ground that it is little wonder few persons, even of those most used to
the woods, ever see its bloom, which is commonly enveloped in a mass of
large, dark leaves. These leaves are peculiarly outlined, having short
lobes at the sides and a truncated end, while the stem is slender, long,
and wire-like. The flower has six petals and three transparent sepals.
In its centre rises a pale-green cone surrounded by from eighteen to
thirty stamens. Sap-green, yellow of various shades, orange-vermilion,
and vague traces of some inimitable scarlet, are the colors curiously
blended together within and without the grand cup-shaped corolla. It is
Edgar Fawcett who draws an exquisite poetic parallel between the oriole
and the tulip,--albeit he evidently did not mean the flower of our
Liriodendron, which is nearer the oriole colors. The association of the
bird with the flower goes further than color, too; for the tulip-tree is
a favorite haunt of the orioles. Audubon, in the plates of his great
ornithological work, recognizes this by sketching the bird and some
rather flat and weak tulip-sprays together on the same sheet. I have
fancied that nature in some way favors this massing of colors by placing
the food of certain birds where their plumage will show to best
advantage on the one hand, or serve to render them invisible, on the
other, while they are feeding. The golden-winged woodpecker, the downy
woodpecker, the red-bellied woodpecker, and that grand bird the pileated
woodpecker, all seem to prefer the tulip-tree for their nesting-place,
pecking their holes into the rotten boughs, sometimes even piercing an
outer rim of the fragrant green wood in order to reach a hollow place. I
remember, when I was a boy, lying in a dark old wood in Kentucky and
watching a pileated woodpecker at work on a dead tulip-bough that seemed
to afford a great number of dainty morsels of food. There were streaks
of hard wood through the rotten, and whenever his great horny beak
struck one of these it would sound as loud and clear as the blow of a
carpenter's hammer. This fine bird is almost extinct now, having totally
disappeared from nine-tenths of the area of its former habitat. I never
see a tulip-tree without recollecting the wild, strangely-hilarious cry
of the _Hylotomus pileatus_; and I cannot help associating the
giant bloom, its strength of form and vigor of color, with the scarlet
crest and king-like bearing of the bird. The big trees of California
excepted, our tulip-bearing Liriodendron is the largest growth of the
North-American forests; for, while the plane-tree and the
liquidambar-(sweet-gum) tree sometimes measure more in diameter near the
ground, they are usually hollow, and consequently bulged there, while
the tulip springs boldly out of the ground a solid shaft of clear,
clean, and sweetly-fragrant wood, sixty or seventy feet of the bole
being often entirely without limbs, with an average diameter of from
three to five feet. I found a stump in Indiana nearly eight feet in
diameter (measured three feet above the ground), and a tree in Clarke
County, Kentucky, of about the same girth, tapering slowly to the first
branch, fifty-eight feet from the root.
In nearly all the Western and Southern States the tulip is generally
called poplar, and the lumber manufactured from it goes by the same
name, while in the East it is known as white-wood. The bark is very
thick and cork-like, exhaling an odor peculiarly pungent and agreeable;
the buds and tender twigs in the spring have a taste entirely individual
and unique, very pleasant to some persons, but quite repellent to
others. Gray squirrels and the young of the fox-squirrel eat the buds
and flowers as well as the cone-shaped fruit. Humming-birds and
bumble-bees in the blossoming-time make a dreamy booming among the
shadowy sprays. A saccharine, sticky substance, not unlike honey-dew,
may often be found in the hollows of the immense petals, in search of
which large black ants make pilgrimages from the root to the top of the
largest tulip-trees, patiently toiling for two or three hours over the
rough bark, among the bewildering wrinkles of which it is, a wonder how
the way is kept with such unerring certainty. I have calculated that in
making such a journey the ant does what is equivalent to a man's
pedestrian tour from New York City to the Adirondacks by the roughest
route, and all for a smack of wild honey! But the ant makes his long
excursion with neither alpenstock nor luncheon, and without sleeping or
even resting on the way.
The tulip-tree grows best in warm loam in which there is a mixture of
sand and vegetable mould superposed on clay and gravel. About its roots
you may find the lady-slipper and the dog-tooth violet, each in its
season. Its bark often bears the rarest lichens, and, near the ground,
short green moss as soft and thick as velvet. The poison-ivy and the
beautiful Virginia creeper like to clamber up the rough trunk, sometimes
clothing the huge tree from foot to top in a mantle of brown feelers and
glossy leaves. Seen at a distance, the tulip-tree and the
black-walnut-tree look very much alike; but upon approaching them the
superior symmetry and beauty of the former are at once discovered. The
leaves of the walnut are gracefully arranged, but they admit too much
light; while the tulip presents grand masses of dense foliage upheld by
knotty, big-veined branches, the perfect embodiment of vigor.
In the days of bee-hunting in the West, I may safely say that a majority
of bee-trees were tulips. I have found two of these wild Hyblas since I
began my studies for this paper; but the trees have become so valuable
that the bees are left unmolested with their humming and their honey. It
seems that no more appropriate place for a nest of these wild
nectar-brewers could be chosen than the hollow bough of a giant
tulip,--a den whose door is curtained with leaves and washed round with
odorous airs, where the superb flowers, with their wealth of golden
pollen and racy sweets, blaze out from the cool shadows above and
beneath. But the sly old 'coon, that miniature Bruin of our Western
woods, is a great lover of honey, and not at all a respecter of the
rights of wild bees. He is tireless in his efforts to reach every
deposit of waxy comb and amber distillation within the range of his keen
power of scent. The only honey that escapes him is that in a hollow too
small for him to enter and too deep for his fore-paws to reach the
bottom.
Poe, in his story of the Gold-Bug, falls into one of his characteristic
errors of conscience. The purposes of his plot required that a very
large and tall tree should be climbed, and, to be picturesque, a tulip
was chosen. But, in order to give a truthful air to the story, the
following minutely incorrect description is given: "In youth the
tulip-tree, or _Liriodendron Tulipiferum_, the most magnificent of
American foresters, has a trunk peculiarly smooth, and often rises to a
great height without lateral branches; but in its riper age the bark
becomes gnarled and uneven, while _many short limbs make their
appearance on the stem_" The italics are mine, and the sentence
italicized contains an unblushing libel upon the most beautiful of all
trees. Short branches never "appear on the stems" of old tulip-trees.
The bark, however, does grow rough and deeply seamed with age. I have
seen pieces of it six inches thick, which, when cut, showed a fine grain
with cloudy waves of rich brown color, not unlike the darkest mahogany.
But Poe, no matter how unconscionable his methods of art, had the true
artistic judgment, and he made the tulip-tree serve a picturesque turn
in the building of his fascinating story; though one would have had more
confidence in his descriptions of foliage if it had been May instead of
November.
The growth of the tulip-tree, under favorable circumstances, is strong
and rapid, and, when not crowded or shaded by older trees, it begins
flowering when from eighteen to twenty-five years old. The
blooming-season, according to the exigences of weather, begins from May
20 to June 10 in Indiana, and lasts about a week. The fruit following
the flower is a cone an inch and a half long and nearly an inch in
diameter at the base, of a greenish--yellow color, very pungent and
odorous, and full of germs like those of a pine-cone. The tree is easily
grown from the seed. Its roots are long, flexible, and tough, and when
young are pale yellow and of bitterish taste, but slightly flavored with
the stronger tulip individuality which characterizes the juice and sap
of the buds and the bark of the twigs. The leaves, as I have said, are
dark and rich, but their shape and color are not the half of their
beauty. There is a charm in their motion, be the wind ever so light,
that is indescribable. The rustle they make is not "sad" or "uncertain,"
but cheerful and forceful. The garments of some young giantess, such as
Baudelaire sings of, might make that rustling as she would run past one
in a land of colossal persons and things.
I have been surprised to find so little about the tulip-tree in our
literature. Our writers of prose and verse have not spared the magnolia
of the South, which is far inferior, both tree and flower, to our gaudy,
flaunting giantess of the West. Indeed, if I were an aesthete, and were
looking about me for a flower typical of a robust and perfect sentiment
of art, I should greedily seize upon the bloom of the tulip-tree. What a
"craze" for tulip borders and screens, tulip wallpapers and tulip
panel-carvings, I would set going in America! The colors, old gold,
orange, vermilion, and green,--the forms, gentle curves and classical
truncations, and all new and American, with a woodsy freshness and
fragrance in them. The leaves and flowers of the tulip-tree are so
simple and strong of outline that they need not be conventionalized for
decorative purposes. During the process of growth the leaves often take
on accidental shapes well suited to the variations required by the
designer. A wise artist, going into the woods to educate himself up to
the level of the tulip, could not fail to fill his sketch-books with
studies of the birds that haunt the tree, and especially such brilliant
ones as the red tanager, the five or six species of woodpecker, the
orioles, and the yellow-throated warbler. The Japanese artists give us
wonderful instances of the harmony between birds, flowers, and foliage;
not direct instances, it is true, but rather suggested ones, from which
large lessons might be learned by him who would carry the thought into
our woods with him in the light of a pure and safely-educated taste.
Take, for instance, the yellow-bellied woodpecker, with its red fore-top
and throat, its black and white lines, and its bright eyes, together
with its pale yellow shading of back and belly, and how well it would
"work in" with the tulip-leaves and flowers! Even its bill and feet
harmonize perfectly with the bark of the older twigs. So the
golden-wing, the tanager, and the orioles would bear their colors
harmoniously into any successful tulip design.
South of the Alleghany Mountains I have not found as fine specimens of
this tree as I have in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. Everywhere the
saw-mills are fast making sad havoc. The walnut and the tulip are soon
to be no more as "trees with the trees in the forest." Those growing in
the almost inaccessible "pockets" of the Kentucky and Tennessee
mountains may linger for a half-century yet, but eventually all will be
gone from wherever a man and a saw can reach them.
The oak of England and the pine of Norway are not more typical than the
tulip-tree. The symmetry, vigor, and rich colors of our tree might
represent the force, freedom, and beauty of our government and our
social influences. If the American eagle is the bird of freedom, the
tulip is the tree of liberty,--strong, fragrant, giant-flowered,
flaunting, defiant, yet dignified and steadfast.
A very intelligent old man, who in his youth was a great bear- and
panther-hunter, has often told me how the black bear and the tawny
catamount used to choose the ample "forks" of the tulip-tree for their
retreats when pursued by his dogs. The raccoon has superseded the larger
game, and it was but a few weeks ago that I found one lying, like a
striped, fluffy ball of fur, in a crotch ninety feet above ground. "Our
white-wood" lumber has grown so valuable that no land-owner will allow
the trees to be cut by the hunter, and hence the old-fashioned
'coon-hunt has fallen among the things of the past, for it seems that
the 'coon is quite wise enough to choose for the place of his indwelling
the costliest tulip of the woods. I have already casually mentioned the
fact that the tulip-tree's bloom is scarcely known to exist by even
intelligent and well-informed Americans. Every one has heard of the
mimosa, the dogwood, the red-bud, and the magnolia, but not of the
tulip-bearing tree, with its incomparably bold, dashing, giantesque
flower, once so common in the great woods of our Western and Middle
States. I have not been able to formulate a good reason for this. Every
one whose attention is called to the flower at once goes into raptures
over its wild beauty and force of coloring, and wonders why poems have
not been written about it and legends built upon it. It is a grander
bloom than that which once, under the same name, nearly bankrupted
kingdoms, though it cannot be kept in pots and greenhouses. Its colors
are, like the idiosyncrasies of genius, as inimitable as they are
fascinating and elusive. Audubon was something of an artist, but his
tulip-blooms are utter failures. He could color an oriole, but not the
corolla of this queen of the woods. The most sympathetic and experienced
water-colorist will find himself at fault with those amber-rose,
orange-vermilion blushes, and those tender cloudings of yellow and
green. The stiff yet sensitive and fragile petals, the transparent
sepals, with their watery shades and delicate washing of olive-green,
the strong stamens and peculiarly marked central cone, are scarcely less
difficult. All the colors elude and mock the eager artist. While the
gamut of promising tints is being run, he looks, and, lo! the grand
tulip has shrivelled and faded. Again and again a fresh spray is fetched
in, but when the blooming-season is over he is still balked and
dissatisfied. The wild, Diana-like purity and the half-savage,
half-æsthetic grace have not wholly escaped him, but the color,--ah I
there is the disappointment.
I have always nursed a fancy that there is something essential to
perfect health in the bitters and sweets of buds and roots and gums and
resins of the primeval woods. Why does the bird keep, even in old age,
the same brilliancy of plumage and the same clearness of eye? Is it
because it gets the _elixir vitæ_ from the hidden reservoir of
nature? Be this as it may, there are times when I sincerely long for a
ball of liquidambar or a mouthful of pungent spring buds. The inner bark
of the tulip-tree has the wildest of all wild tastes, a peculiarly
grateful flavor when taken infinitesimally, something more savage than
sassafras or spice-wood, and full of all manner of bitter hints and
astringent threatenings: it has long been used as the very best
appetizer for horses in the early spring, and it is equally good for
man. The yellow-bellied woodpecker knows its value, taking it with head
jauntily awry and quiet wing-tremblings of delight. The squirrels get
the essence of it as they munch the pale leaf-buds, or later when they
bite the cones out of the flowers. The humming-birds and wild bees are
the favored ones, however, for they get the ultimate distillation of all
the racy and fragrant elements from root to bloom.
The Indians knew the value of the tulip-tree as well as its beauty.
Their most graceful pirogues were dug from its bole, and its odorous
bark served to roof their rude houses. No boat I have ever tried runs so
lightly as a well-made tulip pirogue, or dug-out, and nothing under
heaven is so utterly crank and treacherous. Many an unpremeditated
plunge into cold water has one caused me while out fishing or
duck-shooting on the mountain-streams of North Georgia. If you dare
stand up in one, the least waver from a perfect balance will send the
sensitive, skittish thing a rod from under your feet, which of course
leaves you standing on the water without the faith to keep you from
going under; and usually it is your head that you are standing on. But,
to return to our tree, I would like to see its merits as an ornamental
and shade tree duly recognized. If grown in the free air and sunlight,
it forms a heavy and beautifully-shaped top, on a smooth, bright bole,
and I think it might be forced to bloom about the fifteenth year. The
flowers of young, thrifty trees that have been left standing in open
fields are much larger, brighter, and more graceful than those of old
gnarled forest-trees, but the finest blooms I ever saw were on a giant
tulip in a thin wood of Indiana. A storm blew the tree down in the midst
of its flowering, and I chanced to see it an hour later. The whole great
top was yellow with the gaudy cups, each gleaming "like a flake of
fire," as Dr. Holmes says of the oriole. Some of them were nearly four
inches across. Last year a small tree, growing in a garden near where I
write, bloomed for the first time. It was about twenty years old. Its
flowers were paler and shallower than those gathered at the same time in
the woods. It may be that transplanting, or any sort of forcing or
cultivation, may cause the blooms to deteriorate in both shape and
color, but I am sure that plenty of light and air is necessary to their
best development.
In one way the tulip-tree is closely connected with the most picturesque
and interesting period of American development. I mean the period of
"hewed-log" houses. Here and there among the hills of Indiana, Ohio,
Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, there remains one of those low,
heavy, lime-chinked structures, the best index of the first change from
frontier-life, with all its dangers and hardships, to the peace and
contentment of a broader liberty and an assured future. In fact, to my
mind, a house of hewed tulip-logs, with liberal stone chimneys and heavy
oaken doors, embowered in an old gnarled apple-and cherry-orchard,
always suggests a sort of simple honesty and hospitality long since
fallen into desuetude, but once the most marked characteristic of the
American people. It is hard to imagine any meanness or illiberality
being generated in such a house. Patriotism, domestic fidelity, and
spotless honesty used to sit before those broad fireplaces wherein the
hickory logs melted to snowy ashes. The men who hewed those logs "hewed
to the line" in more ways than one. Their words, like the bullets from
their flint-locked rifles, went straight to the point. The women, too,
they of the "big wheel" and the "little wheel," who carded and spun and
wove, though they may have been a trifle harsh and angular, were
diamond-pure and the mothers of vigorous offspring.
I often wonder if there may not be a perfectly explainable connection
between the decay or disappearance of the forests and the evaporation,
so to speak, of man's rugged sincerity and earnestness. Why should not
the simple ingredients that make up the worldly part of our souls and
bodies be found in all their purity where nature's reservoir has never
been disturbed or its contents tainted? Why may not the subtile force
that develops the immense tulip-tree and clothes it with such a starry
mantle have power also to invigorate and intensify the life of man? "I
was rocked in a poplar trough," was the politician's boast a generation
ago. Such a declaration might mean a great deal if the sturdy, towering
strength of the tree out of which the trough was dug could have been
absorbed by the embryo Congressman. The "oldest inhabitant" of every
Western neighborhood recollects the "sugar-trough" used in the
maple-sap-gathering season, ere the genuine "sugar-camp" had been
abandoned. Young tulip-trees about fifteen inches in diameter were cut
down and their boles sawed into lengths of three feet. These were split
in two, and made into troughs by hollowing the faces and charring them
over a fire. During the bright spring days of sugar-making the young
Western mother would wrap her sturdy babe in its blanket and put it in a
dry sugar-trough to sleep while she tended the boiling syrup. A man born
sixty years ago in the region of tulip-trees and sugar-camps was
probably cradled in a "poplar" trough; and there were those born who
would now be sixty years old if they had not in unwary infancy tumbled
into the enormous rainwater-troughs with which every well-regulated
house was furnished. I have seen one or two of these having a capacity
of fifty barrels dug from a single tulip bole. In such a pitfall some
budding Washington or Lincoln may have been whelmed without causing so
much as a ripple on the surface of history.
But, turning to take leave of my stately and blooming Western beauty, I
see that she is both a blonde and a brunette. She has all the dreamy,
languid grace of the South combined with the _verve_ and force of
the North. She is dark and she is fair, with blushing cheeks and dewy
lips, sound-hearted, strong, lofty, self-reliant, a true queen of the
woods, more stately than Diana, and more vigorous than Maid Marian.
MAURICE THOMPSON.
OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
Daniel Webster's "Moods."
A late magazine-article treating of one of America's illustrious
dead--Daniel Webster--alluded to his well-known sombre moods, and the
gentle suasion by which his accomplished wife was enabled to shorten
their duration or dispel them entirely.
On an occasion well remembered, though the "chiel takin' notes" was but
a simple child, I myself was present when the grim, moody reticence of
the great orator converted fully twoscore ardent admirers into personal
foes.
During the summer of 1837, Mr. Webster, in pursuit of a Presidential
nomination, executed his famous tour through the Great West, at that
time embracing only the States of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and
Illinois. The first infant railway of the continent being yet in
swaddling-clothes, the journey was accomplished by private conveyance,
and the bumps and bruises stoically endured in probing bottomless pits
of prairie-mud, diversified by joltings over rude log-ways and intrusive
stumps, were but a part of the cruel price paid for a glittering prize
which in the end vanished before the aspirant like fairy gold. At
stations within reach of their personal influence, local politicians
flew to the side of the brilliant statesman with the beautiful fidelity
of steel to magnet: hence he was environed by a self-appointed escort of
obsequious men, constantly changing as he progressed.
"Our member" spared neither whip nor spur, and joined the triumphal
march at Chicago. Mr. Webster was then on the home-stretch, and it was
shortly after this date that the incident I describe occurred. It was a
time of wild Western speculation; towns and cities sprung into being as
buoyantly as soap-bubbles, and often proved as perishing. Major Morse
was president of a company which, perceiving a promising site for harbor
and town on the shore of Michigan, where yet the Indian charmed the
deer, secured a tract of land and proceeded to lay out an inviting town
of--corner-lots. The major's family occupied temporarily a wide log
house, with a rough "lean-to" of bright pine boards freshly cut at the
mill below. Outside, the dwelling was merely a hut of primitive pattern
nestling under the shade of a tall tree; inside, it presented a large
room divided by curtains into cooking-and sleeping-apartments,
surmounted by a stifling loft reached by the rungs of a permanent
perpendicular ladder. Savory odors of wild fowl and venison daily
drifted up the charred throat of its clay-daubed chimney, and by the
same route, whenever the rolling smoke permitted, children sitting about
the hearth took observations of the clouds and heavenly bodies,
according to the time of day. A narrow passage cut through the heart of
the old logs led into the fragrant "lean-to," where against the wall
rested a massive sideboard of dark mahogany, its top alight with glitter
of glass and silver, its inmost recesses redolent of the creature
comforts which the hospitality of the times demanded. Vases and meaner
crockery overflowed everywhere with the gorgeousness of blossoms daily
plucked from sandy slopes or the verge of the adjacent marsh. Bright
carpeting kindly hid the splintered floor, and pictures did like service
for the rough walls, while the whitest of muslin festooned the tiny
windows.