Wood Wanderings

by Winthrop Packard

NOVEMBER WOODS

NOVEMBER is Nature’s stock-taking month, when she suspends her labors, stands aloof from her work, and counts up the dozens, noting them all on her list before she carefully puts them into the winter storehouse. To the very last of October her factory is still running, though on part time. By the first of December she has put things away.

November is the month in which she counts up the gain or loss and is happy or disconsolate, according to the tally. Why else these wonderful clear days on which you may see without a spyglass clear to the other end of your universe? On some of these days Nature smiles in delight over her success, and we say, this is the real Indian summer. She is pleased with the perfection and profuseness of the product. On others you will see her eyes cloud with tears, and sometimes a perfect passion of northeast tempest blots the landscape and drowns the world in a flood of rain. In this case she has discovered that the workers in some special department have been lazy or hampered by some unfortunate condition and their output is a failure.

There are years when the nuts do not mature and the squirrels must migrate or starve. On others the drought so dries the upland grasses that those of next year may not sprout as usual from the roots but must be propagated by seed, which of itself is scarce also because of the dryness. Or excessive rains so flood the lowlands that a thousand swamp and meadow products rot and write the word failure large over a whole department.

For Nature’s successes are by no means easily won. She lays such plans for a hickory tree that if all the blossoms which open in May were to produce fruit the trees’ tough limbs would be torn from their sockets with the weight of it long before maturity. Some years, because of storm or frost, the tree’s crop is a total failure, but the resourceful mother, the moment she notes the death of the embryos, sets the wood to making a more vigorous growth than would have been possible in a fruiting season. Then, though she may weep in November over the loss of nuts, she will be able to smile through her tears at the thought that next year the tree will have far more ripe twigs for the bearing of nuts. Or the tree may produce a thousand nuts and the squirrels be too busy to plant more than a dozen of them. What is true of the hickory tree is true of all other creatures of the vegetable and animal world. Death stalks close upon the heels of birth, and a million fragile lives pass out unnoticed to one that greets our eyes in maturity. No wonder some years November is a month of wailing and Nature lets the storms of December blot the tally sheet with the white forgiveness of the snow before the almanac will agree that the month is half over.

The boundaries of the real month are thus not half so firmly set as that which the calendar proclaims. October may on the one end and December on the other so overlap it, some years, that Nature has hardly time for her bookkeeping. This year I think November came a day or two earlier than the calendar figures it, for the last days of the calendar month of October went out with a perfect paroxysm of weeping.

Nature, even before she fairly got her tablets out for the tally, had a terrible pet about something. I think her grief must be because of the carelessness of man during the summer’s and autumn’s unprecedented drought whereby he has killed with his fires so much of the woodland growth. For other than this it seems to me that the year’s work has been very successful. Never were wild fruits more plentiful. Only on the driest of the upland pastures was there failure. There the fruit set in more than the usual quantity, but in some cases shrivelled before coming to maturity.

There was a tremendous crop of chestnuts this year, with enough hickory and hazel nuts to make the squirrels smile and work overtime in laying them up for the winter. From the June berries which purpled the shad bush to the wild apples that still hang on the woodland trees, gleaming pale-yellow among the rugged tracery of bare branches, production has been plentiful and picking peaceful. Hardly a rainy night, never a rough storm, did we have from the first of May until the end of September. All those trees whose fruiting depends upon windborne pollen which can only float in dry weather had perfect conditions for fertilization. So with those plants, whether shrub or tree or annual or perennial herbs, that depend on insects for the same service. There was no time lost on account of rain.