This love, once implanted, means surer protection for
the trees, otherwise so defenseless against the unthinking vandalism of
commercialism or incompetence--a vandalism that has not only devastated
our American forests, but mutilated shamefully many trees of priceless
value in and about our cities.

Of the Japanese maples--their leaves seemingly a showing of the
ingenuity of these Yankees of the Orient, in their twists of form and
depths of odd color--I could tell a tale, but it would be of the tree
nursery and not of the broad outdoors. Let us close the book and go
afield, in park or meadow, on street or lawn, and look to the maples for
an unsuspected feast of bloom, if it be spring, or for richness of
foliage in summer and autumn; and in coldest winter let us notice the
delicate twigs and yet sturdy structure of this tree family that is most
of all characteristic of the home, in city or country.

The Growth of the Oak

The old saw has it, "Great oaks from little acorns grow," and all of us
who remember the saying have thus some idea of what the beginning of an
oak is. But what of the beginning of the acorn? In a general way, one
inferentially supposes that there must be a flower somewhere in the
life-history of the towering white oak that has defied the storms of
centuries and seems a type of everything sturdy and strong and
masculine; but what sort of a flower could one imagine as the source of
so much majesty? We know of the great magnolias, with blooms befitting
the richness of the foliage that follows them. We see, and some of us
admire, the exquisitely delicate blossoms of that splendid American
tree, the tulip or whitewood. We inhale with delight the fragrance that
makes notable the time when the common locust sends forth its white
racemes of loveliness. But we miss, many of us, the flowering of the
oaks in early spring, and we do not realize that this family of trees,
most notable for rugged strength, has its bloom of beginning at the
other end of the scale, in flowers of delicate coloring and rather
diminutive size.

The reason I missed appreciating the flowers of the oak--they are quite
new to me--for some years of tree admiration was because of the
distracting accompaniment the tree gives to the blooms. Some trees--most
of the maples, for instance--send out their flowers boldly ahead of the
foliage, and it is thus easy to see what is happening above your head,
as you stroll along drinking in the