Both species are particularly worthy of protection and preservation. They produce a valuable nut without our care; they are ornamental to our fields and by-roads; they feed the squirrels and shelter the birds, and they add a lively interest to natural objects by their spontaneous products. The Hazel is associated with many pleasant adventures in our early days, with nut-gatherings and squirrel-hunts, and with many pleasant incidents in classical poetry. The Hazel has been a favorite theme of poets, especially those of the Middle Ages. In the songs of that period are constant allusions to the Hazel-bush, probably from its frequency in natural hedge-rows, and its valuable fruit.
THE BUTTON-BUSH.
Not much has been written of the Button-bush. We hear but little of those shrubs that do not readily admit of culture, and are not susceptible of modification by the arts of florists. The Button-bush is confined to wet, solitary places; indeed, it may be considered a true aquatic, as it grows in most cases directly out of the water. It is associated with the complaining song of the blackbird, whose nest is often placed in the forks of its branches, and it accompanies the ruder aspects of nature. It is far from being an elegant plant; and the little beauty it possesses belongs to the perfectly globular shape of its heads of flowers, which are nearly white. It is generally seen bordering the sluggish streams that flow through the level swamps, and often forms little islets of shrubbery in the middle of a sheet of water.
THE CLETHRA.
After the flowers of the azalea have faded, we are attracted in like situations by a similar fragrance from the Clethra, or Spiked Alder, remarkable as one of the latest bloomers of the American flowering shrubs. It bears its white flowers in a long spike, or raceme, somewhat like those of the black cherry-tree. The Clethra, when in blossom, is not destitute of elegance, and it is valuable for the lateness of its flowering. The foliage of this plant is homely, and its autumnal tints are yellow, while the prevailing tints of our wild shrubbery are different shades of red and purple. It is found in wet and boggy places, where it is very common, displaying its floral clusters as late as the fourth week in August. This shrub, when cut up for brushwood, is called the “Pepperbush” by the fishermen of our coast, from the resemblance of its roundish fruit to peppercorns. The picturesque attractions of the Clethra are not to be despised, when its long racemes of white flowers are seen projecting from crowded masses of verdure on the edges of the wooded swamps.
THE WESTERN PLANE.
When journeying through the older towns of New England, the melancholy forms of the ill-fated Planes attract our attention by their superior size, and still more by the marks of decay which are stamped upon all. This appearance is most remarkable in the early part of summer; for the trees are not dead, but some hidden malady caused the first crop of foliage to perish for several successive years. The trees, after putting forth a new crop of leaves from a second growth of buds, had not time to ripen their wood before the frosts of winter came and destroyed their recent branches. This disaster was repeated annually for ten or fifteen years, causing an accumulation of twigs at the extremities of the branches, making a broom-like appendage, and greatly deforming the spray of the tree.
The Western Plane, or Buttonwood, is a well-known tree by the waysides in New England and in the forests of the Middle and Western States. It belongs to a genus of which there are only three known species, and this genus constitutes a whole natural family. It may, therefore, be something more than a fanciful hypothesis, that all its noble kindred have perished and disappeared from the face of the earth, with other plants of a distant geological era, and that the three remaining species are destined to share the same fate, as signalized by the mysterious fatality which has attended both the Western and Oriental Plane. The Buttonwood is remarkable for its great height and magnitude, its large palmate leaves, and its globular fruit. The foliage is rather sparse, of a light, rusty green, and resembles in many points that of the common grapevine. Near the insertion of every leaf, and a little above it, is a stipule forming a plaited ruff that encircles the growing branch. These ruff-like appendages are among its generic marks of distinction.
“The Buttonwood,” says Michaux, “astonishes the eye by the size of its trunk and the amplitude of its head. But the white elm has a more majestic appearance, which is owing to its great elevation, to the disposition of its principal limbs, and the extreme elegance of its summit.” He considers the Buttonwood “the largest and loftiest tree of the United States.” He mentions one growing on a small island in the Ohio River, which at five feet from the ground measured forty feet and four inches in circumference; and he found another on the right bank of the Ohio that measured, at four feet from the ground, forty-seven feet in circumference, or nearly sixteen feet in diameter, and showed no marks of decay. He states that the Buttonwood is confined “to moist, wet grounds, where the soil is loose, deep, and fertile, and it is never found upon dry lands of irregular surface.”
It was probably the rapid growth and great size of the Buttonwood that caused our ancestors to plant it so extensively as a shade-tree. It rises also to a great height before it sends out any branches, thereby affording the inmates of houses the advantage of its shade, without intercepting their prospect, and without interfering with passing objects when planted by roadsides. But these noble trees, so conspicuous and so thrifty thirty years ago, have been slowly perishing from some mysterious cause which no theory can satisfactorily explain. It is generally supposed to be connected with a want of hardihood in the constitution of the tree, that renders it unable to endure all the vicissitudes of a Northern climate.