side with similar plats of low swamp-roses or crimson-spiked willow herb. But the most attractive flower in the whortleberry pasture is the red summer lily,—the cynosure of the happy children who assemble there, the queen of the meadow, and the delight of every rambler in the coppice.

The man who thinks of nature only as a field for the display of magnificent art may sneer at these rustic scenes and their native ornaments. But pride cannot make unadorned nature contemptible, nor can the grandeur of a princely estate deprive its occupants, if their culture equals their wealth, of the interest with which they behold a field covered with spontaneous vegetation, or a simple rustic farm. From the opening of spring until the fall of the leaf, the whortleberry pasture is a garden full of the fairest flowers and the most healthful fruits. And if Great Britain’s isle had been covered with whortleberries, like our New England hills, these fruits would have been celebrated in English poetry, like the fruit of the vine and the olive in the poetry of Greece and Rome.

WHORTLEBERRIES AND HUCKLEBERRIES.

We may vulgarize a word by associating it with the market. The wild pastures abound in summer with well-known fruits, some of jet and some of azure. We go out with a few friends and gather them with flowers, for present amusement. These fruits are Whortleberries. This is their poetical and their botanical name, the one that is associated with all the beautiful things that cluster in the same field. These fruits are also gathered for the market, and exposed for sale with cucumbers, new potatoes, and squashes. They are now Huckleberries. Shelley has defined poetry to be the art “that lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” This is done partly by a choice selection of words; and whenever a common thing is known by two names equally euphonious, we should always select that which is not in commercial use. We should say Whortleberries if we are writing an essay or a poem about them, and Huckleberries if we are going to buy a few of them in the market. The usages of the market in other matters ought to be excluded from literature. In commerce, for example, fishes are fish; in natural history fish are fishes.

THE HAZEL.

“Now let us sit beneath the grateful shade

Which Hazels interlaced with elms have made.”

Virgil, Eclogue V.

The Hazel, under which Menalcas invites his brother-shepherd to sit, is a tree of considerable size, while the American hazels are mere shrubs, seldom overtopping a rustic stone-wall. The Hazel among the Romans, like the olive among the Jews, was regarded as the emblem of peace; and this estimation of it was transmitted to the people of a later period. Hence, in popular works of fancy on the language of flowers, this is recorded as its symbolic meaning; and in ancient times a Hazel rod was supposed to have power of reconciling friends who had been separated by disagreement. These superstitions connected with the Hazel, and more particularly the one relating to the Hazel rod, named the Caduceus, assigned by the gods to Mercury as a means of restoring harmony to the human race, probably gave origin to the divining-rod, which was first made of Hazel and afterwards of the witch-elm. It is remarkable that in America this use was made of the hamamelis, a very different plant in its botanical characters, and hence called the Witch-Hazel.

There are two New England species, both delighting in the shelter of rude fences, and producing their flowers before their leaves. They are distinguished chiefly by the shape of their fruit. The common Hazel is the one most generally known. In this the shells or husks that enclose the nuts are of the same round shape, growing in a cluster, and each invested with a calyx like that of an ordinary flower. The Beaked Hazel is a smaller bush and frequents more solitary places than the other. “The calyx enclosing the nut, densely hispid and round at base, is contracted like a bottle into a long narrow neck, which is cut and toothed at the extremity.” The whole nut with its envelope resembles a bird’s head and beak. A dry sandy loam is the soil generally occupied by the Hazel. Along the old roads that pass over dry sandy plains, that border many of the river-banks in the Northern States, the Hazel, growing in frequent clumps, forms in some of these locations the most common kind of shrubbery. When we see a pitch-pine wood on one side of a road, the cultivated land on the opposite side is usually bordered with a growth of Hazels.