Wood Wanderings

by Winthrop Packard

Twice during the year does the rich green of the chestnut leafage bloom with a richer tinting,—first in June, when the long staminate blossoms seem to pour in cascades from their billowed tops, and again at this time of year, when the ripened nuts push open the green burs of September and the failing sap leaves them at first a yellow-green and later a golden tan-brown. Walking beneath the trees to-day you are likely to get a rap on the head from a solid seal-brown chestnut, or even find your neck full of prickers where the fretful porcupine of a descending bur has jabbed you.

Already the ash trees, whose foliage has passed with much rapidity through olive-green and olive-yellow to tan-brown, which still holds a little of the olive tint, stand bare and gray against the sky, like the red maples, sure prophets of winter. The ash is never profuse of leaves. It drops them first of all in the autumn and is among the latest to put them forth in the spring. Even in the height of summer you cannot say that its foliage is dense; and when the slender brown leaves lie upon the ground they do not make a thick carpet. They merely crisp under foot instead of rustling.

Under a Norway maple the ground will later be half-leg deep in dense curled leaves that rustle and swish under your stride. You plough through them and they leap up and dance away from your progress, a splashing, undulating brown tide. Under oaks, much later, you find a similar sea, though its flood does not rise so high and there is a crisper rustle that is yet a large-hearted and generous sound. Under willows there is a silky crispness that is quite different from either.

So, blindfolded and led from one part of the forest to another, you might tell every tree under which you passed by the sound of its dead leaves under foot. So, too, knowing your tree, you might tell with accuracy the time of the year, the definite week of autumn in which your pilgrimage was taking place. Under the oaks to-day, though but a few leaves are yet on the ground, you would feel the round acorns under foot, and you would know that these were not chestnuts because of the lack of burs; so, too, you might know that you were under the white oak instead of the black by the different shape of the acorn.

If your foot-sense were not sufficiently subtle to note this difference—though if you were much addicted to life in the open woodland it would be—you still might, blindfolded, know the white oak from the black by the sweetness of its acorns. I sometimes think they are more pleasing to the palate than the chestnuts, though they have a slight astringency. Yet their meat is sweeter and, aside from the slight bitterness, has more of flavor, as you will see if you will test first one and then the other. I think you will agree with me that the chestnut flavor is pale and insipid in comparison.

The black-oak acorn is a different fruit. Like the tree it seems to have absorbed all the bitterness of the wood. The white oak always seems to me to glow with the generous hospitality of the sunshine, the black oak to be morose and vindictive, a tree of dull days and shadow. I have little excuse for this feeling, unless it is because of their fruits.

The two trees grow side by side in the woodland, the black, if anything, the more vigorous in growth, yet the scaly whiteness of the bark of the one always seems hospitable, the rugose blackness of that of the other unfriendly. So with the fruit; the rich flavor of the white oak acorns is inviting, the meracious bitterness of the others is repellent. Out of the fact of this palatableness on the part of the one and repulsiveness on the part of the other has grown a singular condition in the southern states, where the trees as here once grew in equal profusion, side by side in the forests.

There it is the custom, and has been since the days of first settlement, to turn swine loose in the forests, where in the autumn they fatten on “mast,” which is an old English name still in use there, but little known in New England. It means forest nuts of any kind, but especially acorns. These southern, forest-feeding swine have so loved the white-oak mast that they have in a large measure kept the trees from reproducing by eating all the seeds. The black-oak mast, on the contrary, they have rejected, as any wise animal would, leaving the seeds to be scattered about in profusion and reproduce more black oaks. Hence a scarcity of white oaks in southern forests where they would be welcome.

The oaks are more tenacious of their leaves than any other deciduous tree, though they are fairly early in showing autumn tints. Long after the reds of other trees of the wood are buried in the brown drifts that cover the roots from the too fierce frosts of winter the rich deep crimsons and red-browns of the oak remain. Indeed, the leaves of some species hold on all winter, and let go their grip only reluctantly when pushed off by the swelling buds of next spring’s growth.

Their rustle, as they cling to the twigs in December, makes the wood vocal as the winter winds sift the snow softly down among them. Oftentimes before you see the first fine, far-apart flakes of the coming storm you may hear them pat here and there on a resonant oak leaf, and their presence makes the winter outlook more perfectly and comfortingly bleak as the fine flakes whirl through them. Snow amongst perfectly bare twigs fails of its full effect. You need the shiver of its sifting among the dry, persistent leaves of the oaks to realize all the beauty of its bleakness.