Wood Wanderings

by Winthrop Packard

There is the vigorous stem and the leaves as green as they will ever be again, indeed I think greener. The whole thing, which will be a perfect shoot a foot long, is compacted into a solid club less than an inch in length. Enclosing this is a fibrous husk which wraps it from all cold. Howsoever bitter the weather the life warmth of the young shoots is most carefully protected by this wrapping. But there is more than this. An air-tight, waterproof coating of hardened pitch is outside of the whole, completing an exceedingly neat, tasteful, and effective seal.

The pitch-pine mother trees have completed their preserving and now sit back and radiate perfume in satisfaction and kindly good will toward the whole world, for this slightly resinous sweetness does not come at all from the pitch-covered buds on the branch tips as I first thought. It seems to emanate from the whole tree. Cut a branch and take it home with you. Strip leaves and buds from it if you will; then smell the wood. It is there. But more than from anywhere else it seems to come from the mature leaves,—those which have borne the burden and the heat of the summer, and now are losing their rich green in a ripening which befits maturity and work well done.

All the evergreens take on this slight tendency to a mellow yellow as the autumn waxes. It is due, no doubt, to the lessening of the sap in the leaves. All winter they will hold it, and when the joy of spring sends his lifeblood bounding back again, it will fade and leave them vigorously green once more.

Crossing the glade again on my homeward way I plucked branches of juniper so thickly studded with blue berries that there seemed scarcely room for the scaly-pointed leaves, and in so doing I stumbled upon the real secret of the dainty odor left by the goddess and her train. For the matured shoots and leaves of the juniper give off a fragrance that is as much more dainty than that of the pitch pine as that is more dainty than the strongly resinous odor of the white pine when cut or bruised.

Cytherea must have smiled upon the humbler juniper as she passed, and the dwarfed and stunted shrub must have caught the warmth of her eyes full in the heart, for it sits snug as the days shorten and radiates a happiness that is perfume, and sends the thought of the goddess to all who pass that way. The stronger odor of the pitch pine carries it far on the soft south wind across the glade and down the path through the pasture, but this is only the vehicle. The dainty essence of perfume which stops you as if a soft hand fell upon your arm floats from the loving heart of the rough and lowly juniper.

The sun of this day on which summer came back set in a pale sky that flushed with a tint of rose leaves, burning long before it died to ashes,—the cool, gray ashes of autumn twilight. Against this the slender tracery of birch twigs stood outlined delicately. Some leaves still cling to the birches, and these were silhouetted against the pale-rose glow in a soft haze that made a shadowy presentment of springtime all along the western sky. The year in its second childhood thus slips happily away from us in dreams of its youth. Through the August midday of the pitch-pine grove we pass to the home path among the birches, and though October dusk slips its cool hand into ours, it is only to lead us toward a western horizon where springtime seems still to wait for us wistfully.