Pliny, whose work embodies the natural science of his time, tells us that some trees bear no seed. "The only ones," says he, "among the trees that bear nothing whatever, not so much as any seed even, are the tamarisk, which is used only for making brooms, the poplar, the Atinian elm [Ulmus campestris rarely does in England], and the alaternus"; and he adds that "these trees are regarded as sinister [or unhappy, infelices] and are considered inauspicious."

As there is even yet a lingering doubt in many minds with regard to some trees, whether they bear flowers and seed or not, it is the more important to show not only that they do, but for what purpose.

We are so accustomed to see another forest spring up immediately, as a matter of course, when one is cut down (whether from the stump or from the seed), never troubling ourselves about the succession, that we hardly associate seeds with trees, and do not anticipate the time when this regular succession will cease and we shall be obliged to plant, as they do in all old countries. The planters of Europe must therefore have a different and much more correct notion of the value of seeds than we. To speak generally, they know that forest trees spring from seeds; but we know only that they come out of the earth when we cut them down, as regularly as the fur grows on the hides of animals after the summer has thinned it. As time elapses and the resources from which our forests have been supplied fail, we too shall of necessity be more and more convinced of the significance of the seed.

My purpose in this chapter is to show how, according to my observation, our forest trees and other vegetables are planted by Nature.

When, hereabouts, a forest springs up naturally where none of its kind grew before, I do not hesitate to say that it came from seeds. Of the various ways by which trees are known to be propagated—by transplanting, cuttings, and the like—this is the only supposable one under these circumstances. No such forest has ever been known to spring from anything else. If anyone asserts that it sprang from something else, or from nothing, the burden of proof lies with him.

It remains, then, only to show how the seed is transported from where it grows to where it is planted. This is done chiefly by the agency of the wind, water, and animals. The lighter seeds, as those of pines and maples, are transported chiefly by wind and water; the heavier, as acorns and nuts, by animals.

To begin with the pitch pine. All my readers probably are acquainted with its rigid conical fruit, scarcely to be plucked without a knife—so hard and short that it is a pretty good substitute for a stone. Indeed, this is the use to which the Romans once put their kind. They called it the pine nut, and sometimes the apple of the pine, whence pine-apple. It is related that "when Vatinius gave a show of gladiators to conciliate the people, by whom he was much hated, they pelted him with stones. The ediles made an order forbidding the people to throw anything but apples within the arena; and on this the people pelted Vatinius with the apples of the pine tree. The question was, then, whether this was to be considered as a defiance of the law; and the celebrated lawyer Cascellius being consulted, replied, ‘The pine nut, if you throw it at Vatinius, is an apple.’"

If not plucked, these cones hold on all winter and often many years. You see old gray cones, sometimes a circle of them (which the Romans appear to have called azaniae) within two feet of the ground on the trunks of large trees, having been formed there when the tree was young twenty or thirty years before—so persistent are they.

Within this strong, prickly, and pitchy chest are contained about a hundred dark brown seeds in pairs, each pair occupying a separate apartment behind its prickly shield. A very thin membrane or wing about three-fourths of an inch long extends from one end of each seed, which it clasps in its divided extremity like a caged bird holding the seed in its bill and waiting till it shall be released that it may fly away with and plant it.

For already some rumor of the wind has penetrated to this cell, and preparation has been made to meet and use it. According to Darwin, Alphonse De Candolle has remarked that winged seeds are never found in fruits which do not open. They were designed for flight. This wing is so independent of the seed that you can take the latter out and spring it in again, as you do a watch crystal.

The sun and wind, which have the key to these apartments, begin to unlock them with a crackling sound in the second or third fall and continue to do so here and there all winter long, and there they lie exposed with their thin, curved handles upward and outward to the wind, which ever and anon extracts them and conveys them away. If they chance to be released in calm weather, they fall directly to the earth, rapidly whirling all the way; but if there is any wind, they are borne more or less to one side. They remind me most, after all, of some deep-bellied fish—an alewife or shad—with their flanks and a tail curving to this side or that, the whole of whose flexible body is a sort of wing or fin fitted not for the varied and prolonged flight of birds, but to steer and assist its course in the stronger or grosser current in which it floats. Schools of brown fishes which perform this short migration annually.

Nature always adopts the simplest modes which will accomplish her end. If she wishes one seed to fall only a little to one side from a perpendicular line, and so disseminate its kind, perhaps she merely flattens it into a thin-edged disk—with some inequality—so that it will "scale" a little as it descends. In course of time, when it contemplates a more distant and wider flight from the pine-tree tops to the earth, moveable edges, called fins or wings, may be added to this simple form.

The pitch pine is a very seedy tree and is peculiarly bent on extending its domains. It begins to bear when very small—sometimes when less than two feet high.

I have noticed that where, on account of the poverty or rockiness of the soil, these trees find it hard to live at all, they bear the more fruit. I have counted on a solitary pitch pine, which was only three feet high and as broad as high, spreading flat over a rock on a hilltop, more than one hundred cones of different ages. Having scaled this rocky citadel, its first care, though in a crippled state, was to call a hundred followers about it and so get undisputed possession.

Michaux observes that "wherever these trees grow in masses, the cones are dispersed singly over the branches, and … they release the seeds the first autumn after their maturity; but on solitary stocks, the cones are collected in groups of four, five, or even a larger number, and remain closed for several years."

Not only is it the outside trees that bear the most seed, where it is most required, but only a considerable wind, which can transport the seed to a distance, is able commonly to set it free, so that it does not fall at once to the ground, where it would be wasted. All have noticed the dense groves of pitch pine of uniform height, which were perhaps planted in a single gale, and you can often tell what tree the seed came from. In my mind’s eye, and sometimes partially with my bodily eye, I see the seeds from which they sprang falling in a dense shower which reaches twenty or thirty rods on one side, like grain scattered by the hand of the sower.

Sometimes a man cuts off a lot of young pitch pines, leaving only the old parent tree to seed the ground again. They are not commonly noticed till half a dozen years old.

As I went by a pitch-pine wood the other day, I saw a few little ones springing up in the pasture from these seeds which had been blown from the wood. There was a puny one which came from the seed this year, just noticeable in the sod, and I came near mistaking it for a single sprig of moss. It was, as it were, a little green star with many rays, half an inch in diameter, lifted an inch and a half above the ground on a slender stem. What a feeble beginning for so long-lived a tree! By the next year it will be a star of greater magnitude, and in a few years, if not disturbed, these seedlings will alter the face of Nature here. How ominous the presence of these moss-like stars to the grass, heralding its doom! Thus, from pasture this portion of the earth’s surface becomes forest—because the seeds of the pine, and not of moss and grass alone, fell on it. These which are now mistaken for mosses in the grass will perhaps become lofty trees and endure two hundred years.

Unlike the white pine, the pitch pine is opening its cones and dispersing its seed gradually all winter, and it is not only blown far through the air, but slides yet further over the snow and ice. It has often occurred to me that it was one value of a level surface of snow, especially a crusted snow, that by its smoothness it favored the distribution of such seeds as fell on it. I have many times measured the direct distance on a snowy field from the outmost pine seed to the nearest pine to windward, and found it equal to the breadth of the widest pasture. I have seen that the seed thus crossed one of our ponds, which is half a mile wide, and I see no reason why it should not be blown many miles in some cases. In the fall it would be detained by the grass, weeds, and bushes, but the snow having first come to cover up all and make a level surface, the restless pine seeds go dashing over it like an Esquimaux sledge with an invisible team until, losing their wings or meeting with some insuperable obstacle, they lie down once for all, perchance to rise up pines. Nature has her annual sledding to do, as well as we. In a region of snow and ice like ours, this tree can be gradually spread thus from one side of the continent to the other.

By the middle of July, I notice on the shore of the above-mentioned pond, just below the high-water line, many little pitch-pines which have just sprung up amid the stones and sand and muck, whose seed has been blown or drifted across. There are some places for a row of pines along the water’s edge, which at length, after fifteen or twenty years, are tipped over and destroyed by the heaving of the frozen shore.

I noticed lately a little pitch pine which had come up on the sandy railroad embankment in our meadows, just sixty rods by pacing from the nearest pine tree; nor is this uncommon. I have seen a single pitch pine spring up spontaneously in my yard in this village, about half a mile from the nearest of its kind, with a river and its deep valley, and several roads and fences between, and it grows there yet. This tree would soon sow itself in all our yards if they were neglected.

Every year the seed of the pines is blowing thus from our pine woods and falling on all sorts of ground, favorable and unfavorable. When the circumstances are propitious, a forest of pines springs up, especially if the land to leeward is open or has been lately cleared, or plowed, or burned over.

One man accordingly tells me, and there are countless cases like it, that he had a lot of pines, which being cut, shrub oaks came up. He cut and burned and sowed rye, and, it being surrounded by pine woods on three sides, the next year a dense growth of pines filled the ground.

Squirrels also help to disperse the pitch-pine seed.

I notice every fall, especially about the middle of October, a great many pitch-pine twigs or plumes, which have evidently just been gnawed off and left under the trees. They are from one-half to three-fourths of an inch in thickness, and often have three or four branches. I counted this year twenty under one tree, and they were to be seen in all pitch-pine woods. It is plainly the work of squirrels. As I had not chanced to detect their object, I resolved last fall to look into the matter.

Accordingly, thinking it over one night, I said to myself, "Anything so universal and regular, observed wherever the larger squirrels and pitch pines are found, cannot be the result of an accident or freak, but must be connected with the necessities of the animal." I have found that the necessaries of my life are food, clothing, shelter, and fuel; but the squirrels use only food and shelter. I never see these twigs used in constructing their nests; hence, I presume that their motive was to obtain food, and as its seeds are all of the pitch pine that I know them to eat, my swift conclusion was that they cut off these twigs in order to come at the cones, and also to make them more portable. I had no sooner thought this out than I as good as knew it.

A few days after, as I was passing through a pitch-pine wood, where as usual, the ground was strewn with twigs, I observed one eleven inches long and about half an inch thick, cut off close below two closed cones, the stem of one cone also being partly cut. Also in open land three or four rods from this grove, I saw three twigs which had been dropped near together. One was just two feet long and cut off more than a foot below three cones which were still left on it, two on one branch and one on another. One of the others was longer still.

Thus, my theory was confirmed by observation. The squirrels were carrying off these pine boughs with their fruit to a more convenient place either to eat at once or store up. You would be surprised to see what great limbs they carry, and to what distances sometimes. They are stronger than we suppose. A neighbor tells me that he had a gray squirrel which would take a whole and large ear of corn, run out of a broken window of his corn barn and up the side and over the roof, or perhaps high into an elm with it.

Most of the twigs which you see in the woods, however, are smaller, mere single plumes, which have been sheared off above the cones, whether to lighten the load or to come at the cone. They were so generally cut off last fall, when comparatively few pitch pines bore any cones, that I commonly detected the fertile trees when going through a grove by seeing these green twigs strewn on the brown ground beneath them.

It is surprising how rudely the squirrels strip and spoil the trees on which they depend. I often thought what a hue and cry I should have made about it, if they had been orchard trees and belonged to me. Even the pitch pines thus get trimmed after a fashion, and perhaps for their benefit.

In most cases, evidently, they carry off the cone alone; but perhaps a strong squirrel prefers to carry three cones, twig and all, at one trip than come three times after single cones. I frequently see where they have dropped the bare cones, having been interrupted, and I once counted twenty-four such cones quite fresh and unopened brought together under a solitary pine in a field, evidently ready to be transported to another place.

It chanced that I did not see last October where any of these cones had been eaten or stripped, as I often do. I conclude therefore that most of them must have been collected into holes in trees or in the earth, where the squirrels live, and possibly some are buried singly as nuts are.

Think how busy the squirrels are in October, in every pitch-pine grove all over the state, cutting off the twigs and collecting the cones. While the farmer is digging his potatoes and gathering his corn, he little thinks of this harvest of pine cones which the squirrel is gathering in the neighboring woods still more sedulously than himself.

In this way even the squirrels may spread the pine seed far over the field. I frequently see a pitch-pine cone far out in an open field, where it was dropped by a squirrel when on its way toward some tree or wall or stump—or oftener by the side of a fence on which the squirrel travelled at a considerable distance from the woods; and there it will sometimes lie covered by the snow all winter, and not expand and shed its seeds till the snow goes off and it feels the heat of the sun.

The pitch-pine cones have very stout and tough stems, the woody part alone being often a quarter of an inch in diameter; and they are scarcely so long as wide, which makes them hard to come at. But rigid and unmanageable as they are, almost every fresh cone of this kind which you see on the ground was cut off by a squirrel, and you can plainly see the marks of its teeth on the stem. He cuts it as he bends it, and a very few cuts suffice to separate it from the branch.

When he has thus plucked it, sitting on a fence-post or other perch, he begins at the base of the cone and gnaws off the scales one after another, devouring the seeds as he goes, leaving only half a dozen empty scales at the extremity. The close-shaven cone presents thus a pretty flower-like figure, which it would take a long time to produce with a knife.

This plucking and stripping a pine cone is a business which he and his family understand perfectly. It is their forte. I doubt if you could suggest any improvement. After ages of experiment perhaps, their instinct has settled on the same method that our reason would, finally, if we had to open a pine cone with our teeth; and they were thus accomplished long before our race had discovered that the pine cone contained an almond.

Observe more particularly how this one proceeds. He does not prick his fingers, nor pitch his whiskers, nor gnaw into the solid cone, any more than is necessary. Having sheared off the twigs and needles that may be in his way (sometimes even the cheeks of the twig, for like the skillful woodchopper he first deliberately secures room and verge enough), he neatly cuts off the stout stem of the cone with a few strikes of his chisels, and it is his. To be sure, he may let it fall to the ground and look down at it for a moment curiously, as if it were not his, but probably he is taking note where it lies and adding it to the heap of a hundred like it in his mind, and it is only so much the more his for his seeming carelessness. When he comes to open it, he holds it in his hands, a solid embossed cone so hard it almost rings at the touch of his teeth, pausing for a moment, perhaps, not because he does not know how to begin, but only to hear what is in the wind. He knows better than to try to cut off the tip and work his way downward against a chevaux-de-frise of advanced scales and prickles. If there ever was any age of the world when the squirrels opened their cones wrong end foremost, it was not the golden age, surely. He knows better than to gnaw into the side for three-fourths of an inch in the face of many armed shields. But he does not have to think what he knows. Having heard the last Aeolian rumor, he whirls the cone bottom upward in a twinkling, and beginning where the scales are smallest, and the prickles slight or none, and the short stem is cut so close as not to be in his way—for the same strokes which severed it from the twig have exposed its weak side—he proceeds to cut through the thin and tender bases of the scales, and each stroke tells, laying bare at once a couple of seeds. Thus, he strips it as easily as if the scales were chaff, and so rapidly, twirling it as he advances, that you cannot tell how he does it till you drive him off and inspect his unfinished work. Dropping this, he resorts to the pines for another, till quite a pile of scales and of these interesting cores is left on the snow there.

In April of last year I found under one small pitch pine in a little grove of these trees on the top of Lee’s Cliff, a very large heap of cones which had been thus cut off and stripped evidently by the red squirrel the previous winter and fall, they having sat upon some dead stubs a foot or two above the while. Probably there was a hole in the ground there where they lodged. I counted 239 cores of cones under this tree alone, and most of them lay within an area of two feet square upon a mass of the scales one to two inches deep and three or four feet in diameter; showing that these had been stripped by but few squirrels, possibly only one. They had brought them all to this stub to be eaten, in order that they might be near their hole in case of danger. There were also many similar cores of cones under the surrounding pines. They appeared to have devoured all the fruit of that pitch-pine grove; and who had a better right to it?

The red squirrel thus harvests the fruit of the pitch pine annually. His body is about the color of its cone, and he who can open them so dexterously is welcome to what he can find in them. The cones to him who can open them. As for the seed of new plantations, Nature will be contented with the crumbs which fall from his table.

Such are the principal ways in which the pitch-pine wood is planted. I know the history of many of them.

It is pleasant to observe any growth in a wood. There is the tract northeast of Beck Stow’s Swamp, where some years since I used to go a-blackberrying and observed that the pitch pines were beginning to come in; and I have frequently noticed since how fairly they grew, clothing the plain as evenly as if dispersed by art. At first the young pines lined each side of the path like a palisade, they grew so densely, crowding each other to death in this wide world. Eleven years ago I was first aware that I walked in a pitch-pine wood there, and not a blackberry field—which erelong, perchance, I shall survey and lot off for a wood auction, and see the choppers at their work. These trees, I said to myself, are destined for the locomotive’s maw; but fortunately it has changed its diet of late, and their branches, which it has taken so many years to mature, are regarded even by the woodman as trash.

There is also the pitch-pine plain behind James Baker’s, which I remember a bare pasture. Ten years ago it was already an open pitch-pine wood, where I used to cut off long and broad capes in my walk, gliding easily between the trees without disturbing the fretful watchdog, and unseen from the house, whose tinkling industry I heard. Nay, I sometimes went near enough to catch glimpses of a row of shining milk pans between the trees. These are among our pleasantest woods, so open and level—half field, half wood. On the outskirts, the trees are far apart and have room enough, making here and there only a carpet of pine needles, with wiry grass and goldenrod, St. John’s-wort, and blackberry vines, and younger pines between; further in, wild pinks and lady’s slippers in their season; and further still, you come to moss-covered patches, dry, deep, white moss, or almost bare mold, half covered with pine needles. Thus begins the future forest floor.

Nor would I forget the dense pitch-pine wood east of the Deep Cut, which I remember as an open grassy field with a pigeon place in it, where also I used to gather blackberries. It contains now one of our pleasantest wood paths, which we call Thrush Alley, because the wood thrush sings there in the shade of the pines in the heat of the day. I have heard this bird sing in several of these groves where I remembered a bare pasture. It is an era when the wood thrush first sings in a new pine wood.

As for the white pine, you have all observed its clusters of sickle-shaped green cones at the top chiefly of the tallest trees, well nigh inaccessible to man. About the middle of September these turn brown and open in the sun and wind, and, as in the case of the pitch pine, away go the seeds of future forests flying far and wide.

How little observed are the fruits which we do not use! How few attend to the ripening and dispersion of the white-pine seed! In the latter part of September in a fruitful year, the tops of high trees for six or ten feet are quite browned with the cones, hanging with their points downward and just opened. They make a great show even sixty rods off, and it is worth the while to look down from some favorable height over such a forest—to observe such evidence of fertility in this which commonly we do not regard as a fruit-bearing tree. I occasionally go to the white-pine woods merely to look at their crop of cones, just as a farmer visits his orchards in October.

These seeds all fall in September, except a few which are left glued to the cones by the pitch. They have one advantage at least over the pitch pine, that growing commonly in the tops of lofty trees they will be wafted to a greater distance by the wind in proportion as they fall further.

The white pine bears much more sparingly than the pitch, and one would say that the latter, though more difficult to transplant, was more likely, both on account of the abundance of its seeds and their falling all winter, to disperse itself and maintain its ground here. Yet it is to be remembered that the white pine has a wider range, since it not only grows well in open ground, but springs up in the midst of the woods far more readily than the pitch pine.

However, in the fall of 1859 the white pines bore a peculiarly abundant crop, as I observed not only in this town but in all this part of the country and as far off as Worcester. I could see its burden of brown cones half a mile distant.

You may often see amid or beside a pine grove, though it may be thirty or forty years old, a few yet larger and older trees from which their seed came, rising above them like patriarchs surrounded by their children, while a third generation shows itself yet further off.

Short, and on some accounts unfavorable, as the season is during which the white-pine seed is falling, it appears to be blown to no less distance than that of the pitch pine. I frequently pass by some wet and bushy meadow in the midst of open land, which is being rapidly filled with little white pines whose seeds must have been blown fifty or sixty rods at least. They are now rapidly spreading over the northeast part of Fair Haven hillside, though the nearest seed-bearing pines are across the river from thirty to sixty rods off. Also, I notice for a quarter of a mile along the Corner Road beyond Abiel Wheeler’s, where it runs through a broad, open tract, quite a number of white pines springing up against the south wall, which must have come from seed blown from Hubbard’s Grove, some fifty rods east; and I observe the same thing in other parts of the town. They run forward and entrench themselves like the French soldiers in Sevastopol, and ere long we begin to see the plumes waving there.

The last is a single line of trees of various sizes and much interrupted, from seeds which have gradually been caught and protected by the wall; for I find that, however few they may be, they drift according to the same law with snow. Indeed, I am quite satisfied that there is no part of this town so remote from a seed-bearing pine but its seed may be blown thither, and so a pine spring up there. These which we see springing up thus in distant and neglected meadows and by fences show what would happen over all the intervening space if it were not for our cultivation—that there is nothing to prevent their springing up all over the village in a few years but our plows and spades and scythes. They grow slowly at first, but after they get to be four or five feet high they will frequently increase seven feet in the next three years.

For many years the daily traveller along these roads—nay, the proprietor himself—does not notice that there are any pines coming up there, and still less does he consider whence they came; but at last his heir knows himself to be the possessor of a handsome white-pine lot, long after the wood from which the seed came has disappeared.

We need not be surprised at these results when we consider how persevering Nature is and how much time she has to work in. It does not imply any remarkable rapidity or success in her operations. A great pine wood may drop many millions of seeds in one year, but if only half a dozen of them are conveyed a quarter of a mile and lodge against some fence, and only one of these comes up and grows there, in the course of fifteen or twenty years there will be fifteen or twenty young trees there, and they will begin to make a show and betray their origin.

In this haphazard manner Nature surely creates you a forest at last, though as if it were the last thing she were thinking of. By seemingly feeble and stealthy steps—by a geologic pace—she gets over the greatest distances and accomplishes her greatest results. It is a vulgar prejudice that such forests are "spontaneously generated," but science knows that there has not been a sudden new creation in their case but a steady progress according to existing laws, that they came from seeds—that is, are the result of causes still in operation, though we may not be aware that they are operating.

It is a boy’s statement, and does not imply much wisdom, to discover that "little strokes fall great oaks," for the sound of the axe invites our attention to such a catastrophe. We can easily count each stroke as it is given, and all the neighborhood is informed by a loud crash when the deed is consummated; but they are few who consider what little strokes, of a different kind and often repeated, raise great oaks or pines. Scarcely a traveller hears these or turns aside to communicate with that Nature which is steadily dealing them.

Nature works no faster than need be. If she has to produce a bed of cress or radishes, she seems to us swift; but if it is a pine or oak wood, she may seem to us slow or wholly idle, so leisurely and secure is she. She knows that seeds have many other uses than to reproduce their kind. If every acorn of this year’s crop is destroyed, or the pines bear no seed, never fear. She has more years to come. It is not necessary that a pine or an oak should bear fruit every year, as it is that a pea vine should.

However, Nature is not always slow in raising pine woods even to our senses. You have all seen how rapidly, sometimes almost unaccountably, the young white pines spring up in a pasture or clearing. Small forests thus planted soon alter the face of the landscape. Last year perhaps you observed a few little trees there, but next year you find a forest.

In an account of Duxbury in the Massachusetts Historical Collections written in 1793, it is said: "Capt. Samuel Alden, who died twelve years since, recollected the first white pine in the town. Now the eighth part, perhaps, of the woodland is covered with this growth." Pigeons, nuthatches, and other birds devour the seed of the white pine in great quantities, and if the wind alone is not enough, it is easy to see how pigeons may fill their crops with pine seed and then move off much faster than a locomotive to be killed by hundreds in another part of the county, and so plant the white pine where it did not grow before.

If you set out for the first time in your life to collect white-pine seed hereabouts, you will probably be indebted for every one you will get to the labor of the red squirrel. As I have said, this seed ripens in September, when the cones open, and the seed is quickly blown out; but the cones hang on all winter, only falling from time to time in high winds. If you wait till a cone may chance to fall thus, you will surely find it empty. I think that I may venture to say that every white-pine cone that by good rights falls to the earth naturally in this town before opening and losing its seeds (and almost every pitch pine that falls at all) is cut off by a squirrel; and they begin to pluck them long before they are ripe, and when the crop is a small one, as it commonly is, they cut off thus almost every one before it fairly ripens. I think, moreover, that their design, if I may so speak, in cutting them off green is partly to prevent their opening and losing their seeds, for these are the ones for which they dig through the snow in the winter and the only white-pine cones which contain anything then. Most of these cones appear to be soon carried off by them—fresh to holes in the earth.

Though the seed of pines cannot otherwise be relied on commonly when it is more than a year or two old, it is stated in Loudon that "the seeds of most species, when allowed to remain in the cone, preserve their vegetative power for several years." So few sound seeds as there appear to be in these cones, the squirrel may occasionally plant a pine tree, as well as lay up food for itself, and this might explain a pine’s springing up where no seed had fallen for several years—for I often see white-pine cones which have been transported a considerable distance. If you walk through a white-pine wood in the latter part of September, you will find the ground strewn with green cones that have been thus dropped, while those left on the trees are all open. In some woods, every one will be on the ground.

In August and early in September, they are exceedingly busy cutting off cones in all white-pine woods, for they know well the nature of the tree. Perhaps they also store up the seeds separately, for by the middle of September a great part of those left on the ground will have been already stripped by them, they beginning at the base, as with the pitch-pine cone. Many of these, however, cut off late, open of themselves on the ground and shed their seeds there.

The first season that I set out to gather white-pine seed, I was as green at the business as the cones before they have opened and put it off too late. The next year, every one that I got had been gathered for me by the squirrels, but many of these were immature. The third year, I tried to compete with the squirrels and climbed the trees in good season myself. Hear my experience:

September 9th, 1857

To the woods for white-pine cones. Very few trees bear any, and they are on their tops. I can easily manage small trees, fifteen or twenty feet high, climbing till I can reach the dangling green pickle-like fruit with my right hand, while I hold to the main stem with my left; but I am in a pickle when I get one. The cones are now all flowing with pitch, and my hands are soon so covered with it that I cannot easily cast down my booty when I would, it sticks to my fingers so; and when I get down at last and have picked them up, I cannot touch my basket with such hands but carry it on my arm, nor can I pick up my coat which I have taken off unless with my teeth—or else I kick it up and catch it on my arm. Thus I go from tree to tree, rubbing my hands from time to time in brooks and mudholes in the hope of finding something that will remove pitch, as grease does, but in vain. It is the stickiest work I ever did; yet I stick to it. I do not see how the squirrels that gnaw them off and then open them, scale by scale, keep their paws and whiskers clean. They must possess some remedy for pitch that we know nothing of, for they can touch it and not be defiled. What would I not give for the recipe! How fast I could collect cones if I could only contract with a family of squirrels to cut them off for me!—or what if I had a pair of shears eighty feet long and a derrick to wield them with!

At length, after two or three afternoons, I get a bushel of them home, but I have not got at the seeds yet. They are more effectually protected than a chestnut in its burr. I must wait till they please to open and then get pitched once more.

These green cones collected in my chamber have a strong spirituous scent, almost rummy, or like a molasses hogshead, which would probably be agreeable to some.

In short, I found the business far from profitable, for commonly the trees do not bear more than enough for the squirrels.

The seeds of the hemlock and larch are falling all winter and are dispersed in a similar manner to those of the pitch pine. Much hemlock seed is also floated upon the surface of the streams which they overhang. I can thus easily tell when it begins to fall.

So far as I have observed, if coniferous trees bear much seed one year, they bear little or none the next year. In 1859 the white pine, hemlock, and larch bore abundantly, so that the northern birds which feed on their seeds (redpolls and goldfinches and others) were very numerous, and the following spring I saw the crossbills here for the first time in my life. Indeed, I think that I can tell by the numbers of the above birds in our woods whether there is a good crop of these and of birch seeds. But in 1860 I did not chance to see a single fresh hemlock or larch cone, and I am not sure that I saw a ripe white-pine cone of that year—neither did I see any of the above-named birds the following winter.

In the previous winter of 1859-60 I saw large flocks of lesser redpolls feeding on the seeds of the hemlocks—their conical tops, in which the seed was most abundant, being quite alive with them. The snow and ice under the hemlocks on the Assabet were strewn with cones, scales, and seeds, which the wind and the birds had loosened—literally blackened with them for many a rod—and tracked up by redpolls, chickadees, and squirrels, which had been attracted by the seed. A bountiful supply of winter food was here furnished for them. No sooner had a fresh snow fallen and covered up the old layer, than down came a new supply, all the more distinct on the spotless surface. This happened many times during the winter.

As I stood there one day, there came a little flock of chickadees, attracted by me as usual, boldly perching close by; then, descending to the snow and ice, they picked up the hemlock seed which lay all around them, occasionally taking one to a twig and hammering away at it under their claws, in order to separate it from the wing or even from the shell. I have seen the same birds dart down to seedless wings of pitch-pine seeds on the snow and then up again as if disappointed, and I have no doubt that they eat those seeds as well as that of the hemlock.

One old hunter tells me of the pigeons alighting in great numbers on the tops of hemlocks in March, and he thinks that they eat the seed.

The following April I saw the crossbills busily feeding upon and under those same hemlocks—the first crossbills that I ever saw alive.

The same winter I saw flocks of redpolls picking the seeds out of the larch cones. They perch on the slender twigs, which are beaded with cones, and swing and teeter there, while they perseveringly peck at the cones, trying now this one, now that, sometimes picking out and swallowing the seeds quite fast. And thus they helped to disperse them.

I see the young hemlocks and larches springing up on suitable soil, to which the wind has wafted their seed, in the same manner as pines—though they are seldom forced upon my notice since those trees are comparatively rare hereabouts. I saw, for instance, the other day many little larches in the meadow, which had evidently sprung from seed blown from a clump of large ones a dozen rods distant and across a road.

The spruce cones do not open till spring. I see, however, in November where the squirrels have stripped them as they do the pine cones.

The birds said by Wilson and others to feed on pine seed are the two crossbills, which have bills expressly formed to open the cones, the red-bellied nuthatch, purple finch (Giraud), brown creeper, chickadee, pine finch, pine warbler—and I may add the lesser redpoll and pigeon.

Birches, of the four kinds common in this state, bear an abundance of winged seed. On some yellow birches, by the middle of October the short, thick, brown cones are nearly as numerous as the leaves were, causing the trees to appear still a dark mass against the sky.

Birch seed begins to fall in October and continues to fall all winter. It is similar in all our species. The fruit of our commonest kind, the small white birch, consists of numerous pendulous cylindrical aments, composed of imbricated scales, with three winged seeds under each. It is remarkable that it so much resembles the fruit of a very different family of trees, the coniferae, that it is often called by the same name, namely, a strobile or cone (strobos from strejw); and I find that as the scales of the pitch-pine cone are arranged always in just thirteen spiral lines around it, so are the scales of the white-birch cone, making about one turn—as you may easily prove by counting the fine lines made by the projecting points of the middle lobes of the scales. It might be worth the while to inquire why Nature loves the number thirteen in these cases.

The scales of all our birch cones are three lobed, like a typical spearhead (or fléur de luce); but those of this species are peculiarly interesting, having the exact form of stately birds with outspread wings, especially of hawks sailing steadily over the fields, and they never fail to remind me of them when I see them under my feet.

Volatile as these appear and are, the seeds which they cover, and for which they are often mistaken, are practically far more bird-like and are wafted much further by the wind. Indeed, they can easily be separated from the scales by winnowing. They are much smaller and of a livelier brown, with a very broad transparent wing on each side and two little dark brown persistent styles in front, just like an insect with its antennae. They may pass for tiny brown butterflies. {GRAPHIC}

When the cones are perfectly ripe and dry, these scales and seeds, being blown or shaken, begin to flake off together like so much chaff or bran, commencing commonly at the base of the cone, and falling gradually throughout the winter, leaving a bare, thread-like core. Thus, unlike the pines, the whole cone loses its cohesion and is disintegrated.

Each catkin, one inch long by a quarter of an inch wide, contains about one thousand seeds, which would suffice to plant an acre of land with birches seven feet apart each way. No doubt many single trees contain seed enough to plant all the old fields in Concord several times over. At this rate you could carry the seed for a thousand acres in a box of three inches cubed.

The seed is so small, and so exceedingly light and chaffy, that it does not fall to the earth in a perfect calm without many gyrations; and when there is considerable wind, it floats on it almost like a mote—disappearing at once from your sight like those little insects which the Indians call "no-see-’ems."

Some falls at the slightest jar, and some is left tossing about incessantly on the light spray till the latest gales of spring. In sudden gusts of wind such seeds as these, and even much heavier ones, must be carried over our highest hills, not to say mountains, and it is evidently one of the uses of such winds, which occur especially in the fall and spring, to disseminate plants. Alphonse De Candolle quotes Humboldt as saying that M. Bousringault had seen seeds (graines) elevated 5,400 feet (pieds) and fall back in the neighborhood (apparently among the Alps). I think that I could arrange a trap by which I could catch some of the birch seed which might be floating in the air, in very windy weather in the winter or spring in any part of this county.

This is eminently one of those northern "grains" which Nature sows broadcast on the snow and with it—as man does with some seeds occasionally. No sooner has the first snow fallen than I begin to see where these pretty brown bird-like scales and winged seeds have been blown into the numerous hollows of the thin-crusted surface. Indeed, all this part of New England is dusted over with them, throughout almost all woods and many fields, as if they had been regularly sifted on it; and each successive snow is newly covered with them—furnishing ever fresh and accessible repasts to the birds. It would not be easy to find a considerable area in the woodland of this county which is completely clear of them. For how many hundreds of miles this grain is scattered over the earth—under the feet of all walkers, in Boxborough and in Cambridge and the like, and rarely an eye distinguishes it.

Whoever faithfully analyzes a New England snowbank will probably report a certain percentage of birch seed. Where a birch has been bent down and jarred, or run over by a sleigh in a woodland path, you will often see the snow perfectly browned with its fruit so as to be conspicuous a long way off.

It is also blown far over the snow like the pine seed. Walking up our river on the 2d of March 1856—by Mr. Pritchard’s land, where the shores and neighboring fields were comparatively bare of trees—I was surprised to see on the snow over the river a great many birch scales and seeds, though the snow had but recently fallen and there had been but little wind. There was one seed or scale to a square foot; yet the nearest birches were a row of fifteen along a wall thirty rods off. When, leaving the river, I advanced toward these, the seeds became thicker and thicker, till at half a dozen rods from the trees, they quite discolored the snow; while on the other side, or eastward of the birches, there was not one. These trees appeared not to have lost a quarter part of their seeds yet. As I returned up the river, I saw some of their seeds forty rods off, and perhaps in a more favorable direction I might have found them much further; for, as usual, it was chiefly the scales which attracted my attention, and the fine winged seed which it is not easy to distinguish had probably been winnowed from them. It suggested how unwearied Nature is in spreading her seeds. Even the spring does not find her unprovided with birch—aye, and alder and pine—seed. A great proportion of the seed that was carried to a distance lodged in the hollow above the river, and when the river broke up, was carried far away to distant shores and meadows. For, as I find by experiment, though the scales soon sink in water, the seeds float for many days.

I notice accordingly that near meadows where there is a very gentle inclination over which water has flowed and receded, birches often grow in more or less parallel lines, the seed apparently having been left there by a freshet, or else lodged in the parallel waving hollows of the snow.

I observed last summer that the seeds of a few black birches, which grow near one side of one of our ponds (which contains sixty acres), had been drifted to other shores and had just sprung up at high-water mark there.

It is evident that the seeds which are dropped on the surface of a pond or lake, by the wind or any other agent, will be drifted to the shore unless they sink, and thus collected into a comparatively small area—whence their progeny, if fitted for it, may at length spread inland. I have no doubt that if such a pond were to be now dug in the midst of our woods, the willow, birch, alder, maple, and so on would from these and similar causes soon be found skirting its shores, even though none of these trees grew near it before.

Alphonse De Candolle says that M. Dureau "cites a fact according to which seeds of mustard and of birch preserve their vitality after twenty years’ immersion in fresh water."

You will often see white birches growing densely in perfectly straight rows in the ruts of old woodpaths now grown up, the seed having been blown into the long hollows in the snow above the ruts.

Birch seed being thus scattered over the country like a fine grain or a shower of dust, which most do not distinguish for seed, suggests how still more impalpable seeds, like those of fungi, are diffused through the atmosphere—and enables us to realize that truth.

No wonder, then, that the white birch is so prevalent and characteristic a tree with us and that the seedling birches spring up every year on so many neglected spots, but especially where the surface has been cleared or burned.

I noticed the other day a little white birch a foot high which had sprung up in the gutter on the main street in front of my house, and it looked about as strange there as it would in State Street in Boston. It had perhaps been wafted thither in some gale or blown out of a woodman’s cart. It suggested how surely and soon the forest would prevail here again if the village were deserted.

Yet it is stated in Loudon’s Arboretum that the small white birch is "rarely found in groups; and single trees are met with only at considerable intervals." This is not true of this part of the country. As a consequence of its seeds being almost universally dispersed, and the soil being adapted to it, it not only forms peculiarly dense and exclusive thickets in open land but is pretty generally distributed throughout pine and oak woods. So that it is very common hereabouts to cut out all the birches when they begin to decay, and leave the longer-lived trees, which are only one-fourth or half grown and are still as dense as they ought to be. If the seeds fall on water, they are drifted to the shore and spring up there, though they are very often killed by the water standing long around them.

It is generally observed that the canoe birch is one of the first and commonest trees to spring up when an evergreen forest is burned, in Maine and elsewhere in the north, forming dense and extensive woods as if by magic where, as is stated, this tree was "not before known." But it is forgotten, or not known, how abundant and volatile the seeds of the birch are, and that these trees are almost universally distributed throughout those woods. Within the last fifteen years I have had occasion to make a fire out of doors in the wilds of Maine about a hundred times, in places wide apart, and I do not remember that I ever failed to find birch bark at hand for kindling. It is the common kindling stuff.

Blodget, in his Climatology, says, "The birch abounds in such forests as exist at the Arctic Circle, and for all the distance southward to the 41st parallel it is common in the woodlands, both of the general surface and of the highest mountains." It appears that the same is true of the north of Europe and of Asia.

Loudon, speaking of the European variety of the common white birch, says, "According to Pallas, the birch is more common than any other tree throughout the whole of the Russian Empire; being found in every wood and grove from the Baltic Sea to the Eastern Ocean." Loudon also learns from a French author that "in Prussia, the birch is planted everywhere; and it is considered to afford security against a dearth of fuel, and to insure the prosperity of the woods by the dissemination of its seeds, which fill up every blank that occurs."

Seedling white birches can easily be obtained for transplanting. They are one of the earliest shrubs to leaf out, and so are easily detected. In a walk in the spring of 1859, coming across a bed of them, seedlings of the previous year, in the grass by the side of an old grain field, and knowing that a neighbor wanted to get a quantity of birches, I pulled up just a hundred of them, to see what I could do, and bound them in moss at the next swamp I came to. The next time I met my neighbor, I took this package out of my pocket and presented him with one hundred birch trees for his plantation. I could have collected a thousand thus in an hour or two; but I would recommend to let them grow two or three years before transplanting, when they will bear the drought better. In August 1861 I found sixty of these birches alive and from one to five feet high.

As it comes up commonly in open land and in exhausted soil, this is in some places called old-field birch.

I frequently see a young birch forest springing up very densely over a large tract which has been neglected only a year or two, tinging it pink with their twigs, and I have been surprised when the owner, as if he had never noticed this godsend, has concluded that he will skim that pasture once more, get one more crop of rye from it, before he lets it lie fallow—and so destroyed some such two-year-old birch wood, in which I could not help taking an interest, though he knew nothing about it. Having in the meanwhile cut down the seed trees, he will now wait twenty years perhaps in the expectation of seeing a forest spring up; whereas, if he had let them alone he would have had a handsome birch wood, ready to be cut, in two-thirds that time. In 1845 or 1846 I pulled up a white birch some two and a half feet high in the woods, brought it home in my hand, and set it out in my yard. After ten years it was much larger than most birches when they are set. It is now [blank space in manuscript] inches in circumference at one foot from the ground.

If the winds are not amply sufficient, we may be indebted to the various birds which feed on the birch seed and shake down ten times as much as they consume. When this seed is most abundant, great flocks of lesser redpolls come down from the north to feed on it and are our prevailing winter bird. They alight on the birches and shake and rend the cones, then swarm on the snow beneath, busily picking up the seed in the copses. Though there may be but few birches, white or black, in the midst of a wood, these birds distinguish their tops from afar. When I hear their notes, I look round for a birch and generally descry them on its top. Mudie says, "It is very pretty to watch one picking the catkins on the long pendulous twigs of a weeping birch over a mountain stream. These twigs are often twenty feet long, and little thicker than packthread. On the points of these the little birds may sometimes be seen, swinging backwards and forwards like the bobs of pendulums, busy feeding, and never losing their perch."

I also see the goldfinch, which the last so much resemble, eating the birch seed in the same manner.

But, to say nothing of these cones on the trees, we have seen what a bountiful table is already spread for the birds, and is kept spread for them all winter, on the snow beneath, all over the country.

The seeds of the alder, which is closely allied to the birch, are distributed in a somewhat similar manner, though they are not winged. They too are falling all winter and dusting the snow beneath and around the bushes, and being flat and thin edged—though both larger and heavier than the birch—they may be blown to a considerable distance. There is, of course, less need that they be winged, since they grow along streams or in wet places, whither their seeds may be floated in freshets; but the birches, though they have a wide range, grow chiefly in dry soil, often on the tops of dry hills. This may account for the fact that one of our alders, the mountain alder, which grows on mountains in the northern part of New England, has winged seeds, apparently in order that the seeds may be spread from one ravine to another and also attain to higher levels.

The seed of the hoary alder floats at first, but afterward sinks to the bottom. I see it falling still and floating off in the spring, as soon as the ice melts, and also washed up in windrows on the shore, in such places as the trees commonly occupy. The farmers, accordingly, often see it springing up in their meadows in pretty straight lines, corresponding to some high-water mark. It is also drifted into shallow bays when the water is high, and there form at last an alder grove, what the French call an aulnage, a convenient word for which we have no equivalent in English.

The same birds feed on the alder as on the birch seeds. Frequently, as I am walking up our frozen and snowy river, I see a flock of lesser redpolls eating the seeds of the alder by the riverside, picking them out of the cones as they do the larch and hemlock seeds, often hanging head downward about it; and I see where they have run underneath and picked up the fallen seeds, which they perhaps have shaken down, making pretty meandering chain-like tracks in two parallel lines.

{GRAPHIC 2}

I even see where squirrels have fed on alder seeds, stripping the cones just as they do the pine cones, and this suggests that they may also feed on the birch seeds, which it requires no such trouble to come at.

The maple seed is another kind which is distributed both by wind and water, as well as by animals. All New Englanders are familiar with the very handsome scarlet fruit of the red maple, and they who paddle on our river may observe the much larger keys of the white maple floating on its surface about the 1st of June. They are nearly two inches long by one-half inch wide, with veined inner edges to the wings like green moths, ready to bear off their seeds. I notice that their fall takes place about the time that the great emperor moth (Attaeus cecropia) comes out of its chrysalis, and I sometimes find them in the morning wrecked on the surface of the river amid the maple seeds. The seed of the sugar maple does not ripen until the first severe frosts of the fall, generally in October, and many hold on till winter.

Gerarde’s old account of a European species will suffice for all. Having described the flowers, he adds, "After them cometh up long fruit fastened together by couples, one right against another, with kernels bumping out near to the place in which they are combined; in all the other parts flat and thin like unto parchment, or resembling the innermost wings of grasshoppers." Being conspicuously nerved, these have more resemblance to wings than the seed of the pines.

In all our maples a thin membrane, in appearance much like an insect’s wing, grows over and around the seed while the latter is being developed within its base. Indeed, this is often perfectly developed, though the seed is abortive—Nature being, you would say, more sure to provide the means of transporting the seed than to provide the seed to be transported. In other words, a beautiful thin sack is woven around the seed, with a handle to it such as the wind can take hold of, and it is then committed to the wind, expressly that it may transport the seed and extend the range of the species; and this it does as effectually as when seeds are sent by mail in a different kind of sack from the Patent Office. There is a Patent Office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.

It is remarkable how commonly the white maple is found on the banks of rivers and in the swamps which border them. It is accordingly called by some the river maple. It is very local in this town, being confined, so far as I have observed, to the immediate bank of the Assabet, and of the Concord or the main stream below its mouth, where it is a characteristic tree; but it is not found on the Concord above the mouth of the Assabet for some ten miles, though it reappears higher up in Sudbury. It is undoubtedly far more common in the section of country watered by the Assabet, and its seeds have probably come down from that way. Most other trees, even including the red maple, if they stand by the water’s edge, show some timidity or reserve at least, holding up their boughs as if they were afraid they would be wetted; but the white maple was evidently made to stand on the bank with the black willow and trail its branches in the stream as one of its peculiar ornaments. Probably its great seeds are more indebted to the water than the wind for their transportation.

The red maple forms dense woods by itself in low ground almost anywhere, called maple swamps, and it is also found scattered throughout other woods, both on low and high ground, though it does not attain to perfection on high ground.

About the middle of May, the red maples along the edges of swamps, their fruit being nearly ripe, are among the most beautiful objects in the landscape, especially if seen in a favorable light with respect to the sun. The keys are high colored, a sort of pink scarlet commonly, dangling at the end of peduncles three inches or more in length and only a little darker shade than themselves. The lit masses of these double samarae, with their peduncles gracefully arching upward and outward a little before they curve downward in order to spread the fruit and give it room, are unequally disposed along the branches, where they tremble in the wind and are often tangled by it. Like the flower of the shadbush, this handsome fruit is seen for the most part against bare twigs, it is so much in advance of its own and of other leaves.

Early in June the causeways are strewn with the seed blown far and wide, and, a month later perhaps, I am surprised to see along our river dense groves of the young maples an inch or more high, which have sprung from seed of the same year, in pure sand, whither it has been drifted and the requisite moisture supplied, at the water’s edge—especially on the shores, whether sandy or muddy, of bays where there is an eddy.

If you look carefully through a dense red-maple swamp anywhere at midsummer, you will commonly find many of these little maples—but only in the most favorable spots, as in the little beds of sphagnum, which appear to have concealed the seed at the same time that they afforded the necessary moisture. There is the little tree already deeply rooted, while the now useless seed, with its fragile wing half wasted away, lies empty nearby, no longer attached to the plant and as if wholly unrelated to it. So speedily has it performed its office.

I noticed last September where a great many little red maples had sprung up in a potato field, apparently since the last plowing or cultivating of that year. They extended more or less thickly as much as eleven rods in a northwesterly direction from a small tree, the only red maple in that neighborhood, occupying an oval or conical space as the seed was blown, and it was evidently owing to the land having been cultivated that year that the seed vegetated there. The previous year, and for many years, it had been a pasture, and no one suspected that any maple seed fell on it. It is evident that land may be kept as a pasture and covered with grass any number of years, and though there are maples adjacent to it, none of the seed catches in it; but at last it is plowed, and that year the seed which falls on it may germinate; and if it chances not to be plowed again, and cattle are kept out, you may have a maple wood there. So of other light-seeded trees.

The sugar maple, though it is called the most common species in the United States, I have found indigenous in only one place in this town. It grows chiefly on high land (hills and mountains). Since it retains some of its seeds so late, I suspect that their distribution may be somewhat aided by the snow.

Animals also may have something to do with the transportation of maple seed. Loudon recommends to plant it in the spring rather than in the fall, to avoid the moles which devour it.

The 13th of May 1858, as I sat in my boat in a calm and sunny bay on the Concord, just above the mouth of the Assabet, I saw a red squirrel steal slyly up a red maple as if he were in search of a bird’s nest, though it was early for most kinds, and I thought I would see what he was at. He crept far out on the slender twigs, which bent beneath him, and, reaching with his neck, nibbled off the clusters of the fruit, sometimes bending them within reach with his paw, and then drawing back a little and squatting on the branch, he voraciously devoured the half-grown keys as if they were a sweet and luscious fruit to him, using his paws to direct or stuff them into his mouth. Bunch after bunch he plucked and ate, letting many fall, and he made an ample if not sumptuous feast, the whole tree hanging red with fruit around him. It seemed like a fairy fruit, as I sat looking toward the sun, with the red keys made all glowing and transparent by its rays between me and the body of the squirrel perched high on that slender twig. It was certainly a cheering sight; and I thought what an abundance and variety of food was now ready for him. At length, when the wind suddenly began to blow hard and shake the twig on which he sat, he quickly ran down a dozen feet.

This will partly account for the rapid disappearance of maple seeds after their fall. You will be surprised on looking, at midsummer, through a large maple swamp which six weeks before was red with seed falling in showers around, at the very small number of maple seeds to be found there, and probably some of these will be empty. You do not generally find any correspondingly dense groves of little trees springing up, but comparatively few, where the seeds have fallen into crevices in the moss and leaves and so escaped being devoured.

By the 10th of May at least, the winged seeds or samarae of the elms give them a leafy appearance, or as if covered with little hops, before the leaf buds are unfolded. A day or two later, especially after rain in the night, you will see the seed generally fallen or falling. It strews not only the streets and puddles but the surface of the river, floating off in green patches down the stream and over the meadows to plant other shores, and thus these trees are found bordering the stream. This must be the earliest of trees and shrubs to go to seed with us.

All gardeners know that it is somewhat troublesome to keep their borders clean of the young trees. The seeds lodge against fences, and in a neglected garden more than enough elms spring up thus to set before the house. Even this seed is sought after by birds, and so also distributed. Kalm, in the account of his travels in this country more than a hundred years ago, says that when he was near Lake Champlain one of his companions shot a great number of pigeons "and gave us some, in which we found a great quantity of the seeds of the elm, which evidently demonstrated the care of Providence in supplying them with food; for in May the seeds of the red maple, which abounds here, are ripe and drop from the trees and are eaten by the pigeons during that time; afterwards the seeds of the elm ripen, which then become their food till other seeds ripen for them." However, according to my observation, the elm seed ripens before that of the red maple. I have observed that the rose-breasted grosbeak feeds on the seed of the elm.

So also the white ash, whose knife-shaped seeds are said to remain on often all winter, is dispersed in a similar manner to the elm and maple, springing up in corners and along fences where the seed had been caught and defended—and also floating off on the streams in whose neighborhood it grows.

The black ash, which is such a lover of the water, is still more indebted to it for the transportation of its seed.

I often see a small clump of maples, elms, or ash trees, and various shrubs in the midst of our river meadows, growing about a rock which is concealed by their leaves; or sometimes, on a firmer shore, two or three elms stand close around a bare rock, which lifts its head above the water in the spring as if protecting it—preventing its being wasted away—and my first thought is how it might have floated in between them. But in truth they owe their origin and preservation to it. It first detained the floating seed, protected the young trees, and now preserves the very soil in which they grow.

Thus, the boulder dropped anciently in a meadow makes at length a clump of trees there and is concealed by its beneficiaries.

As for willows and poplars, their downy seeds fill the air in May and June and also form a thick scum on the surface of water. The barren and fertile flowers are almost always on separate plants. It chances that most of the foreign white willows set out on our causeways are sterile. You can easily distinguish the fertile ones at a distance, when the pods are ripe and bursting, by their hoariness. It is said that no sterile weeping willows have been introduced into this country, that we have but one-half the tree, and accordingly no perfect seeds are formed here. Also, I have detected but one sex of two of the indigenous willows common on the brink of our river, and most of our balm of Gileads are fertile ones.

The fertile catkins of the willow are those green caterpillar-like ones, commonly an inch or more in length, which develop themselves rapidly after the sterile yellow ones are fallen or effete. A single catkin consists of from twenty-five to one hundred little pods, more or less ovate and beaked, each of which is closely packed with cotton, in which are numerous seeds so small that they can scarcely be discerned by ordinary eyes. At maturity the pod opens its beaks, each half curving backwards, and releases its downy contents like the milkweed. Except for size, it is much as if you had a hundred milkweed pods arranged cylindrically around a pole.

The seed is still smaller and lighter than that of the birch—a mere atom, as I measure, almost one-sixteenth of an inch in length by one quarter as much in width—and is surrounded at the base by a tuft of cotton-like hairs about a quarter of an inch long rising irregularly around and above it. These render it the most buoyant of the seeds of any of our trees. It is borne the furthest horizontally with the least wind. It falls very slowly, even in the still air of a chamber, and rapidly ascends in the heated air over a stove. It floats the most like gossamer of any, in a meandering manner and, being enveloped in this cobwebby tuft somewhat like a spider, the seed is hard to detect. It would take a delicate gin indeed to separate these seeds from their cotton.

By the 13th of May the very earliest of our willows (Salix discolor), about the warm edges of meadows, show great green wands, a foot or two long, consisting of curved worm-like catkins three inches long. Like the fruit of the elm, they form conspicuous masses of green before the leaves are noticeable. But some have now begun to burst and show their down, and thus it is the next of our trees and shrubs to shed its seeds after the elm.

Three or four days later, in dry hollows in the woods and by woodsides, the Salix humilis, and in high and very dry woodpaths the smallest of our willows, Salix tristis, begin to show their down. The twigs of the latter are soon thickly covered with cotton, like hoary wands, containing little green seeds like excrements of caterpillars.

At the same time also, the down of the early aspen (Populus tremuloides) begins to appear. The Populus grandidentata is considerably later. The pods of these are subject to a singular monstrosity, growing very large and turning bright yellow, so that they look like a handsome ripe fruit.

In the first half of June, willow down and seeds of various species are blowing over the causeways and meadows.

On June 9th, 1860, we had half a dozen distinct summer showers, from black clouds suddenly wafted up from the west and northeast, and also some thunder and large hail. Standing on the Mill Dam in the afternoon, just after one of these showers, I noticed the air as high as the roofs full of some kind of down, which at first I mistook for feathers or lint from some chamber. It rose and fell just like a flight of ephemerae, or like huge white dancing motes, from time to time coming to the earth. Next, I supposed it to be some gauzy, light-winged insect. It was driven by a slight current of air between and over the buildings and went flying in a stream all along the street, and it was very distinct in the moist air, seen against the dark clouds still lingering in the west. The shopkeepers stood in their doorways wondering what it could be. This was white-willow down which the rain had loosened, and the succeeding slight breeze set a-going, bearing its minute blackish seed in its midst. The earth having just been moistened, this was the best time to sow it. I traced it to its source in a large willow twenty rods distant and a dozen rods from the street, behind the blacksmith’s shop.

Such is the way in which this tree sows its seed, and possibly some of these downy atoms, which strike your cheek without your being conscious of it, may come to be pollards five feet in diameter.

Again a week later, on the 15th of June, being on the Concord River, I noticed something whitening the leeward shore, where there was a sort of bay, a gap in the black-willow and button bushes. It was conspicuously white for two or three rods and reminded me of white rags which I once saw washed up from a wreck on the seashore, also of feathers. Turning aside to it, I found it to be the down of the white willow, as usual full of little seeds, collected by the wind, like a dense white foam a foot or two wide along the water’s edge, covering the surface like a fleece or batting, and also heaped or ridged like foam on the outer edge. I had not thought of willow down before, because the white willow does not border the river, and it was not time for the black willows in that neighborhood. The wind was southwest, and it had come from some white willows on a causeway twenty rods off in that direction, having first been blown fifteen rods over land.

This downiness is one of the peculiarities by which willows and poplars are generally known. It is a common objection to the balm of Gilead that its down litters the yard—and one species, the Populus laevigatus, which does not grow in Concord, is called cottonwood.

Pliny thought that the willow lost its seed before it attained to maturity, going off into a cobweb—"in araneam abit." Homer, in the Odyssey, refers to the willow as wlesicárpou, which Pliny and some commentators interpret to mean "fruit-losing," though others suppose it to mean "that produces barrenness." Circe, directing Ulysses to the Infernal Regions, says (according to Pope’s translation):

Soon shalt thou reach old Ocean’s utmost ends,
Where to the main the shelving shore descends;
The barren trees of Proserpine’s black woods,
Poplars and willows trembling o’er the floods.

From this I infer that the shores of the Styx must present an appearance almost exactly like those of the Saskatchewan and Assineboin and many of our northwestern prairie rivers. The poets get their idea of the Infernal Regions from the most remote and barren part of the Supernal Regions. The explorers of our immense northwest plains, from Mackenzie to Hind, report that the prevailing trees, and these are confined to the immediate river valleys, are small aspens and willows; and some think that if the prairies were not annually burned by the Indians, these at last might make a soil for nobler forests.

I have often noticed in the wilds of Maine, and even hereabouts, how rapidly the poplar springs up on burnt lands. It is remarkable that just those trees whose seeds are the finest and lightest should be the most widely dispersed—the pioneers among trees, as it were, especially in more northern and barren regions. Their tiny seed is buoyed up and wafted far through the atmosphere, and speedily clothes the burnt tracts of all British America and our own northern wilds, affording both food and shelter for the beaver and the hare; and the water also assists in transporting them, while the heavy-seeded trees for which they may prepare the way are comparatively slow to spread themselves.

No soil is so dry and sandy, none so wet, scarcely any so alpine or arctic, but it is the peculiar habitat of some species of willow. When I was at the White Mountains in July 1858, considerable tracts of its alpine region were hoary with the down of the little bearberry willow (Salix uva-ursi), a densely tufted trailing shrub on which you trod as on moss. Its seeds were just bursting away with irrepressible elasticity and buoyancy, and spreading its kind from peak to peak along the White Mountain range. Another also found there, Salix herbacea, the smallest of all willows if not of all shrubs, is said, together with the Salix arctica, to extend the furthest northward of all woody plants.

Though we do not commonly observe these seeds floating through the air, yet suitable tests will almost everywhere reveal them. If you lay bare any spot in our woods, however sandy, by a railroad cutting for instance, or if the frost prevents other trees from springing up there, no shrub or tree is surer to plant itself there sooner or later than a willow (Salix humilis or Salix tristis) or poplar.

The seeds of the poplar seem, like those of the milkweed, to settle mostly in hollows, where there is a lull of the wind. Or they may happen to grow there chiefly because these places, being frosty, are slow to be clothed by less hardy plants. In this neighborhood there are many such poplar hollows.

Build a causeway through almost any open meadow and, if man does not interfere, it will soon be fringed on each side with a hedge of willows (not to mention alders and so on), though none may have grown near there before and no plants or seeds have been introduced by man. Hence, man has learned to protect his causeways against floods by setting willows of the largest species there.

About 1844, when our railroad was built, there was a large, open tract, for the most part meadow, south of the west end of the village and between it and the woods, in which no bushes of any consequence were allowed to grow. Through this the railroad causeway, a sandbank fifteen or more feet in height, was built, running north and south about at right angles with the river; and some ten years afterward I was struck by the fact that a continuous natural willow hedge had been formed, especially on the east side of the embankment along its base, where there was a fence beginning about half a mile from the river and stretching an equal distance to the woods. This hedge was, of course, as straight as the railroad or its bounding fence.

Here was, in fact, quite a natural Salictum, very convenient for me to study, consisting of eight species of willows, or about one half of all the kinds that I find in Concord: namely, Salix rostrata, humilis, discolor, alba, torreyana, sericea, pedicellaris, and lucida—all but one indigenous. You might have thought that the seeds or twigs were brought with the sand when the causeway was built, from the neighboring deep cut in the woods; but only the first three of these willows at most grew there. The last four were not to be found elsewhere nearer than the river meadows, half a mile northward, the other side of the village—and indeed, they are in this town, generally speaking, confined to the river’s brink and the adjacent meadows. Especially I should be surprised to find the last two in places remote from the river meadows, so local are they here. The Salix alba is the only one which I know to have grown near the causeway before.

Hence, I saw that the seeds of at least one-half of these kinds, and probably most of the others, had been blown hither from a distance and were caught by the bank lodging against its foot, somewhat as a snowdrift accumulates there; for I saw several ash trees among them, which had come from an ash ten rods east in the meadow, though none had sprung up elsewhere. There were also a few alders, elms, birch, poplars, and some elder. Thus, if the other conditions are favorable, you may surely expect the willows to spring up, for there will always be found seed enough of these trees floating in the air.

For years a willow might not have chanced to take root in the open meadow, but run a barrier like this through it, and in a short time it will be lined with them; for it both collects the seeds and defends the plants against man himself, as well as other foes. They plant themselves along its base only, as exclusively as along the shores of a river. The sandbank is a shore to them, and the meadow a lake; for here they enjoy the warmth and shelter of the sand while their roots are revelling in the moisture of the meadow. The very trees and weeds, if we consider their origin, have often drifted thus like snow against the fences and hillsides, where their growth is encouraged and protected.

How impatient, how rampant, how precocious these osiers. Some derive their Latin name Salix from salire, "to leap," they spring up so rapidly—they are so salient. They have hardly made two shoots from the sand in as many springs, when silvery catkins burst out along them, and anon golden blossoms and downy seeds, spreading their race with incredible rapidity. Thus, they multiply and clan together, taking advantage even of the railroad, which elsewhere invades and disturbs the domains of the trees.

But though the seeds of the willow thus annually fill the air with their lint, being wafted to every cranny in the woods and meadows, apparently only one in a million gets to be a shrub or tree. Nevertheless, that suffices; and Nature’s purpose is completely answered. Many of the Salix alba have been set along our causeways, but very few have sprung up naturally and maintained their ground elsewhere, and I suspect that more of these have come from twigs accidentally dropped than from seeds. Even the few which have planted themselves with the black willow on the brink of the stream may have sprung from twigs which have been drifted from the causeways. The oldest and largest of these trees standing about houses, if we may believe tradition, have but one history, the same story being told of nearly all. The portly grandfather who sits within remembers that when he was a little boy playing horse in the yard, he at length stuck his willow switch in the ground and forgot it, and now it has grown to yonder tree, which all travellers admire. Of course, it will not do to let many of these willow seeds, comparatively, succeed, for if every white willow seed were to become a tree like this, in a few years the entire mass of the planet would be converted into willow woods, which is not Nature’s design.

Another foreign species, the Salix purpurea, came into this town by accident a few years ago, as a withe tied round a bundle of other trees. A curious gardener stuck it in the ground, and now it has descendants.

About the middle of June, the black willow, which borders our river, goes to seed, and its down begins to fall on the water and continues to fall for more than a month. It is most conspicuous on the trees in the last week of this month, giving them a particolored or spotted white-and-green look, quite interesting, like a fruit. It is then also most abundant on the water.

Some of these seeds, which I put in a tumbler in my window on the 7th of June, germinated in two days, showing little roundish green leaves. This surprised and interested me because botanists generally complain of the great difficulty of making willow seed germinate.

I think that I see how this tree is propagated. Its minute brown seeds, just perceptible in the midst of the cotton, are wafted with this to the water—most abundantly about the 25th of June—and there they drift and form a thick white scum, together with other matter, especially against some alder or other fallen or drooping shrub by the side of the stream, where there is less current than usual. This scum commonly takes the form of narrow crescents, ten or fifteen feet long, at right angles with the bank and curving downstream, and is so thick and white as to remind me of hoar-frost crystals. There within two or three days a great many germinate and show their two little roundish green leaflets above the white, more or less tinging with green the surface of the scum, somewhat like grass seed in a tumbler of cotton and water. Many of these are drifted in amid the buttonbushes, willows, and other shrubs and the sedge along the riverside; and perhaps the water falling just at this time when they have put forth little fibers, they are gently deposited on the mud just left bare in the shade, and thus probably many of them have a chance to become perfect plants. But if they do not drop into sufficiently shallow water and are not left on the mud at the right time, they probably perish. I have seen the mud in many such places green with them, and perhaps the seed was often blown directly through the air to such localities.

But if they do not succeed in this way, they have other resources. For instance, like some other species along our river, this, by a singular provision, is so brittle at the base of the twigs that they break on the least touch, as if cut square off—though they are as tough above as they are brittle below and could no doubt be twisted into a strong cable by which to moor your vessel, a use to which willow twigs are put in some countries. But these twigs are only thus shed like seeds which float away and plant themselves in the first bank on which they lodge.

One June I noticed, in a mass of damp shavings, leaves, and sand left bare on the sandy shore of the Assabet, a little prostrate black willow just coming into flower; and pulling it up I found it to be a twig sixteen inches long, two-thirds buried in the damp mass. This was probably broken off by the ice, brought down, washed up, and buried there like a layer, and now for two-thirds its length it had put out rootlets an inch or two long abundantly, and leaves and catkins from the part above ground, and thus you had a tree which might at length wave high over the shore. So vivacious is this willow, availing itself of every accident to spread along the river’s bank. The ice that strips it and breaks it down only disperses it the more widely.

I commonly litter my boat with a shower of these twigs whenever I run into the black willows, for they are low and spreading, even resting on the water; and heretofore I had ignorantly pitied the hard fate of the tree that was made so brittle and not yielding like a reed. But now I admired its invulnerability. I would gladly hang my harp on such a willow, if so I might derive inspiration from it. Sitting down by the shore of the Concord, I could almost have wept for joy at the discovery of it.

Ah willow, willow, would that I always possessed thy good spirits; would that I were as tenacious of life, as withy, as quick to get over my hurts.

I do not know what they mean who call the willow the emblem of despairing love!—who tell of

"the willow worn by forlorn paramour!"

It is rather the emblem of triumphant love and sympathy with all Nature. It may droop, it is so lithe, but it never weeps. The willow of Babylon blooms not the less hopefully here, though its other half is not in the New World at all and never has been. It droops not to commemorate David’s tears, but rather to remind us how on the Euphrates once it snatched the crown from Alexander’s head.

No wonder that willow wood was anciently in demand for bucklers; for, like the whole tree, it is not only soft and pliant but tough and resilient, not splitting at the first blow but closing its wounds at once and refusing to transmit its hurts. It is a tree whose ordinary fate it is to be cut down every two or three years, and yet it neither dies nor weeps but puts forth shoots which are all the more vigorous and brighter for it, and it lives as long as most. It is observed in Fuller’s Worthies that "this tree delighteth in moist places and is triumphant in the Isle of Ely, where the roots strengthen their banks, and lop affords fuel for their fire. It groweth incredibly fast, it being a by-word in this country that the profit by willows will buy the owner a horse before that by other trees will pay for his saddle."

Herodotus says that the Scythians divined by the help of willow rods, and where could they have found any better twigs for such a purpose? I begin to be a diviner myself at the first sight of one.

When I pass by a twig of willow, though of the slenderest kind, rising above the sedge in some dry hollow early in December, or above the snow in midwinter, my spirits rise as if it were an oasis in the desert. The very name "sallow" (salix, from the Celtic sal, "near," and lis, "water") suggests that there is some natural sap or blood flowing there. It is a divining wand that has not failed but stands with its root in the fountain.

Aye, the willow is no tree for suicides. It never despairs. Is there no moisture longer in Nature which it can transmute into sap? It is the emblem of youth, joy, and everlasting life. Where is the winter of its discontent? Scarcely is its growth restrained by any season, but its silvery down begins to peep forth in the warmest days in January.

Nor were poplars ever the weeping sisters of Phaeton, as some pretend, for nothing rejoices them more than the sight of the sun’s chariot, and little wreck they who drives it.

It would perhaps be shorter to tell how such a tree as the willow does not propagate itself than how it does. I do not know of any animals which disseminate it, unless those birds which use the down in their nests may do so. Jardine, in a note to Wilson, says that the nests of the lesser redpoll, which he has often found in a young fir plantation in the north of Britain, being constructed late in the season, "were invariably lined with the wool of willow catkins." This may sometimes be the case with our goldfinches’ nests. Mudie says that the English goldfinch sometimes lines its nest with willow down. Wilson says that the purple finch feeds on the seeds of the poplar.

The buttonwood, according to Michaux the largest deciduous tree in this latitude, has seeds which, though much larger than those of the birch and willow, are smaller than those of most garden vegetables. Each of its balls, which are about seven-eighths of an inch in diameter, consists of three or four hundred club-shaped seeds about a quarter of an inch long, standing on their points like pins closely packed in a globular pin-cushion, surrounded at the base by a bristly down of a tawny color, which answers the purpose of a parachute. These balls, dangling at the end of long but tough and fibrous stems, on lofty trees—and when there is a small crop, on the tops of the trees, as I have noticed—are shaken and tossed about by the storms of winter and spring and so gradually loosened and the seeds set free, perhaps in a driving snowstorm. Under these circumstances the seed though it is not remarkably buoyant, stands a chance of being carried a long way. I have noticed that it sows itself readily anywhere within ten or twenty rods of the parent tree. And I read that "poplars and cottonwood [or sycamore (Platanus)] make up a large share of the tree growths of the interior woodlands on alluvial or prairie soils." Wilson says that the orchard oriole usually lines its nest with the buttonwood down or wool and that the purple finch feeds on its seeds in the winter. Giraud also says that the last seems to be very fond of those seeds.

From such small beginnings—a mere grain of dust, as it were—do mighty trees take their rise. As Pliny says of the cypress, "It is a marvellous fact, and one which ought not to be overlooked, that a tree should be produced from sources so minute, while the grains of wheat and of barley are so very much larger, not to mention the bean." He adds that the ants are remarkably fond of its tiny seed, and his wonder is excited by the fact that "an insect so minute is able to destroy the first germ of a tree of such gigantic dimensions."

Or as Evelyn writes, who appears to have been inspired by Pliny:

And what mortal is there so perfect an anatomist, who will undertake to detect the thousandth part or point of so exile a grain, as that insensible rudiment, or rather halituous spirit which brings forth the lofty fir tree and the spreading oak? [Or who is prepared to believe] that trees of so enormous an height and magnitude, as we find some elms, planes, and cypresses, some hard as iron and solid as marble (for such the Indies furnish many), should be swaddled and involved within so small a dimension (if a point may be said to have any) without the least luxation, confusion, or disorder of parts, and in so weak and feeble a substance; being at first but a kind of tender mucilage, or rather rottenness, which so easily dissolves and corrupts substances so much harder when they are buried in the moist womb of the earth, whilst this, tender and flexible as it is, shall be able in time to displace and rend asunder whole rocks of stones, and sometimes to cleave them beyond the force of iron wedges, so as even to remove mountains? For thus no weights are able to suppress the victorious palm; and thus our tree (like man whose inverted symbol he is), being sown in corruption, rises in glory by little and little ascending into a hard, erect stem of comely dimensions—into a solid tower, as it were; and that which but lately a single ant would easily have borne to his little cavern is now capable of resisting the fury and braving the rage of the most impetuous storms.

What would Pliny and Evelyn have said of that eighth wonder of the world, the giant sequoia of California, which springing from so small a seed (the cones are said to be shaped like those of a white pine, but to be only two and a half inches long) has outlasted so many of the kingdoms of the world?

If we suppose the earth to have sprung from a seed as small in proportion as the seed of a willow is compared with a large willow tree, then the seed of the earth, as I calculate, would have been equal to a globe less than two and a half miles in diameter, which might lie on about one-tenth of the surface of this town.

Of course, there is no necessity for supposing that the various trees of which I have spoken, which bear such an abundance of seeds, provided with wings or down expressly for their transportation, should have sprung up from nothing; and I am aware that I am not at all peculiar in asserting that they come from seeds, though the mode of their propagation by Nature has been but little attended to. Most of them, or the corresponding species, are extensively raised from the seed in Europe, and they are beginning to be here. So much, then, for the light and winged seeds of trees.

As for the heavy seeds and nuts which are not furnished with wings, the notion is still a very common one that when the trees which bear these spring up where none of their kind were noticed before, they have come from seeds or other principles spontaneously generated there in an unusual manner, or which have lain dormant in the soil for centuries, or perhaps been called into activity by the heat of a burning. I do not believe these assertions, and I will state some of the ways in which, according to my observation, such forests are planted and raised.

Every one of these seeds, too, will be found to be winged or legged in another fashion. Surely it is not wonderful that cherry trees of all kinds are widely dispersed, since their fruit is well known to be the favorite food of various birds. Many kinds are called bird-cherries, and they appropriate many more kinds which are not so called. Eating cherries is a bird-like employment, and unless we disperse the seeds occasionally, as they do, I shall think that the birds have the best right to them.

See how artfully the seed of a cherry is placed in order that a bird may be compelled to transport it—in the very midst of a tempting pericarp, so that the creature that would devour this must commonly take the stone also into its mouth or bill. If you ever ate a cherry and did not make two bites of it, you must have perceived it—right in the center of the luscious morsel, a large earthy residuum left on the tongue. We thus take into our mouths cherry stones as big as peas, a dozen at once, for Nature can persuade us to do almost anything when she would compass her ends. Some wild men and children instinctively swallow these, like the birds, when in a hurry, as the shortest way to get rid of them. It is only princes who can afford to have their cherry puddings stoned, and so make their lives more completely luxurious and useless; and perhaps they expect to atone for this by planting a tree with a flourish of trumpets now and then.

Thus, though these seeds are not provided with vegetable wings, Nature has impelled the thrush tribe to take them into their bills and fly away with them; and they are winged in another sense, and more effectually than the seeds of pines, for these are carried even against the wind. The consequence is that cherry trees grow not only here but there. The same is true of a great many other seeds.

If this seed had been placed in a leaf, or at the root of the tree, it would not have got transported thus.

I very often see the stones of the cultivated cherry left in the nests of birds in the woods, at a great distance from a cherry tree (in gardens they are often full of them); also while stooping to drink at springs, I see them on the bottom, where birds that came to drink like me must have dropped them, half a mile from the nearest cherry tree—and thus the tree gets planted. In short, it is notorious how busy the birds are in distributing cherry stones, since it is difficult for you to save any cherries for the table. Yet it is to be noticed that they do not always take the stone with them.

A neighbor tells me that the birds do not touch his inferior mazzard cherries until they have finished all the grafted kinds—and even the small wild black cherries that may be near—but after that they strip his mazzard trees also.

Accordingly, the cultivated cherry will spring up far and wide, in sproutlands or wherever the earth is bared of trees, like the wild ones; but as both the forest and cultivation destroy them, they attain to a size which attracts our attention only in sproutlands or along fences. This species appears to prefer a hilltop—whether the birds are more inclined to carry the seeds there, or they find there the light and exposure and the soil which they prefer.

There are a dozen or fifteen handsome young English cherry trees on a hilltop in the woods by Walden Pond, which was cut off a dozen years ago, and I remember much larger ones on Fair Haven Hill enclosed in the woods. I dug up three of the former last fall and set them in my garden, and they were handsome trees and growing faster than any I could find in the last nursery which I visited—showing a clear and vigorous growth—but with large and bad roots for transplanting.

The black, or rum, cherry is far more widely dispersed by the same means and is a common shrub in sproutlands. The birds convey its seeds in great quantities into the midst of the densest woods, and when the woods are cut these are among the first and commonest shrubs to spring up there. But this, too, soon dies out there, and I rarely if ever see a large tree in the woods. You have only to let one stand by your house, or the edge of your field, to have flocks of birds—cherry-birds, kingbirds, and robins—coming and going directly from and to a great distance every day when the fruit is ripe.

Dr. Manasseh Cutler, in 1785 speaking of the northern wild red cherry at the White Mountains—a tree comparatively rare in this town—said, "In land where there is no kind of cherry trees, after the old growth, which consists chiefly of spruce, pine, beech, and birch (exceedingly tall and large), has been felled and burnt on the ground, there springs up the next summer an immense number of these cherry trees."

Michaux also refers to the same fact, saying that "this species of cherry tree offers the same remarkable peculiarity with the canoe birch of reproducing itself spontaneously" under these circumstances.

I have noticed in Maine what dense thickets of this tree spring up on the sites of loggers’ camps, and at carries, where small areas have been cleared, or even where a solitary traveller has camped for a night—so forward is this fruit, as well as raspberries and strawberries, to come, as it were, at the first beckoning of man, for they love the same light and air that he does. Mr. George B. Emerson, in his Report on Trees, says that in climbing the wild hills of Maine and New Hampshire he has "repeatedly observed in the beds of the streams, often the most practicable paths, surprising numbers of the nuts of this cherry, though there were no trees of the kind within a great distance." They were probably washed down by torrents, as well as left there by birds and quadrupeds. However, even the dense thickets of this tree which spring up under these circumstances are easily accounted for, when you consider how regularly and widely its seeds are dispersed by birds.

Probably the fruit of no tree is more regularly sought after by them than that of cherry trees, both wild and cultivated, though some of the former are far from agreeable to our taste; and a great proportion of these birds are such as are likely to carry the seed into the depth of the woods. As I learn from the ornithologies and my own observation, the most common cherry-eating birds are the robin, cherry-bird, catbird, brown thrasher, kingbird, jay, pigeon woodpecker, red-headed woodpecker, bluebird, and cardinal grosbeak.

The ancients, having observed how commonly some seeds were planted by birds, inferred that birds were indispensable agents in their planting. Evelyn, speaking of the seeds of the holly, of which bird-lime is made, says, "There goes a tradition that they will not sprout till they be passed through the maw of a thrush; whence the saying Turdus exitium suum cacat."

If you would study the habits of birds, go where their food is; for example, if it is about the first of September, to the wild black-cherry trees, elder bushes, pokeweed, and mountain ash trees. Excepting the whortleberries, which are drying up, the wild cherries and elderberries are then the two prevailing wild fruits in this town.

As I was walking at this date in 1859 in a sproutland far in the woods in Lincoln, I came to a small black cherry full of fruit, of which I plucked some, and there for the first time for a long while I saw and heard cherry-birds—their shrill and fine seringo—and robins, which of late had been scarce. Indeed, I had remarked to my companion on the general scarcity and silence of the birds. We sat on a rock near this tree and listened to these now unusual sounds. From time to time one or two birds came dashing from out the sky toward this tree till, seeing us, they wheeled, disappointed, and perhaps alighted on some neighboring twigs to wait till we were gone.

The cherry-birds and robins seem to know the locality of any wild cherry tree in the town, and you are as sure to find them on these trees now as to find bees and butterflies on the thistles. If we stay long, they go off with a fling to some other such tree which they know of but we do not. The neighborhood of a wild-cherry tree full of fruit is now, for the notes of birds, a little spring come back again.

At length we continued our walk through silent and deserted fields and woods, and when, a mile or two from this, I was plucking a basketful of elderberries by a fence, I was surprised to find that I had come upon a flock of young golden robins and bluebirds, apparently feeding on them, flitting before me from bush to bush. Thus, whenever we came to the localities of these fruits, we found the berry-eating birds assembled.

To what an extent, then, must cherry stones, especially the smaller or wild kinds which the birds can readily swallow, be sown annually in fields and woods!

There is no mystery about new trees coming up where there has been a fire, because either the young and feeble plants, whose roots escape the fire but which would die if the wood was left, can now grow there, or else, the ground being thus cleared, the seeds can catch there.

It is remarkable how generally wild fruits, berries, and seeds are the food of birds, mice, and so forth. Judging what I do not know from what I do, I am inclined to say that all are—however hard or dry, sour, bitter, tasteless, or minute—for their tastes are not like ours.

How many kinds of birds, for instance, feed on the berries of the red cedar in the fall and winter? According to ornithologists, the most common are the robin, cherry-bird, myrtle-bird, bluebird, purple finch, mockingbird, pine grosbeak, and, as I have noticed, the crow; and probably the same ones eat the berries of the creeping juniper also. Wilson says that the cherry-bird is "immoderately fond" of the fruit of the red cedar and that "thirty or forty may sometimes be seen fluttering among the branches of one small cedar tree, plucking off the berries"; and Audubon observes that "the appetite of the cedar-bird [for it is called both cherry- and cedar-bird] is of so extraordinary a nature as to prompt it to devour every fruit or berry that comes in its way. In this manner they gorge themselves to such excess as sometimes to be unable to fly, and suffer themselves to be taken by the hand."

We have very little red cedar in Concord, especially in the south part of the town, and I used to wonder accordingly where a little one which I observed twenty years ago, springing up on one of our hills, had come from. But one hard winter, when I chanced to be watching the crows which regularly visited each hole which the fishermen had made in the ice of Walden Pond as soon as the latter had withdrawn, for the sake of the bait which was left there, I found that they dropped on the ice the seeds of the cedar and barberry in abundance. The nearest cedars which then bore fruit were a grove by the side of Flint’s Pond in Lincoln, a mile eastward, where the barberry, which also does not grow at Walden, is plentifully mingled with them. I saw that the crows, after eating cedar berries and barberries there, and having picked up the bait which the fishermen had left on Flint’s Pond, had come over to Walden to see what they could glean here. Therefore I have not been surprised to see since that date many more little cedars springing up on that hill.

Barberry seeds, sour as the fruit is, are extensively planted by crows—like apple seeds, in little thickets—and also by robins, which feed on them regularly and extensively in the fall, and by other birds, and probably by mice, for I sometimes see an old bird’s nest half full of them. In the winter I surprise the partridge on the barberry bush, and also on the sumac and see where they have hopped up to it, and I suspect that they eat the berries of both.

One would not expect the bayberry to be much sought after, yet it is said to be eaten by the yellow-rumped warbler, or myrtle-bird (which has got its name thence), the robin, hermit thrush, mockingbird; and Wilson, speaking of the white-bellied swallows at Great Egg Harbor at the end of summer, says that he saw them completely covering some of the myrtle bushes and that "for some time before their departure, they subsist principally on the myrtle berries (Myrica cerifera) and become extremely fat."

I know of but one fertile bayberry bush in this town, but I have found that its berries were all gone by the middle of October—probably eaten by birds, for, where abundant, a great part hold on till the next year.

The fruit of the tupelo (pepperidge, sour gum) is small, very acid, and has a large stone, and you would not think of tasting it a second time—yet it is singularly attractive to birds, especially robins. "So fond are they of gum berries," says Wilson, "that wherever there is one of these trees covered with fruit, and flocks of robins in the neighborhood, the sportsman need only take his stand near it, load, take aim, and fire; one flock succeeding another, with little interruption, almost the whole day: by this method prodigious slaughter has been made among them with little fatigue."

Other birds which are said to feed on them are the rose-breasted grosbeak (eagerly), pigeon woodpecker (plentifully), red-headed woodpecker, mockingbird, cherry-bird, and bluebird.

It is said in Loudon’s Arboretum that "in Livonia, Sweden, and Kamtschatka, the berries of the mountain ash [the same we have introduced, though we have one of our own] are eaten, when ripe, as fruit." But I think that the climate there must have an ameliorating effect on them, or else the inhabitants are very hard pushed—though I know that there is nothing so crabbed but somebody will be found to eat it somewhere. They are exceedingly bitter and austere to my taste, and I do not see how the birds can eat them; but it is to be observed that they do not stand to chew them. However, I observe that the robins, cherry-birds, and purple finches have the same taste with the Livonians, and Evelyn says that the thrushes are so fond of them that as long as these trees last in your woods you will be sure of their company.

About the 20th of September—though they often begin before the berries are ripe—the trees which stand in front yards will be all alive with these birds, which have come after the fruit; nor is it only a transient bite which they take, for they do not stop till they have completely stripped them of their drooping orange clusters. It is as if a "bee" had assembled to do the most work in a short time, and in the merriest way—having just despatched a similar business somewhere else. My neighbor complains that the birds first get most of his strawberries, at the same time that they are doing him some good, and finally when his mountain-ash berries get to be most ornamental to his front yard, they take every one of them in a few days.

It is not then a few seeds only that are dropped here and there, but the whole crop of some of the trees I have been speaking of, unless it is a very large one, is commonly dispersed far and wide by these agents.

Nevertheless, it chances that I have noticed but one mountain ash of any species (the American one is not indigenous in this town) which had been sown in this manner here. Yet where the soil and climate are suitable, this must be the way they are propagated.

The handsome but unpalatable fruit of the sassafras is so commonly devoured by birds that I can rarely find one ripe, and even the dry and repulsive fruit of the Celtis (hackberry) is said to be eaten by the pigeon and by the ivory-billed woodpecker.

In short, the seeds of trees or their pericarp are peculiarly the food of birds, rather than of quadrupeds, reptiles, or fishes. They can reach them most easily, and are fitted to disperse them the farthest.

About the 1st of September, if you would study the habits of birds, go where their food is—for example, to the wild black-cherry trees and elder bushes, the poke and mountain-ash trees. Excepting the whortleberries, which are past their prime and drying up, the wild cherries and elderberries are now the two prevailing wild fruits, and accordingly we find the berry-eating birds assembled where they grow, about the elderberries—the golden robins, bluebirds, and robins.

To the above list we may add, in their season, the fruit of the sumac, Prinos, Viburnum, thorn, rose-hips, shadbush, grape, Amphicarpaea, and checkerberry. Squirrels and mice also very commonly eat the above-named seeds of trees and shrubs. Charles Darwin says of the Parus major (of England) that he has "many times seen and heard it hammering the seeds of the yew." May not our chickadee, which is nearly allied to the former, feed on the seeds of our yew? Wilson says of the pokeberries, which are eaten by robins, "the juice of the berries is of a beautiful crimson, and they are eaten in such quantities by these birds, that their whole stomachs are strongly tinged with the same red color"—which accident has sometimes saved the lives of the robins, since epicures feared that their flesh might be poisonous.

But what is more remarkable, even the skunk cabbage and arum berries are eaten by birds or quadrupeds.

About the middle of August, the small fruits of most plants are generally ripe or ripening, and this is coincident with the flying in flocks of such young birds now grown as feed on them.

Widely as it is dispersed, I do not know that I ever detected a seedling huckleberry. When I have examined the bushes of the common black huckleberry (Gaylussacia resinosum) in a thick pine wood thirty years old, I have found that they spread by vigorous runners just under the leaves, forking occasionally; and though the individual bushes were not more than eight or ten years old, the stock or runner was undoubtedly as old as the wood and was the relic of a flourishing huckleberry patch, which in one instance had grown along a wall in an open field. I sometimes traced the runner seven feet before it broke off, and it was undoubtedly much longer. There would be three or four bushes rising from it successively, which grew very feebly—not more than an inch in the last year—while the runner had grown from six to twelve inches at the end. The largest bushes still betrayed their origin in this runner by a curve at the base, for the end of the runner had turned upward to form the bush, while another shoot kept on horizontally.

{GRAPHIC 3}

A huckleberry bush in the open field appears to be in its prime at five or six years of age—and to live commonly ten or twelve.

The same was the case with the low blueberries (Vaccinium vacillans and Vaccinium pennsylvanicum), though on a smaller scale; and in one more open place I saw the former growing in rows several feet long, directly above the subterranean runners and indicating their position.

You will occasionally notice a young huckleberry bush growing lustily on the top of a high white-pine stump which has been sawed off, standing in the chink between the bark and the wood as if it had sprung from a seed which was left on the stump by a bird and was blown into this chink; but probably such bushes oftenest come from runners which find their way up from below. So with the Pyrus arbutifolia and so on. Plants of this order (Ericaceae) are said to be among the earliest fossil plants, and they are likely to be among the last to be found on the globe. The huckleberries form a humble and more or less dormant, but yet vivacious, forest under a forest, which bides its time.

Two or three years after a wood has been cut, you will commonly find an abundant crop of huckleberries and blueberries there, not to mention chokeberries, serviceberries, and so on. These have already been planted there by animals, just as I shall show that the little oaks are, or possibly some have survived there since the wood was cut before; for Nature keeps a supply of these important plants in her nursery under the larger woods, always ready for casualties, as fires, windfalls, and clearings by man.

I see the seeds of these and other berries left on the rocks in woods and pastures where birds have perched. They are constantly disseminating them in their season.

Probably no berries are more sought after by them. Wilson says that the cherry-bird makes an annual visit to the Alleghenies for them, and that in their season they form almost the whole fare of the summer redbird and scarlet tanager. To these we add the great crested flycatcher, small green crested flycatcher, prairie hen, and turtledove—and we may also join with them the robin, brown thrasher, woodthrush, pigeon—and doubtless many other birds feed on them. George Emerson says that the low blueberry feeds immense flocks of wild pigeons.

The fox, too, eats huckleberries extensively; and I very often see their seeds mixed with the fur and bones of the animals which they have devoured. It chanced last September, that in the only two instances in which I examined fox dung, on different days and in places far apart in the woods, it consisted chiefly of woodchuck’s fur with a part of the lower jaw and incisor teeth, and huckleberry seeds with some whole huckleberries. Like ourselves, the fox likes two courses, woodchuck and huckleberries, at the same meal. Thus, it appears that Nature employs not only a great many birds but this restless ranger, the fox, to disperse the huckleberry. I frequently see also the seeds of other small fruits (perhaps rose-hips or winterberries) left in his excrement.

In like manner the high blueberry, chokeberry, and so on, are ready to spring up in swamps when they are cleared, but afterwards maples and so forth overshadow and kill them.

Going by a piece of rich, low ground last October, I observed an immense quantity of scarlet asparagus seeds, dotting the pale brown mist made by its withered branches and stems. There was at least an acre of the plant, and there must have been many bushels of the seed. This sight suggested how extensively the birds must spread it.

Examining, accordingly, an uncultivated and bushy hillside a dozen rods north and across a road, I saw numerous plants two or three feet high in the grass and bushes there, with already their own seed—which plants the birds must have formerly introduced there from the above-named patch. Also I find very small and slender wiry plants—thus planted, with the seed attached, in the remotest and wildest swamps in the town—a mile from the nearest house. They never come to anything in the latter case, and most would not know what they were.

For several years I have noticed small tomato plants growing in the woods in various places about Walden Pond, sometimes within hollow stumps, at least three-fourths of a mile from the nearest house or garden. The seeds may possibly have been carried there annually by picnic parties. Otherwise they must have been dropped by birds each year, for they do not bear fruit there. Yet I have not chanced to see the birds pecking at tomatoes in our gardens, nor have I ever seen seedling potato plants which were not sown by man, though they are a kindred plant and far more extensively cultivated. The goldfinch feeds on various seeds and has received various names accordingly. I know it chiefly as the thistle bird, but I find that my neighbor who stores seeds calls it the lettuce bird—and another knows it as the bird that gets his sunflower seeds, and still another, perchance, as the hemp bird.

Consider how the apple tree has spread over the country, through the agency of cows and other quadrupeds, making almost impenetrable thickets in many places and yielding many new