Part 35
The amount of this species available in the Northwest is not definitely known, but it is a relatively scarce wood. No attention has ever been given to planting it as a commercial proposition. It is not of very rapid growth, and unless it is in dense stands, it develops a short trunk and large crown. It is better suited for shade and ornament, and is to be seen as a street tree in some western towns. It does not flourish in the eastern states, but has found the climate of western Europe more congenial and is occasionally found as an ornamental tree there.
The relative importance of this maple in the state of Washington is indicated by the amount used annually compared with certain other hardwoods. In 1911 the consumption of willow was 2,000 feet, vine maple 10,000, Oregon ash 58,000, Oregon oak 197,000, western birch 315,000, Oregon maple 932,500, red alder 1,881,500, and black cottonwood 32,572,200.
VINE MAPLE (_Acer circinatum_) is sometimes called mountain maple, though the name is misleading. It may grow among mountains, but always near streams. It is found at various altitudes from near sea level to 5,000 feet above. It ranges from the coast region of British Columbia southward through Washington and Oregon to Mendocino county, California. This tree is more useful than might be inferred from its name, or even from a study of it in its usual form. Only an occasional tree is good for the wood user. A height of twenty feet and a diameter of six inches are above the average. It is called vine maple because of its habit of sprawling on the ground like a vine. The trunk lacks sufficient stiffness to hold it erect. It grows upward to a certain point, then leans over and the branches lie on the ground. Some of them take root and in course of time what was first a single stem becomes a thicket of branches and stems. The winter snow often has much to do with bending the trunk, which appears to have no power to get back to the perpendicular when once bowed down. The damp situation where this tree thrives best, induces a luxuriant growth of moss and mold which help to bury the branches that lie on the ground.
The tree prospers in deep shade. The young leaves are rose red, and in the fall become yellow or scarlet. The fruit is the characteristic maple key. The wing becomes rose-red before falling in autumn. Though this tree is more a curiosity than a lumberman’s asset, it is not without value. Handle makers use 10,000 feet of it a year in the state of Washington. It is shaved and turned for ax and shovel handles. It has two-thirds the strength and less than half the stiffness of eastern hard maple. The tree grows slowly and the annual rings are very narrow and indistinct. Seventy or eighty years are required to produce a trunk five inches in diameter. The wood is hard, and checks badly in seasoning. The bark is very pale brown--suggesting the color of a potato sprout that has grown in a dark cellar. The Indians liked the wood for fish net bows, though there appears to have been no very good reason why they preferred it to other woods of the region. Its most extensive use at present is as fuel, but it is not particularly sought after. The tree’s future is not promising. Under domestication it does not take on its fantastic, moldy, moss-grown form, and its forest growth will never be encouraged by lumbermen.
DWARF MAPLE (_Acer glabrum_) is one of the smallest of the maples, but in a north and south direction its range is equal to that of any other. Its southern limit is among the canyons of Arizona, and its northern on the coast of Alaska within six or seven degrees of the Arctic circle. It extends to Nebraska, and is found east of the continental divide far north in British America. It reaches its largest size on Vancouver island and on the Blue mountains in Oregon. It here is large enough to make small sawlogs, but it is usually shrubby in other parts of its range. It grows from sea level in Alaska to 9,000 feet altitude among the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. Two forms of leaf occur. One is three-lobed; the other is a compound leaf, the lobes having formed separate leaves. The bright upper surface of the leaf gives the species its botanical name. The seeds have large, wide wings. It cannot be ascertained that the wood of this maple has ever been used for anything.
[Illustration]
BOX ELDER
[Illustration: BOX ELDER]
BOX ELDER
(_Acer Negundo_)
Attempts to ascertain the meaning of the word _negundo_ which botanists apply to this species have not been crowned with entire success. It is known to be a word in the Malayalam language of the Malabar coast of India, and is there applied to a tree, apparently referring to a peculiar form of leaf. The name was transferred to the box elder by Moench, and has been generally adopted by botanists, although at least seven other scientific names have been given the tree. It bears ten or more English names in different regions. Among these names are ash-leaved maple, known from Massachusetts to Montana and Texas; cut-leaved maple in Colorado; three-leaved maple in Pennsylvania; black ash in Tennessee; stinking ash in South Carolina; sugar ash in Florida; water ash in the Dakotas; and box elder wherever it grows.
The tree’s geographical range does not fall much short of 3,000,000 square miles, and is equalled by few species of this country. It extends from New England across Canada to Alberta, thence to Arizona, and includes practically all the United States east and south of those lines. It thrives in hot and cold climates, and high and low elevations; in regions of much rain, and in those with little. That fact has been turned to account by tree planters, particularly in the years when the western plains were being settled by homesteaders. The box elder was the chief tree on many a timber claim where the letter of the law rather than the spirit was carried out. It afforded the earliest protection against scorching summer sun and the keen winds of winter about many a frontiersman’s cabin on the plains. It was the earliest street tree in many western towns. The people planted it because they knew it would grow, and they were not so sure of a good many other trees. Green ash was often its companion in pioneer plantings on the plains. Many towns which set box elders along the streets when they did not know of anything better, still have the trees, though they would willingly exchange them for something else. They are not ideal street and park trees; do not produce shapely trunks and crowns; and drop leaves all summer and seeds all winter. The tree is reputed to be short lived, yet some of those planted a generation or two ago show no symptoms of decline.
There is no good reason why this tree should be called an elder, or an ash, except that its leaves are compound. If that is a reason, it might be called a hickory or a walnut, since they bear compound leaves. It is clearly a maple. Its fruit shows it to be so, and Indians of the far Northwest who had no other maple, formerly manufactured sugar from this tree, collecting the sap in wood or bark troughs and boiling it with hot stones.
The compound leaf does not necessarily take it out of the maple group. It requires no great exercise of imagination to understand how a lobed leaf, by deepening the sinuses between the lobes, might become a compound leaf in the process of evolution. There may be no visible evidence that the box elder’s leaf reached its present form by that process, but there is another maple which is at the present time developing a compound leaf in that way, or seems to be doing so. It is the dwarf maple (_Acer glabrum_) of the Northwest coast. Lobed leaves and compound leaves may occur on the same tree.
The seeds of box elder resemble those of other maples. They ripen in the fall, and are blown off by wind, few at a time, during several months. The trees are from fifty to seventy feet high, and from one and a half to three feet in diameter. The trunk is apt to divide near the ground in several large branches, and is not of good form for sawlogs, being often crooked as well as short. The small branches, particularly those less than a year old, are usually nearly as green as the leaves. This fact may assist in identifying the tree when the leaves are off. The bark bears more resemblance to ash and basswood than to maple.
The wood is lightest of the maples. It weighs less than twenty-seven pounds to the cubic foot; has less than half the strength and about forty per cent of the stiffness of sugar maple; and is much inferior to it in most mechanical properties. It is equal, if not superior to most maples in whiteness. The pores are small, numerous, and scattered through all parts of the growth ring, as is characteristic of maple wood. The tree grows rapidly. The summerwood is a thin, dark line, separating one annual ring from another. The medullary rays are many and obscure, but when wood is sawed or split along a radial line, they are easily seen, and show the true maple luster.
The uses of box elder are similar to those of soft maple. The wood is seldom reported under its own name. In fact, an examination of wood-using reports of various states, shows that in only two states, Michigan and Texas, has box elder been listed separately. Its uses in the former state were for boxes, crates, flooring, handles, woodenware, and interior finish, while in Texas it was made into furniture. The tree is of commercial size in at least thirty states, and is cut and marketed in all of them. Tests of the wood for pulp are said to be satisfactory, and it finds its way in rather large amounts to cooper shops where it is made into slack barrels. It is cut as acid wood along with other maples, beech, and birch, and is converted into charcoal and other products of distillation.
It may be expected that box elder will exist in the United States as long as any other forest tree remains. It is willing to be crowded off good land into low places, which are almost swamps, and there it grows free from disturbance; but if given the opportunity it will appropriate the most fertile soil within reach of it; and by scattering seeds during four or five months of the year, it manages to do much effective planting.
CALIFORNIA BOX ELDER (_Acer negundo californicum_) is a variety of box elder, and not a separate species. As the name implies, it is a California tree, and it occurs in the valleys and among the Coast Range mountains from the lower Sacramento valley to the western slopes of the San Bernardino mountains. The tree is from twenty to fifty feet high and from ten to thirty inches in diameter. The leaves and young twigs are hairy, in that respect differing from the eastern box elder. The seeds are scattered during winter. The wood is very pale lemon-yellow or creamy-white, the heart and sapwood hardly distinguishable. The wood is soft and brittle, but is suited to the same purposes as the eastern box elder. No reports of its uses appear to have been made. It is found on the borders of streams and in the bottoms of moist canyons. It is believed to be a short-lived tree.
STRIPED MAPLE (_Acer pennsylvanicum_) is usually thirty or forty feet high, and eight or ten inches in diameter. Its range extends from Quebec to northern Georgia, westward to Minnesota, and is of largest size on the slopes of Big Smoky mountains of Tennessee, and the Blue Ridge in North and South Carolina. It grows best in shade, but maintains itself in open ground; is generally shrubby in the northern part of its range. The name refers to the bark. The stripes are longitudinal and are caused by the parting of the outer bark and the exposure to view of the lighter colored inner layers. The bark of small trees is greenish, but later in life the color is darker, and the stripes largely disappear. Among its names are moosewood, so called because it is good browse for moose and other deer; goosefoot maple, a reference to the form of the leaf; whistlewood, an allusion to the ease with which the bark slips from young branches in spring when boys with jack-knives are on the search for whistle material. The names mountain alder and striped dogwood are based on misunderstanding of the tree’s family relations.
The young leaves are rose colored when they unfold, and when full grown are six inches wide. The wood is light and soft, and light brown in color, the thick sapwood lighter. The wood is liable to contain small brown pith flecks, which in longitudinal sections appear as brown streaks an inch or less in length and as thick as a pin, and in cross section they are brown dots. They are not natural to the wood but are caused by the larvæ of certain moths which burrow into the cambium layer, or soft inner bark, and excavate narrow galleries up and down the trunk. The galleries afterwards fill with dark material. The insects sometimes attack other maples, the birches, service, and other trees. The wood of striped maple is little used, because of the small size of the trees. The species is planted for ornament in this country and Europe.
BLACK MAPLE (_Acer nigrum_) has been by some considered a variety of sugar or hard maple, and by others a separate species. It is as large as the sugar maple and its range is much the same, but it is more abundant in the western part of its range than in the East. The name refers to the color of the bark of old trunks. If the name had considered the bark of young twigs it would have been yellow or orange maple, because the twigs are of that color. In summer the peculiar drooping posture of the leaves calls attention to this tree. However, the bark, twigs, and leaves combined are not sufficient to set it apart, in the eyes of most people, for it generally passes without question as sugar maple, even when it stands side by side with that tree. It yields sugar abundantly. The wood is a little heavier than that of sugar maple, but the difference cannot be noticed except when the two woods are weighed. Their uses are the same. No maker of furniture, flooring, or finish ever protests against black maple. The tree generally prefers lower and damper ground than sugar maple, and is often found along streams.
[Illustration]
SERVICEBERRY
[Illustration: SERVICEBERRY]
SERVICEBERRY
(_Amelanchier Canadensis_)
This tree will never be other than a minor species in the United States, but it is not a worthless member of the forest. It belongs to the rose family, and therefore is near akin to the haws, thorns, and crabapples. The genus is found in Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as in the United States. Two tree species occur in this country, or, according to some botanists, three, one west of the Rocky Mountains, two east.
The serviceberry has a number of names: June berry, service-tree, May cherry, Indian cherry, wild Indian pear, currant tree, shadberry, savice, and sarvice. The northern limit of its range is in Newfoundland, the southern in Florida. It grows westward to Minnesota and Arkansas; but it is not plentiful except in certain restricted localities. It is most abundant among the ranges of the Appalachian mountains, and of its largest size toward the south. It is dispersed through forests generally, a tree or bush here and there; but it prefers the borders of forests, the brinks of cliffs, banks of streams, or some other open space where light is abundant. It prospers most in rich soil but does fairly well in ground thin and dry.
The bloom, where it occurs, is a conspicuous feature of the landscape, though generally a tree on ten or twenty acres represents the density of its stand. The white, showy bloom comes early in spring, when most trees are yet bare of leaves. Occasionally, however, the serviceberry is more abundant, and the rows and clumps of blooming trees along creek banks or about the margins of glades or other openings in the forests, look like distant snowdrifts.
The fruit is a berry a half inch or less in diameter, bright red when fully grown in early summer, and changing to purple when ripe. The seeds are brown and very small, and each berry contains from five to ten. When circumstances are favorable, the tree is a prolific bearer, the slender branches bending beneath the weight. The tree need not reach any
## particular size before beginning to bear. On some of the severely burned
summits of the Alleghany mountains in West Virginia, 4,000 feet or more above sea level, this tree, when only two or three feet high, bears abundantly. Such trees are probably sprouts from roots of older trunks destroyed by fire. At its best, it reaches a height of forty or fifty feet and a diameter of one or possibly two feet. Trunks of largest size occur among the southern Appalachian ranges.
The wood is heavy and very hard and strong. It is liable to check and warp in seasoning, is satiny, and is susceptible of a good polish. Medullary rays are very numerous, but obscure; color, dark brown, often tinged with red. The wood is stronger, stiffer and heavier than white oak. It possesses most of the properties to make it a wood of great value, but its scarcity, and the usual small size of the trees, relegate it to the class of minor woods. Some use is made of it in turnery and for other small articles. It is frequently planted in gardens for its bloom and berries. In such situations it lacks some of the charm which it holds as part and parcel of the wildwoods where its early spring bloom is thrown against a background of leafless branches.
WESTERN SERVICEBERRY (_Amelanchier alnifolia_) is also called pigeonberry and sarvice. Its botanical name refers to the resemblance of its leaves to those of alder. Its range covers a million square miles, and the species reaches its best development on islands and rich bottom lands of the lower Columbia river. It is found as far south as California, north to Yukon territory, east to Lake Superior and northern Michigan. It is nowhere a tree of attractive size, and is usually a shrub about ten feet tall and one inch thick. Trees are sometimes thirty feet high and six or eight inches in diameter. The fruit is blue-black and sweet, and pleasant to the taste if not overripe. Indians in the northern and western range of this tree gather the berries industriously while they last, and many of the white settlers do likewise. The birds flock to the thickets for their share, and though the berries are small, the bears in the region consider them worthy of prompt and continued attention. The berries are generally a little more than half an inch in diameter, and ripen in July or August, depending on latitude. Cattle, sheep, goats, and deer find this small tree or bush a source of food. They do not object to eating the berries when obtainable, but their principal attack is on the leaves and tender shoots which afford excellent browse. Fortunately, the serviceberry is so tenacious of life that it is next to impossible to browse it to death. If eaten down to the ground, with little left but bare and barked trunks sticking up like bean poles, the roots will throw up sprouts year after year, making the service thicket a permanent browse-pasture. Fire is not able to destroy such a thicket, for, when the tops are burned off, the sprouts will quickly spring up with vigor unimpaired. As a source of food for insects, birds, beasts, and men, few trees, in proportion to size and quantity, are the equal of western serviceberry. Flowers, fruit, leaves and sprouts are all food for something.
LONGLEAF SERVICE TREE (_Amelanchier obovalis_) is by some regarded a variety rather than a species. It occupies in part the same range as serviceberry, but runs much farther north, reaching the valley of Mackenzie river in latitude 65. It is found in North Carolina and Alabama, but it is only a shrub in the extreme southern part of its range. The fruit ripens in early summer and is reddish purple. Trees are seldom more than thirty feet high and eight inches in diameter. A variety with large fruit is occasionally planted as an ornamental tree. Unless the crop of serviceberries is unusually plentiful in a locality, the most of it is eaten by birds which temporarily abandon nearly all other sources of food and give their undivided attention to the perishable harvest which must be garnered in at once or it will be lost.
NARROWLEAF CRAB (_Malus angustifolia_) is one of the wild crabapples of the United States. They are of the genus _Malus_ and the thousands of varieties of cultivated apples are derived from them, or from other species found in the old world which are very similar. They belong to the rose family. The narrowleaf crab is found from Pennsylvania to Florida and westward to Tennessee and Louisiana. It thrives best in open spaces in the forest and is often found in glades and along the banks of streams in the North, while in the South it occurs in depressions in the pine barrens. The flowers are much like those of apple, very fragrant, and in color are white, pink, or rose. When in full bloom, the tree is a beautiful object, and its odor is carried long distances. The fruit is an apple in all respects except size and taste. It is somewhat flattened, and is an inch or less across. It is fragrant when fully ripe, and many a person has been led by appearances to taste, only to meet disappointment. The flesh is hard and sour, and unfit for food in its natural state, but by cooking and artificial sweetening, it is made into preserves. The tree reaches a height of twenty or thirty feet and a diameter of eight or ten inches. It is smaller than the sweet crab. The wood is hard, heavy, light brown, tinged with red, with thick yellow sapwood. It is not put to many uses, but is occasionally made into small handles, and levers. It has been much used as stock on which to graft apples. Farmers who wanted orchards formerly dug up small crabapples in the surrounding woods and fields, planted them in an orchard, and when securely rooted, the apples of desired kinds were grafted on. If successful, the apple finally replaced the crab by spreading its own bark and wood over the entire trunk, until no part of the original stock remained visible. The sweet crab was also employed as a stock on which to graft apples.