The Romance of Plant Life. Elliot George Francis Scott
TREE'S PERILOUS LIFE
Hemlock spruce and pine forests – Story of a pine seedling – Its struggles and dangers – The gardener's boot – Turpentine of pines – The giant sawfly – Bark beetles – Their effect on music – Storm and strength of trees – Tall trees and long seaweeds – Eucalyptus, big trees – Age of trees – Venerable sequoias, oaks, chestnuts, and olives – Baobab and Dragontree – Rabbits as woodcutters – Fire as protection – Sacred fires – Dug-out and birch-bark canoes – Lake dwellings – Grazing animals and forest destruction – First kind of cultivation – Old forests in England and Scotland – Game preserving.
"The murmuring pines and the hemlocks
Stand like harpers hoar with beards that rest on their bosom." —Longfellow.
OF course the Hemlock here alluded to is not the "hemlock rank growing on the weedy bank," which the cow is adjured not to eat in Wordsworth's well-known lines. (If the animal had, however, obeyed the poet's wishes and eaten "mellow cowslips," it would probably have been seriously ill.) The "Hemlock" is the Hemlock spruce, a fine handsome tree which is common in the forests of Eastern North America.
These primeval forests of Pine and Fir and Spruce have always taken the fancy of poets. They are found covering craggy and almost inaccessible mountain valleys; even a tourist travelling by train cannot but be impressed by their sombre, gloomy monotony, by their obstinacy in growing on rocky precipices on the worst possible soil, in spite of storm and snow.
But to realize the romance of a Pine forest, it is necessary to tramp, as in Germany one sometimes has to do, for thirty miles through one unending black forest of Coniferous trees; there are no towns, scarcely a village or a forester's hut. The ground is covered with brown, dead needles, on which scarcely even green moss can manage to live.
Then one realizes the irritating monotony of the branches of Pines and Spruces, and their sombre, dark green foliage produces a morose depression of spirit.
The Conifers are, amongst trees, like those hard-set, gloomy, and determined Northern races whose life is one long, continuous strain of incessant endeavour to keep alive under the most difficult conditions.
From its very earliest infancy a young Pine has a very hard time. The Pine-cones remain on the tree for two years. The seeds inside are slowly maturing all this while, and the cone-scales are so welded or soldered together by resin and turpentine that no animal could possibly injure them. How thorough is the protection thus afforded to the young seeds, can only be understood if one takes a one-year-old unopened cone of the Scotch Fir and tries to get them out. It does not matter what is used; it may be a saw, a chisel, a hammer, or an axe: the little elastic, woody, turpentiny thing can only be split open with an infinite amount of trouble and a serious loss of calm.
When these two years have elapsed, the stalk of the cone grows so that the scales are separated, and the seeds become rapidly dry and are carried away by the wind.
These seeds are most beautiful and exquisitely fashioned.
The seed itself is small and flattened. It contains both resin and food material, and is enclosed in a tough leathery skin which is carried out beyond the seed into a long, very thin, papery wing, which has very nearly the exact shape of the screw or propeller of a steamer. This wing or screw is intended to give the seed as long a flight in the air as possible before it reaches the ground. If you watch them falling from the tree, or throw one up into the air and observe it attentively, you will see that it twirls or revolves round and round exactly like the screw of a steamship. It is difficult to explain what happens without rather advanced mathematics, but it is just the reverse of what happens in the steamer.
The machinery in the steamer turns the screw, and the pressure of the water, which is thrown off, forces the boat through the water; in the case of the pineseed, the pressure of the air on the flying wings makes the seed twirl or turn round and round, and so the seed must be a much longer time in falling. They often fly to about 80 or 100 yards away from the parent tree.
Once upon the ground, the seed has to germinate if it can; its root has to pierce the soil or find a way in between crevices of rocks or sharp-edged stones. All the time it is exposed to danger from birds, beasts, and insects, which are only kept off by its resin. But it is difficult to see, for its colour is just that of dead pine needles and its shape is such that it easily slips into crevices. Then the seven or eight small green seed leaves break out of the tough seed coat, and the seedling is now a small tree two inches high. It may have to grow up through grass or bramble, or through bracken, which last is perhaps still more dangerous and difficult. It will probably be placed in a wood or plantation where hundreds of thousands of its cousins are all competing together. "In this case, the struggle for life is intense: each tree seeking for sunlight tries to push its leader-shoots up above the general mass of foliage; but all are growing in height, whilst the lateral branches which are cramped by the neighbouring trees are continually thrown off. The highest branches alone get sufficient light to remain alive, but they cannot spread out freely. They are strictly limited to a definite area; the crown is small and crowded by those of the trees next to it, and the trunk is of extraordinary length."
The above quotation from Albert Fron's Sylviculture (Paris, 1903) refers to an artificial forest cultivated and watched over by man. But the trees in such forests have "extra" dangers and difficulties to fight against. Even scientific foresters admit that they are very ignorant of what they are trying to do. In fact, the more scientific they are, the more readily they will confess how little they really know.
Watch a labourer in a nursery transplanting young pine trees; each seedling tree has a long main root which is intended to grow as straight down into the ground as it possibly can. All the other roots branch off sideways, slanting downwards, and make a most perfect though complicated absorbing system. With his large hand the man grasps a tree and lifts it to a shallow groove which he has cut in the soil. Then his very large, heavy-nailed boot comes hard down on the tender root-system. The main root, which ought to point down, points sideways or upwards or in any direction, and the beautifully arranged absorbing system is entirely spoilt. The wretched seedling has to make a whole new system of roots, and in some trees never recovers.
All sorts of animals, insects, and funguses are ready to attack our young tree. Squirrels in play will nibble off its leading shoots. Cattle will rub against its bark, and the roedeer, a very beautiful creature, and yet a destructive little fiend from the tree's point of view, nibbles the young shoots and tears the bark with its horns.
A tree's life is full of peril and danger. Yet it is most wonderfully adapted to survive them. Take a knife and cut into the bark of a pine tree, and immediately a drop of resin collects and gathers on the wound. After a short time this will harden and entirely cover the scar. Why?
There are in the woods, especially in Canada and North Russia, hundreds of insects belonging to the most different kinds, which have the habit of laying their eggs in the wood of tree-trunks. In those regions the entire country is in the winter covered with snow and ice for many months. Insects must find it difficult to live, for the ground is frozen to a depth of many feet. Where are the eggs of these insects to be stored up so that they can last through the winter without injury?
There is one insect at least, or rather many, of which the Giant Sawfly may be taken as an example, which have ingeniously solved this problem. She painfully burrows into the trunk of a tree and deposits her eggs with a store of food at the end of the burrow. A drop of resin or turpentine, which would clog her jaws, makes this a difficult task, but, as we find in many other instances, it is not impossible, but only a difficulty to conquer. If it were not for the resin, trees might be much more frequently destroyed by Sawflies than they are.
The larvæ of the Sawfly is a long, fleshy maggot. Just at the end are the strong woodcutting jaws by which it devours the wood and eats its way out as soon as it feels the genial warmth of spring penetrating through the tree-bark. Many other insects hibernate or lay their eggs in tree-trunks. Some are caterpillars of moths, such as the well-known Goat moth; others are beetles, such as one which burrows between the bark and the wood of apple trees. The mother beetle lays a series of eggs on each side of her own track. Each egg produces a grub which eats its way sideways away