Some objects are repellant and exclusive. They give no shelter or support
to any created thing. They suffice for themselves, and stand out clearly
defined in their distinct and independent existence. The surface of the
snow is barren; the chilly glacier has no communion with the mountain
glen through which it passes. The clear, sharp-cut crystal harbors no
stain from earth or sky to show its sympathy with the materials out of
which it sprang. The marble rock, like the snow, does not invite the
green things of the soil around it to share its existence with it, and
give to and take from it an element of picturesqueness and beauty.
And yet, as in human society, when social laws overbear private plans,
and the social design is fulfilled in spite of selfish opposition, so in
nature the substances that seek to exclude others are made to contribute
to the general harmony and the beautiful balancing of creation. The very
snow is made to be friendly and hospitable, for it nourishes on its
stainless bosom a simple, one-celled plant which grows with such rapidity
and in such marvelous profusion that it gives to whole fields of polar
and alpine snow a deep crimson hue, as if a creature’s blood had dyed
them. In the shallow parts of water melted on the surface of the glacier
by the hot noonday sun may be seen jelly-like masses of vegetation;
while under the stones which the rocks around hurl down upon it, as if
in anger at its hostility, may be found lively colonies of the small
black glacier flea. Nature will not allow this cold, frigid substance to
maintain a separate existence; for beside bowlders from the rocks, she
persists in soiling its surface with dirt-bands and masses of débris from
the crumbling mountain-side, so that a line of demarcation between ice
and earth can not be drawn, and the glacier blends with the rest of the
mountain; while the sky claims kindred with the deep cerulean blue that
shines in the crevasses. Marble, too, takes on the warm golden tint of
the sunset, and is stained by time with a russet hue that brings it into
partnership with the common rocks, with which all things make friends—the
mosses, the lichens, the vines and birds. Even the hardest crystals
and precious stones have occasional cavities filled with fluids, which
indicate their origin. Nay, so anxious is nature to assimilate every
object, that on the thatch of man’s lowly cottages she plants her tufted
mosses; on the slates of his statelier roofs she paints her frescoes
of golden lichens; and even on his windows she produces not only the
iridescence of age, but also a growth of curious, minute algæ. On his
dark unsightly cinder-walks, which seem like spots of ink disfiguring
nature’s fair page, she makes her dandelions to open their sunshine; and
on the raw new walls which he builds around his possessions, to separate
them from nature’s wastes, she spreads her hoary nebulæ of vegetation.
Man’s works are thus made kindred to the earth and the elements; and
nature, by her hospitalities, makes them at home in every situation.
Some objects are more hospitable than others. The beech, of all trees, is
perhaps the most self-contained. It fills out its trunk so thoroughly;
its bark is so hard and stuffed and rounded with its wood, that it has
not a rift nor a crevice in which any living thing might find refuge.
No moss forms a green tuft upon it; no leafy or shrubby lichen finds
a foothold on its smooth bark. And even the crustaceous species that
consist of a mere film of gray matter grow thinner on its hard repellant
surface than on the rock itself. They cling so closely that they can
not be separated. No botanist would go to the beech expecting to find
on its trunk the wealth of lowly plants in which he delights. To the
entomologist it is equally uninteresting, the number of insects that
frequent it being exceedingly few. Nor is it chosen usually by birds
to build their nests on its boughs. Darwin mentions that worms hardly
ever make their curious castings under its shade. The ground beneath
it nourishes no green grasses, and only its brown mast and polished,
three-cornered nuts carpet the soil.
Why is the beech so inhospitable? Why does it thus stand alone, apart
from the rest of creation, and proudly maintain its own self-sufficient
existence? It is indeed one of the grandest of our forest trees. Nothing
can be lovelier than its translucent foliage in spring, making, as
Coleridge says, “the level sunshine glimmer with green light.” Nothing
can be more splendid than its blaze of amber tints lighting up the
woodland in autumn like a pillar of fire. Its shade is ample; its leaves
are sweet and tender; its nuts pleasant and nutritious. And yet all
creatures, with the exception of the pig, which feeds upon its nuts, seem
to shun it; and hardly any moss or lichen ornaments its trunk and arms
with its quaint jewelry. It stands in the inanimate world of pictures
around us as a type of a thoroughly selfish and unsocial nature. Only
the lover seeks it to carve upon its smooth, hard bark the name of the
beloved one, fondly hoping that it may long retain, clear and sharp as
if cut in stone, the cherished inscription. But even this tender secret
it refuses to keep; its trunk swells, and the letters become dilated and
distorted, and in a few years a new growth smooths out and obliterates
the name, without leaving a trace on its callous wood. Perhaps this
smoothness and hardness of the bark and wood, as well as the dryness
of its shade—for no other woods are so free from damp and so pleasant
to walk in as beech woods—may be the reason why it shelters so little
dependent life. Even the raindrops refuse to linger about it, and though
the sunbeams may play through the green meshes of its transparent foliage
and tremble on the lines of silky hairs that project from the margins
of its young leaves “like eyelashes from the margin of the eyelid,” yet
without moisture the light can favor no growth of fern or moss or lichen,
which loves a damp atmosphere; and without these lowly plants no insect
or bird life can flourish.
Another inhospitable tree is the pine. Its degree of selfishness varies
with the species, some being much more tolerant of alien life than
others; the common larch being, perhaps, the least exclusive, and the
aurucaria the most. The trunk and branches of the larch are covered
from head to foot with tufts and rosettes of hoary lichens, which cling
specially to this tree and give it a most venerable appearance; but the
aurucaria surrounds itself with an impenetrable armor of vegetable spears
and daggers, within whose formidable circle no living thing dare intrude.
I once saw a squirrel skipping along a lawn, and suddenly stopping at the
foot of a tall, wide-spreading aurucaria, it looked up at the bristling
trunk and branches with evident astonishment, as if it had never seen
anything of the kind before; and with an expression of disappointment
and fear that was almost human, and certainly was exceedingly comical,
it turned away and climbed up a more propitious looking species of pine
near at hand. But whatever may be the case in regard to individual trees,
the pine tribe in its social character is decidedly inhospitable. A pine
wood is one of the loneliest scenes in nature, not merely as regards the
intrusion of man, but as regards the intrusion of any other living thing.
Nothing breaks up its uniformity and monotony. It has none of the rich
variety of life that characterizes other woods. The seasons themselves
make no impression upon it, for it is dressed in perennial green, and
it retains its shade alike in summer’s heat and winter’s desolation.
It prevents all undergrowth; no brambles dare to stretch their long,
trailing, thorny arms—like the feelers of some creature of prey—within
its guarded enclosure. No wild roses can open their trembling petals
white with fear, or crimson with blushes, in its solemn sanctuary. No
hazel bush will drop there its ringlets of smoking catkins in spring,
or its ruddy clusters of nuts in autumn. No mimic sunshine of primrose
tufts, no pale star-beams of anemone or sorrel will light up its gloom.
No glimpses of blue sky are let into it by hyacinths, or bluebells, or
violets. To all the lowly plants that find refuge in other woods, and in
turn adorn and beautify their hosts, the pine trees in their dignified
independence refuse admission. No song of bird or hum of insect is heard
beneath their boughs. And on the ground below, strewn deep with a carpet
of brown needles and emptied cones that have silently dropped in the
course of long years from overhead, and are slow to decay, only a few
yellow toadstools and one or two splendid scarlet mushrooms make up for
the painful dearth of vegetation. It seems as if the balsamic breath of
the pines, which is so wholesome to human life—guarding off all fevers
and infectious diseases—were as deadly as the upas shade to other forms
of life.
How widely different is it with the oak! This of all trees—of all living
things—is the most hospitable; and in this respect it is well chosen
as the badge of England, which has the proud distinction of affording
a refuge to every political outcast and victim of ecclesiastical
tyranny throughout the world, and fosters by its love of freedom and
constitutional government, every type and variety of human life. A
whole book might easily be written upon the multitude of living things
that obtain food and shelter from the oak. The natural history of its
inmates and boarders is like that of a garden, or, indeed, a county.
Some creatures are peculiar to it, and find their home nowhere else; and
to many more that are free to come and go, it extends a kindly welcome.
Were it to perish altogether from off the face of the earth, many insects
and plants would disappear utterly. The insect population alone of the
oak tree, including beetles, butterflies, and a great variety of tiny
creeping things which none but a naturalist cares for, or is aware of,
would furnish materials for study of a most interesting and absorbing
kind for many summer weeks together. When we do not see themselves, we
see the evidence of the existence and working of the insects in the great
variety of curious galls which they produce upon the trunk and branches:
oak apples that hang on the twigs like some mysterious unknown fruit,
and are as wondrously fashioned, although excrescences and abortions of
the vital sap, as the legitimate acorn cups and eggs themselves; and
beautiful golden-brown spangles that crowd all the under-surface of the
withering leaves in autumn like the seeds, or the “fairy’s money,” as
it is called, on the back of the ferns, thus linking the oak leaf and
the fern leaf—the highest and the lowest type of vegetation—together
in the wondrous unity of nature by a strange similitude of appearance.
But it is among the plants that we find the most beautiful occupants
of the oak tree. The ivy climbs up its trunk, which affords admirable
support for its myriads of little feet, and changes its glossy leaves,
as it creeps higher and higher, from the deeply-cut angular pattern to
the oval and pointed one; and at the top it waves its airy sprays among
the oak leaves, and produces beside the acorns at the extremities of the
branches, the light-green flowers that blossom only when the plant has
nothing to cling to and must shift for itself; as if nature were taking
care that when the life of the individual was in danger, the life of the
race should at least be made sure. Then there is the mystic mistletoe,
with all its dim and sacred associations with the Druid-worship of our
remote ancestors. It clings still closer to the oak, for it is not an
epiphyte like the ivy—merely making use of the tree for support—and
finding its food independently from the soil and air—but a partial
parasite that strikes its root into the substance of the oak, and while
to some extent feeding upon its prepared juices, is capable of showing a
little independent spirit and working for its own support, as is evident
from the fact of its having green leaves, which, however pale, can still
decompose, to some extent, the sunshine into materials of growth. The
mistletoe is thus a partial boarder of the oak; it gets, so to speak, its
principal meal from it, while for its lighter refreshment it is dependent
upon its own resources. A beautiful emblem truly it is, thus growing on
our royal English tree. According to the suggestive mythology of our
ancestors, which had, indeed, much in it of the deeply philosophical, as
well as of the practical and religious, the oak was Hesus, the god best
and greatest, strongest and ever-during; and the mistletoe was man weak
and poor, but living in him and clinging to his everlasting arms.
It would be almost impossible to enumerate the various kinds of mosses,
lichens, and ferns, that show a preference for the oak, and share its
grand and liberal hospitality. Its trunk seems as if made to harbor
those lowly lilliputian members of the vegetable kingdom, whose quaint
forms and curious properties harmonize so well with the fairy scenery
of midsummer night’s dreams. Unlike the smooth bark of the beech, made
to keep all visitors aloof, the bark of the oak is full of furrows,
crevices, irregularities, porches and outbuildings as it were, where
wandering seeds find lodgement, and first tender growths can secure
their hold against scorching sunbeam and cruel wind. The huge patriarch,
hoary with years, whose lifetime bridges across the whole history of
England, allows the tiny imps of vegetation that are but of yesterday—the
perpetual infants, so to speak, of plant life, freely to clamber over
its roots and arms, and hang upon its rugged bosses which time has used
so cruelly, reducing them almost to bone and muscle, their emerald
bracelets of moss, their plumes of polypody ferns, and their rosettes of
lichen, adorning the magnificent old grandfather of the woods with the
ornaments of youth and beauty! What a wonderful picturesqueness do these
lowly forms of life, crowding around the oak as it grows in years and in
size, give to it! They richly repay the hospitality they receive in the
added charm they impart to the forest patriarch. They show an exquisite
sympathy even with its weaknesses, hiding its defects by their fairy
sprays, and covering its dead members with a lovely pall of vegetable
velvet.
It teaches us thus the touching lesson that the grandest things in
nature may be made more beautiful and picturesque by the simplest—as
the greatest man may be indebted for his chief happiness to the smiles
and prattle of the little children that climb on his knee. And how open
to all the flowers and shrubs of the wild wood are its wide-spreading
arms! The grass may grow up to the very foot of its trunk unreproved by
any dark frowning shadow cast by its leaves. The hyacinth may make a
fragrant mist of blue about its roots, and the primrose need not blanch
its sunny cheek as it creeps up to its venerable bole. Royal as it is,
its dignity consists in its hospitality; and its nobility is indicated by
its freeness of access and kindly generous welcome to all that may hold
within it the sacred principle of life. The gates of its hospitality,
like the Bukharian nobleman’s, are “nailed open.” Sturdy and independent
as it is, there is thus no object that is more closely linked with the
genial life of nature, that blends more harmoniously with the operations
which different creatures carry on for their own advantage, and makes of
them one genial system of mutual benefit.—_London Sunday Magazine._