It was while sitting in his hay-barn study in the Catskills and looking
out upon the maple woods of the old home farm, and under the maples at
Riverby, that the most of these essays were written, during the last two
years of the author's life. And it was to the familiar haunts near his
Hudson River home that his thoughts wistfully turned while wintering in
Southern California in 1921. As he pictured in his mind the ice breaking
up on the river in the crystalline March days, the return of the birds,
the first hepaticas, he longed to be back among them; he was there in
spirit, gazing upon the river from the summer-house, or from the veranda
of the Nest, or seated at his table in the chestnut-bark Study, or busy
with his sap-gathering and sugar-making.
Casting about for a title for this volume, the vision of maple-trees and
dripping sap and crisp March days playing constantly before his mind,
one day while sorting and shifting the essays for his new book, he
suddenly said, "I have it! We'll call it _Under the Maples_!"
His love for the maple, and consequently his pleasure in having hit upon
this title, can be gathered from the following fragment found among his
miscellaneous notes: "I always feel at home where the sugar maple grows
It was paramount in the woods of the old home farm where I grew up. It
looks and smells like home. When I bring in a maple stick to put on my
fire, I feel like caressing it a little. Its fiber is as white as a
lily, and nearly as sweet-scented. It is such a tractable, satisfactory
wood to handle--a clean, docile, wholesome tree; burning without
snapping or sputtering, easily worked up into stovewood, fine of grain,
hard of texture, stately as a forest tree, comely and clean as a shade
tree, glorious in autumn, a fountain of coolness in summer, sugar in its
veins, gold in its foliage, warmth in its fibers, and health in it the
year round."