SPRING-FLOWERING TREES.
THE celandine has had a poem written to it, and so has the daisy, but the poets have had very little to say about the smaller and even more modest blossoms of the trees. Yet of the flowers of March and early April none bring a greater sense of change from the greys and umbers ef winter than the buds which break in the warmer sunshine a the turning year twenty or fifty feet above the lowly wood- land flowers. The celandine patches the brown mould under the meadow trees where no grass will grow, and lights the ditch like a flame ; but it cannot change the landscape. Flowers of the grass like the daisy and the buttercup, or even the dandelion, can alter whole acres, and set strips and squares of yellow about the farm pastures, or whiten a village common as if the laundries had spread out a month's washing. Prim- roses can strew a carpet that filters light through a thousand interlacing branches of hazel undergrowth, and bluebells can glow in the opening of a wood like the glass of a Cathedral window. But no flowers of the early year can set the same bright light in the landscape as the million bursting blossoms of a clump of elms, or the catkins of a row of alders edging a lake, or a bunch of sallows by the mill-pool, as dusty with pollen as the miller himself. The flowers of the sallow are perhaps the best known of all the March and April flowering trees, for it is from the sallow, of course, that the country children break the branches which they carry on "Palm" Sunday. But the flowers of the elm and the ash and the poplar blossom for very few eyes out of the thousands that welcome the sallow. Perhaps the simple secret is that they are too high to be easily seen. Human beings rarely look directly above them, for even when they look at something high the angle at which their eyes are directed is generally a low angle, and they get as far as possible away in order to be comfortable. But at a distance the tiny rose blossoms of the elm merge and blur into a soft mist that thickens the tops of the twigs, but carries no impression of a flower at all. Even a field-glass does not greatly help to distinguish buds from flowers, partly because of the bright and dazzling light of the sky behind the flowers. An elm-tree is, indeed, one of the most difficult trees from which to gather flowers, for it seldom bears blossoms on its lower branches, and the others may very well be out of reach even if you can climb the tree. There ought to be some reason for the elm's preference in bearing its blossoms so high ; but it is difficult to guess, for the witch-elm does not mind growing them within reach of the ground. The Lombardy poplar, of course, could not make its catkins accessible, simply because of its shape and the rule which governs its flowering. It is the rule with woodland trees not to bear flowers until the tree is a certain age, and not to bear fruit until maybe some years later. An ash, for instance, will not bear fruit till it is forty years old, and a horse-chestnut carries no nuts till it is twenty. By the time, then, that a Lombardy poplar is old enough to have catkins it is bound to carry them too high to be in reach. The abele, or white poplar—cotton-poplar, as it is often called—is kinder, and shakes its long catkins in April with as much profusion and carelessness of children's plucking as it spreads in July its lavish carpet of cotton-borne seeds. But it is always possible, in the language of schoolboys, to " get a specimen" of the catkins and flowers which the tree bears out of reach. A storm of rain or wind cuts off catkins and twigs, and strews the floor below the tree with hundreds of the delicate, hanging blossoms, which, if they are wet and bedraggled, still have a semblance of flower life remaining in them. You get some notion of the splendidly wasteful economy of the growth of trees in those broken blossoms and the ended promise of so many seedling plants. Even in the quietest and warmest spring, with just enough breeze to shake the billion grains of pollen abroad among the leafless, unhindering twigs, not one grain may find the flower-cell it needs. A solitary ash in a hedgerow may never bear or propagate a seed in all its life, for some ashes have no female flowers. But even with other trees whose life is more readily multiplied, when a wet and stormy day in March or April whips off the catkins, sodden and ruined, before they have had their pollen blown out upon the wind, the expenditure of careless effort towards the bourgeoning of a single new bud becomes prodigious.
The flowers of the sallow have perhaps become more familiar than others because of the old church custom, but certainly there are none which are lovelier, either when they first break from the bare branch, or when they are in full bloom in the April sun. First comes the peeping of the folded buds behind slitting sheaths, like tiny white snails poking out from brown shells, and then, on the last three or four inches of every twig, six or seven bursting flowers. Cheshire children call them goose's-eggs, and the yellow flowers that follow them goslings ; but if the opening flowers are like anything, it is so many little silver bearskin hats on an upright pole, or miniature rabbits' tails pinned up by a gnome gamekeeper. In the warmer spring sun the silver buds turn to gold, and the Cheshire children's diminutive goslings sit about the branches as such well-behaved birds should, fluffing out hundreds of silky hairs, each ending in a fluted, red-tipped capsule from which the pollen is to burst and float wherever the gusty wind whisks it. But the sallow does not trust entirely to the wind for the future of the race. The tree fills its flowers with scent and honey, and the bees brush and spill pollen as they crawl. Many of the trees that flower in summer, of course, depend on bees and other insects for their fertilisation, but most of the early spring-flowering trees depend almost wholly
on the wind. The yew, for instance, whose pollen sometimes must be carried from tree to tree, and sometimes only from one branch to another of the same tree, in search of the mating flower-cell, bears flowers which offer no attractions to bees, but which free their pollen with even a slight motion of the shaken branch. The shock of a perching bird's weight, or the tumble of a jumping squirrel, would have the same effect; so, for that matter, would the climbing of a bird's-nesting schoolboy, or the blow of a poet's walking-stick. Tennyson perhaps ferti- lised quite a large number of yew fruits and seeds, and has described in "In Memoriam" the sudden puff of dusty life that sprang from the quivering branches :—
"Old warder of these buried bones, And answering now my random stroke With fruitful cloud and living smoke, Dark yew, that graspest at the stones
And dippest toward the dreamless head, To thee too comes the golden hour When flower is feeling after flower."
No other tree throws, or at all events no other tree seems to throw, quite such a cloud of pollen from its catkins as the yew.
Perhaps the clouds that spread from other trees would seem larger and smokier if they were seen, as on the yew, against a dark background ; perhaps the yew needs an especially large cloud of pollen to give the proper chance to the waiting flower- cell, for with the yew much of the pollen becomes intercepted by the leaves, whereas other trees keep their branches bare of leaves until the fertilisation of the flowers is completed.
But even so, the amount of pollen distributed by a single catkin on an alder, say, or a hazel is astonishingly large. It
is not easy to realise what a vast quantity the tree throws by striking a branch or shaking the catkins on the bough ; but if you cut a branch of alder when the catkins are first opening
and stand it in water in a warm room, you can get an idea, however rough, of what the plant could do in a sunny spring without gales and heavy rain. Wind, of course, it would still need to carry on its cycle of life.
Tennyson's line in "The Gardener's Daughter," "More black than ashbuds in the front of March," has often been quoted, and there is a peculiar charm in the dull, soft black of the three buds which tip the grey-green twig like a bird's foot. But the real beauty of an ash-bud belongs to the day when it opens and shows the crimson, clustered blossoms which stud the boughs like so many tiny, brown-red cauliflowers, tight and dark and shining. For sheer strength and vigour of contrasted colour the dark-red
ash-buds and the bursting light-green, almost yellow, flowers of the sycamore, which break in the 131111 of the first week in
April, would be difficult to equal in a spring bouquet, unless it were the drooping gold-green of the weeping willow and the rusty, purple reds of the alder side by side above the stream. Tennyson, by the way, is not the only poet of the flowers of trees, though he alone wrote much of them. A simpler bard is the nursery author of Bo-peep. It was surely on a hot day in March, when the pollen of the hazel was raining about the crimson, starfish tips of the mating flowers, that Bo-peep got tired of looking for her sheep in the dusty fields, and woke under the hedgerow to see a hundred lambs'-tails waving against the blue sky above her.
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