Perhaps if my early home had stood upon an island of evergreens, or if I
had dreamed my first bright dreams among pine hills and cliffs of
laurel, I should have loved their changeless beauty less. But through
all my early years I saw but little of our native evergreens, and none
of cultured, save a stunted cedar, that grew, or, rather, refused to
grow, in our front yard at home; and thus they have ever attracted me
exceedingly--the charm of rarity and novelty being added for me to their
exceeding beauty.
And yet, if brought up among them, I might but have loved them more. For
all I know of philosophy, if I had been earlier familiar with shrubs,
hedges, groups, cedared cliffs, and tall forests of evergreens, they
might have brought me still nobler conceptions, a more exquisite sense
of beauty, than they now do.
Be that as it may, two years 'among the pines' of Virginia and her piny
mountains, have enriched my mind with rare pictures of scenic beauty
that shall keep fresh and green in memory while memory endures! I am no
botanist, I have made no studies of the evergreens, nor shall I attempt
to write of them as scholar or critic, but only as a fascinated
observer. I neither care to know or tell whether the shrubs and trees in
my evergreen pictures are angiosperms or gymnosperms; we have no
'transportation' for text books for students! During these two years,
however, I have been charmed with a thousand views of landscape scenery,
embracing every form, hue, and combination of our lovely native
evergreens, whether on mountain, hill, or plain. I have seen them along
winding streams, with backgrounds of bold, rocky bluffs; sweeping across
undulating plains; rising with the uplifting mountains; peering into and
over romantic mountain gorges; and growing up through the interstices of
bowldered cascades. Or, standing on the mountain peaks, I have seen them
sweep away into the vastness and grandeur of mighty, varied, and almost
boundless expanse. These are but parts of my evergreen pictures. I have
looked upon a simple holly bush when the wind of winter was upon it,
scattering in lovely fragments its pure white robe of snow, revealing
the gleaming of the rich green leaves, and the half-hidden clusters of
the carmine berries. Three distinct colors thrown carelessly together,
but no want of harmony--only pure and exquisite beauty!
In the summer months our evergreens are greatly less noticeable. They
are overshadowed and eclipsed by the rich and exuberant foliage of our
common but noble forest trees; but their beauty is not, even then, lost.
They give variety of hues to the forests which they fringe or help to
form; variety of shapes, and always exquisite, spicy, and healthful
odors. But when the autumn comes, with its infinitely varied tintings of
orange and vermilion; when the frost works its wonders, and the wooded
hills are clothed with splendor--then the rich groups of our native
evergreens rise in their immortality of freshness. How exquisitely their
bright unfading green sets off and contrasts with the rich golds,
glowing scarlets, russet browns, purples, and crimsons, in all their
delicate shades and evanescent hues! The forest leaves grow sere and
fall from their stems, sailing down singly or in groups, like bevies of
frightened birds, until the hickory, oak, maple, and elm stand
uncrowned, disrobed, lifting their bare arms to the winter skies; then
higher and ever higher rises, as the gloom of winter deepens, the glory
of evergreen shrub and tree.
The fields are dull russet, the forests are black, each tree seems a
skeleton; all nature, save the evergreen, looks dead. But our mountains
of firs, our hills of pine, our groves of cedar, our thickets of holly,
our cliffs crowned with laurel, full of life, and covered with
unchangeable verdure, keep eternally fresh and beautiful. Then come the
great white silent snowflakes, sailing round and falling gently down,
alighting on trunk, branch, and leaf, and covering and draping the
hills, until they are pure and fair as the hills of Beulah. There is a
dreamlike beauty in an evergreen forest mantled with snow. What words
could tell the purity of coloring, the gracefulness of form of the pine
boughs bending under their white burden of feathery crystals? Especially
is this true of the young and pliant trees in hedgerows and thickets,
and such as are everywhere springing up over the waste and wornout lands
of Virginia.
The old monarch pine stands out like a sculptured column of ebony
against the blue sky. Its umbel top, crowned with white, makes a fitting
capital for a shaft so noble. It is a picture, in and of itself. The
shrubs and young trees, so rich in leaves and verdure, so pliant to the
lines and curves of grace, when happily and picturesquely grouped, are
almost bewilderingly beautiful. Yet perhaps that which contains in
itself the greatest number of the elements of beauty, is the
medium-sized pyramidal tree, be it of spruce, Norway pine, or balsam
fir. It unites at once, in its pyramidal shape, the strength and majesty
of the old, and in its gracefully curved limbs and abundant leaves, the
beauty and freshness of the young tree. When loaded down with a spotless
burden of snow until its limbs are almost ready to break, no pyramid of
art, no monument chiselled by human hands, can hope to approach its pure
and model beauty.
The evergreen itself, however, seems to know no season but spring. In
none other does it appear to change, and even then it casts not off the
old--it only puts on the new in tenderer and fresher beauty! The new
growth of the spruce and fir, the pale yellowish-green tips set in the
dark old background, are exquisitely lovely; nor are the light green
shoots of the white, yellow, and pitch pine much, less beautiful.
Later comes the glory of the laurel bloom, the most beautiful woodflower
in our climate. As the other trees put on their leaves successively, the
tinting of light, dark, and yellowish green are infinitely varied and
pleasing.
Nor must I pass over, in my picture of evergreen, the mosses and ferns
of the mountains of Virginia. More fragile than the trees and shrubs,
they cannot be considered less beautiful. Indeed, the mosses of Cheat
Mountain are the most luxuriant, exquisite, delicate, and richly
beautiful things in nature. No dream of fairyland could, to my
imagination, be lovelier than are the evergreen heights of these
mountains, covered, matted, fringed, heaped, piled as they are with the
greatest variety of mosses of the most delicate texture, feathery forms,
and wondrously beautiful combinations. No one who has not seen them can
have any just conception of mountain mosses, nor of the marvellous
luxuriance of beauty with which they clothe rock, and tree, and earth,
and everything upon these lone wild slopes and summits. Over the rocks,
amid the mosses, hang the long pendent ferns, in richer, darker green.
And with the grand old pine and fir trees lifting their heads to the
heavens, and the thick tanglewood of shrub and underbrush, there is
grandeur, grace, and beauty in bewildering, changeful, and ravishing
confusion.
How I have loved, in leisure hours, to turn aside from the stern duties
of the field, or the dull monotony of the camp, to gallop under the
great pines, or wind through pathless thickets and native parks of
evergreen, feasting my very soul on their eternal freshness and glory!
How I have loved to see 'Black Hawk' crush with his feet, and sink up to
his fetlocks, in the tender and fairy-like mosses that drape the
mountains! How I have delighted to weave the trailing evergreens into
wreaths, trellises, and bowers in front of my white tent! And, alas!
with hushed and solemn pride, I have planted the holly and the pine on
the graves of my dead comrades, hoping they might live in all their
wondrous beauty over the quiet mound, and keep green the memory of the
brave forever!