are fond of standing on the seashore. When the nuts get ripe they often
fall in the sea and are carried long distances by the ocean currents.
In this way, no doubt, many a coral island has received its lovely
fringe of cocoanut palms.
The nuts are floated to these little islands and washed into crevices
on them, where they lodge and in time grow into stately trees.
The cocoanut palm is a very important tree in tropical countries. The
nuts are used as food, and a valuable oil is obtained from them. Cocoa
oil is used for illuminating and also for making salves.
The thick fiber that surrounds the nut is strong and tough and is made
into cloth, matting, brushes, baskets, coarse rope, and a number of
things. Matting is used in some hot countries to make the sides of
houses, and the cocoanut fiber is useful to thatch roofs.
The wood of the tree is hard and durable and is made into many
household articles. The hard shell of the nut makes good cups and
dishes. So you see the cocoanut tree affords almost everything the
people in the hot countries need.
They make their houses and furnish them from it, they get food and
drink from it, for the milk of the cocoanut is a very pleasant
beverage, and they use the oil to light their abodes at night. No
wonder the people value this noble tree very highly.
[Illustration]
SEEDS THAT ANIMALS LIKE TO EAT.
[Illustration]
THE HICKORY.
The meat of the hickory nut is a seed. The hickory tree bears two kinds
of blossoms. Like the willow, it has staminate catkins and also bears
pistillate flowers, from which grow nuts. Some hickory catkins are
very long and slender and make pretty green tassels on the trees in
the spring. Hickory nuts are good to eat, and you may wonder how these
delicious nuts, that many creatures are fond of, ever get a chance to
grow.
Squirrels are fond of nuts, and they are generally on hand when the
nuts are ripe.
[Illustration: Young hickory nuts.]
The green nuts have an outer covering that splits open when the nut
is ripe and lets it fall to the ground. Of course when a squirrel has
eaten a nut, that is the end of it. But squirrels are good housekeepers
and store away nuts in holes in the trees or in the ground. Chipmunks
do the same, and some birds, as nutcrackers and blue jays, hide nuts
in the same way. Often these nuts are forgotten, or else the little
creature that hid them may die or be killed. Then the nuts that have
been put in the ground have nothing to do but grow when spring warms
the earth.
You see they have been planted by the little nut lovers, that certainly
had no intention of planting them. No doubt a great many nut trees get
started in this way.
Hickory nuts are often called “walnuts” in New England. The
hickory tree belongs to North America, and before this continent was
discovered only the Indians enjoyed hickory nuts. Now they are sent to
England, and indeed all over the world.
The wood of the hickory is hard, tough, and flexible and is very
valuable.
Andrew Jackson was called “Old Hickory” because of his unyielding
nature, and when you study the history of the United States, or read
the life of Jackson, you will not wonder that he was so named.
Hickory switches were used long ago when children were naughty; they
were preferred to willow, because they did not break so easily.
A better use to put hickory to is to burn it. Hickory logs make a very
hot and beautiful fire, and hickory is one of the best of woods to burn
in fireplaces.
[Illustration]
WALNUTS AND BUTTERNUTS.
Black walnuts grow on large, handsome trees of very hard, fragrant,
dark-colored wood. Walnut wood used to be prized more highly than it is
to-day for furniture and the inside finish to houses. It takes a fine
polish but grows rather dark and somber-looking with age.
The black walnut is a native of the eastern part of North America. It
belongs to the same family as the hickory and, like that, bears two
kinds of flowers.
[Illustration: Ripe walnuts.]
The nuts have hard, thick, black shells, and also a softer outer
covering, or rind, that is very bitter and disagreeable to the taste,
and that stains the fingers a dark brown.
The “meat,” or kernel, of the walnut is very oily, and some
people do not like it because of its rather strong flavor. Squirrels
are fond of walnuts, however, and often plant them in the way we have
seen.
The English walnut is an Asiatic tree belonging to the same family,
which has been cultivated in Europe and, to a small extent, in this
country. Its nut is larger than the black walnut, has a thin shell
and a large, sweet kernel. The nut is delicious and a great favorite
at Christmas time. It is sometimes picked green and pickled, and some
people are very fond of pickled walnuts.
The nut yields an abundance of valuable oil, and the wood of the tree
is very beautiful and useful for many purposes, one of which is to
finish houses on the inside, and another to make gunstocks.
There is another tree belonging to the same family that grows in
America and looks very much like the black walnut tree. It is the
butternut. Butternut wood is valuable, and butternuts have sweet, oily
kernels that most people like. The flowers, of course, are like those
of the walnut.
[Illustration: Butternuts.]
A brown dye is made from the inner bark of the butternut tree, and also
a medicine is obtained from it.
During the War of the Rebellion the Southern soldiers were often
dressed in homespun clothes dyed by the bark of the butternut, and on
this account they were called “butternuts.”
THE CHESTNUT.
[Illustration: Chestnut flowers.]
The chestnut is a very large and beautiful tree that grows abundantly
in some parts of New England and over the Alleghany Mountains. Children
always know the chestnut trees, if they live near them.
Like the hickory and walnut, the chestnut has its staminate flowers in
catkins, but these are white instead of green, and give the chestnut
a very handsome appearance when they cover it with airy plumes in the
early summer.
The nuts grow in prickly burrs, two or three in a burr. When the nuts
are ripe in the fall, the burrs open to let them out. As everybody
knows, they have a thin shell and a sweet kernel. They are sometimes
boiled and sometimes eaten raw.
Squirrels, chipmunks, and some birds are fond of them and are often the
means of planting them.
Chestnut wood is soft and has rather a coarse, loose grain. It is used
largely for fence rails, cheap shingles, and railroad ties.
Chestnuts grow in some parts of Europe and Asia, and there is one kind
that bears a nut as large as a black walnut. This nut is not as sweet
as our chestnuts, but it is extensively used as food in some parts of
Europe. The people go in families to gather the nuts, and prize them as
we prize wheat and corn.
[Illustration]
OTHER EDIBLE SEEDS.
[Illustration: Hazelnuts.]
There are other nuts, as the pecan, whose tree belongs to the Hickory
family and grows wild in the southern part of the United States;
the beechnut, which grows on a stately tree of our forests; and the
hazelnut, that grows on bushes in thickets near streams sometimes, or
on the borders of woods.
But squirrels, chipmunks, birds, and such folk are not the only ones
that plant seeds. Some ants do. Indeed ants are great hands to plant
seeds. They do not take the hard nuts, but rather the seeds of certain
grasses and other plants that bear rather small seeds. The ants carry
the seeds into their holes, where they sometimes eat only one part of
the seed, not enough to hurt it in the least, and so the seeds, buried
in the ant-hills, are able to grow.
Ants often drop the seeds they are carrying and lose them, and so the
road to the home of the seed-eating ants is often grown over by plants
the ants have sown.
[Illustration: Beechnut.]
BERRIES.
Some berries, such as raspberries and strawberries, are so good they
seem to grow on purpose to be eaten. Very likely they do.
It is quite necessary for the blackberry and raspberry bushes to have
their seeds sown at some distance from the parent plants, and it is
also an advantage to strawberries to have their seeds dispersed. So
what is better than to get the help of the birds?
To this end the berries are sweet and juicy when ripe, and they are
bright in color, so that the birds can easily find them. A bird often
picks a berry and carries it somewhere else to eat, and often it eats
only a part and leaves the rest, which falls to the ground.
[Illustration]
All berries have seeds in them or outside of them. Strawberries have
the little seeds on the outside, as you can easily see.
[Illustration: Bunchberries.]
Gooseberries, currants, and grapes have the little seeds inside, but,
whichever way it is, some of the seeds will be left or scattered about
by the birds that eat the berries. If some of the seeds are swallowed,
that does not seem to hurt them; like the mistletoe seeds, they are
able to sprout after having been eaten by a bird.
Birds eat a great many kinds of berries that we never think of eating.
Notice how often in the late summer and the autumn you will see bright
red or blue, or black, or white berries shining out from the leaves or
bare branches of the wayside hedges. All of these are eaten by birds
and carried away to new growing places.
Not all birds eat berries or seeds. Watch the birds and see if you can
find out which kinds eat berries and seeds.
CHERRIES.
There is no need of describing cherries, as everybody knows them well.
[Illustration]
The birds are so fond of ripe cherries that we sometimes have
difficulty in getting our share before the robins and thrushes have
taken all. Birds frequently fly away with the cherries, eat the pulp,
and drop the stone, which, of course, contains a seed, and this seed
then often sprouts and grows into a cherry tree. We sometimes find good
cherries growing in hedges and thickets, far from the orchard; these
have been planted there by the birds.
[Illustration]
The sweet cherry is not a native of this country, but was brought here
from Europe. We have a number of wild cherries, however, whose fruit
we do not esteem, but the birds are fond of it, and they are the means
of planting a good many wild cherry trees over the country.
Plums, peaches, and apricots are delicious fruits with hard-shelled
seeds. The fruit is gathered, the pulp eaten, and the stone thrown
away. We do not eat the seed of the plum, peach, and cherry, as we do
that of the hickory and butternut. We throw it away, and thus disperse
the seed children of these fruit trees.
The birds spread the seeds of the wild plums as they do those of the
cherries. The kernels of all these seeds are bitter and contain a very
poisonous substance.
Cherry trees have beautiful white blossoms that come early in the
spring, and the peach trees have lovely pink blossoms. The peaches
bloom the earliest of all, and as their flowers come out before the
leaves, they turn the world into a maze of pink beauty in the parts
where the peach orchards are.
[Illustration: Wild plum.]
APPLES.
Apples have tough cores in which their somewhat delicate seeds are
protected. When we eat apples we throw the cores away. We now know that
this is just what the apple wants.
[Illustration]
If the core is tossed into a hedge by the roadside, its seeds may get a
chance to sprout, and indeed they often do, for in the country we often
come upon apple trees in out-of-the-way corners, where they were not
planted by man on purpose.
Apples do not grow wild in this country, excepting crab apples. No
doubt the birds carry away the ripe crab apples and drop the cores.
[Illustration]
Pears and quinces have cores like the apples, and they are not natives
of this country, but were brought here because of their delicious
fruit. Sometimes we find them growing wild, and we know how this
happened.
The next time we get a chance let us look for the fruit trees the birds
have planted. There are a good many wild fruits that the birds are fond
of, and whose seeds they are in the habit of dispersing over broad
sections of country.
[Illustration]
SEEDS THAT ARE SHOT AWAY.
OXALIS.
Some plants have a way of shooting their seeds out of the pods. You
know about the squirting cucumber.
[Illustration: Oxalis.]
The little “sheep-sorrel,” or yellow-flowered oxalis, that
grows everywhere in the fields and gardens, has a way of shooting off
its seeds when they are ripe.
There is an elastic covering over each seed, and when the pod opens,
this covering splits and suddenly curls up, with force enough to send
the seed quite a distance.
The leaves of the oxalis are sour, and children sometimes eat them.
A very powerful poison can be extracted from them, which is called
oxalic acid, and sometimes salt of lemons, but there is not enough of
this poison in the leaves to make them harmful to eat. The poison when
obtained in large quantities is useful in the manufacture of calico,
where it is used in printing the colors, and it is also sometimes used
in a diluted form to clean metal work.
Be sure to look for the seed pods of the oxalis; they stand up like
little candles and are very pretty. Gather some that are almost ripe
and see how they shoot their seeds.
[Illustration]
WITCH-HAZEL.
This little tree blossoms in the fall of the year. After the leaves are
gone, and sometimes after the snow has come, it stands in the edge of
the woods dressed in a fairy costume of yellow lace-like flowers. After
the flowers come the pods. They are very hard and horny and do not
ripen until the next fall.
[Illustration]
It is fun to gather ripe witch-hazel pods, for when they have been in
the house a little while and have become thoroughly dry they “go
off.”
You may be sitting by the table reading, when pop!—a hard, shining
little black seed strikes you in the face. It is the witch-hazel
beginning its cannonade. Pop!—spat!—crack!—the battery has opened,
and the seeds are flying with great force in all directions. They are
sometimes shot several yards.
[Illustration]
Of course in the woods this shooting is intended to start the seed
children on their journey in the world.
The witch-hazel pod bursts open, and the edges turn in and press
against the smooth seeds with great force, so that when they leave the
pod they fly as though shot out of a sling. Get some witch-hazel pods
and see how they do it.
Another name for witch-hazel is hamamelis, and from the bark is made
a medicine which is put upon bruises. A forked twig of witch-hazel is
sometimes used as a divining rod to find where to dig for water, or for
gold or silver or other metals. The rod is held in the fingers of the
diviner, who walks about, and wherever the rod turns and points down it
is supposed to be the place to dig.
Divining rods are not much used in these days. People are not as
superstitious, in some ways, as they used to be, and they know the rod
cannot help them.
[Illustration]
TOUCH-ME-NOT.
The touch-me-not, or snap-weed, is a delicate little plant that grows
in wet places. Its yellow flowers are airily poised on slender stems,
and the seed pods are very curious.
If one of them is touched, it goes off with a suddenness that is
startling, until one gets used to it.
[Illustration: A pod that has snapped.]
When the pods are ripe they shoot the seeds out in all directions, and
if you disturb a tangle of touch-me-nots in late summer you can hear
the seeds popping on all sides.
There is a violet that shoots the seeds out of its pod, and the wild
geranium pod slings its seeds to some distance by suddenly curling up
on its long stalk.
A good many seed pods have this interesting habit, but I doubt if you
would discover that some peas and beans do this unless you were told.
The lupine, which belongs to the Pea family, shoots off its seeds by
twisting the dry pod, as it opens to let them out. Even our garden
sweet peas and some of our garden beans do this. Watch to see if you
can catch them at it.
Plants have many, many ways of sending their precious seed children out
in the world to find a growing place.
There is no better way to spend our spare time than to watch the ripe
fruits of plants and find out how the seeds are dispersed. Nearly all
plants have some methods of sending their seeds abroad.
You will enjoy the plants more than ever when you begin to discover for
yourself some of the things they do.
[Illustration: Lupine.]
End of Project Gutenberg's Little Wanderers, by Margaret Warner Morley