A year among the trees

by Wilson Flagg

THE ELDER.

Everybody is familiar with the Elder, with its large corymbs of white flowers, hanging over ditches and watercourses, rivalling the linden in sweetness and equalling the balm in its healing virtues. It is common in all wet fallows, flowering in the latter part of June. No shrub is so generally known, both as a tenant of the fields and as an ingredient in the packages of the simpler. We have seen its dried flowers in nice paper bags, neatly done up by some benevolent hands for the benefit of the sick, and we breathed their odors as they were wafted from the vessel in which they were steeped, before we ever saw them in the fields. The Elder is one of the flowering shrubs that first attracts our attention after the blossoms of the orchard have faded. The bee is seen to hunt for it before the vine is in blossom, leaving the flowers of the garden for these abundant stores of native sweets. In autumn we have seen the fences and brooksides laden with its fruit, while the purple clusters were stripped day after day by the robin and catbird, until not one was left to fall to the ground. When the leaves are gone, the branches are sought by children, who use its hollow wood for making various juvenile implements.

“The Elder,” says Barnard, speaking of the English plant, “is common, almost universal, in cottage gardens, hedge-rows, and ruins. It is in fact a thoroughly domesticated tree, and seldom is it found in England far from human habitation, although I have seen it in the wildest valleys of the Pyrenees, when it appeared to have the richest scarlet berries, instead of black.” The species seen in the Pyrenees is probably identical with the American panicled Elder, a rare species in New England, bearing its flowers in spikes, and producing scarlet berries.

The Elder has not much beauty when unadorned either with flowers or fruit. Its pinnate leaves are of a dull green, and seldom add any tints to the glory of autumn. Its flowers, borne in large flat cymes, are very showy, and emit a peculiar though agreeable odor, and are used in Europe to give to wine the flavor of Frontignac. The berries of the European Elder, which is believed by Michaux to be the same as the American common Elder, differing only in its superior size, are said to be poisonous to poultry. But the fruit of the American shrub possesses no such properties. It is eagerly devoured by the insectivorous birds, and is used in the manufacture of a harmless dietetic wine, whose benefits have been very generally appreciated by nostrum venders.

THE HEATH.

There are no heaths in New England, or on the American Continent. We know them only as they are described in books, or as they are displayed in greenhouses. We are strangers to those immense assemblages that furnish an uninterrupted vegetable covering to the earth’s surface, from the plains of Germany to Lapland on the north, and to the Ural Mountains on the east. These plains, called heaths or heathlands, are a kind of sandy bogs, which are favorable to the growth of the Heath, while other plants with these disadvantages of soil cannot compete with them. The tenacity with which they maintain their ground renders them a great obstacle to agricultural improvement. They overspread large districts to the almost entire exclusion of other vegetation, rendering the lands unfit to be pastured, and useless for any purpose except to furnish bees with an ample repast but an inferior honey.

It is often lamented by the lovers of nature that the Heath, the poetical favorite of the people, the humble flower of solitude, the friend of the bird and the bee, affording them a bower of foliage and a garden of sweets, and furnishing a bulwark to larks and nightingales against the progress of agriculture,—it is often lamented that this plant should be unknown as an indigenous inhabitant of the New World. But if its absence be a cause for regret to those who have learned to admire it as the poetic symbol of melancholy, and as a beautiful ornament of the wilds, the husbandman may rejoice in its absence. We have in America the whortleberry, whose numerous species and varieties occupy, like the heaths of Europe, those lands which have not been reduced to tillage, without depriving them of their usefulness to man. They become in their beneficent products a source of profit to thousands of indigent gleaners of the pastures, and of simple luxury to all our inhabitants. Though Nature has denied us the barren flower, and left the imagination unrequited, she has given us, in the place of it, a simple fruit that furnishes annual occasions for many a delightful excursion to the youths and children of our land, and is a simple blessing to the poor.

The farmers of Eastern Massachusetts, who have seen the dyer’s broom spread itself over the hills, occupying the whole ground, and entirely displacing all valuable herbs and grasses, may form some idea of the mischiefs attending the spread of the Heath in Europe. The heaths might be described as tree-mosses, bearing a multitude of minute campanulate flowers of various colors. They are not exceeded by any other plants, except mosses, in the uniform delicacy of their structure. Hence they are admired by florists, who find among them those multitudinous varieties which, in other plants, are produced by culture.

THE ANDROMEDA.

The plants of New England which are most nearly allied to the heath are the different species of Andromeda. These plants vary in height from one foot to seven or eight feet. They resemble the whortleberry in their general appearance, and in their leaves and flowers, but their fruit is a dry capsule, not a berry, and their foliage is not tinted in the autumn. They are, I believe, without an English name. Several species are indigenous in New England, but only two or three of them are common. One of the most beautiful, though extremely rare, is the Water Andromeda, which is found near the edges of ponds. This is the species which suggested to Linnæus the name given by him to the genus. He describes it in his “Tour of Lapland” as “decorating the marshy grounds in a most agreeable manner. The flowers are quite blood-red before they expand; but when full-grown the corolla is of a flesh-color. Scarcely any painter’s art can so happily imitate the beauty of a fine female complexion; still less could any artificial color upon the face itself bear a comparison with this lovely blossom.” He thought of Andromeda as described by the poets, and traced a fancied resemblance between the virgin and the plant, to which it seemed to him her name might be appropriately given.