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Updated: May 21, 2025
A distinct and beautiful plant, of dwarf, creeping habit, forming a tuft of short branchlets springing from the main procumbent stems, none of which exceed 6 in. in length by ¾ in. in thickness. They are almost round when old, the younger ones being slightly angled, and bearing, along the ridges, little tubercles, crowned with short spines.
Placed on an upright branch, just below the point where five branchlets, a foot or more long, sprang out to shelter, and closely surrounded by seven twigs, of few inches but many leaves, it was a marvel I had been able to see it at all. The redstarts might be lively and restless, but they were good workers.
The great forest-tree has a shoot, which in the course perhaps of hundreds of years, has developed a wide-spreading system of trunk and branches, bearing on the ultimate twigs or branchlets innumerable leaves, while beneath the soil a widely-branching root-system covers an area of corresponding extent.
These stems bear the names of the half-a-dozen men, endowed with intellects of heroic force and clearness, to whom we are led, at whatever point of the world of thought the attempt to trace its history commences; just as certainly as the following up the small twigs of a tree to the branchlets which bear them, and tracing the branchlets to their supporting branches, brings us, sooner or later, to the bole.
The foliage is short and rigid, two leaves in a fascicle, arranged in comparatively long, cylindrical tassels at the ends of the tough, up-curving branchlets.
With a slender pole as a handle, hickory shoots, or twisted fibre of inner bark of slippery-elm, for twine, and a thick bunch of the top branchlets of balsam, spruce, hemlock, or pine for the brush part, you can make a broom by binding the heavy ends of the branches tight to an encircling groove cut on the handle some three inches from the end. Cut the bottom of the brush even and straight.
Two moss-lined caves near the ground open back into the trunk, one on the north side, the other on the west, forming picturesque, romantic seats. The largest of the main branches is eighteen feet and nine inches in circumference, and some of the long pendulous branchlets droop over the stream at the foot of the fall where it is gray with spray.
We are now ready to resume our lesson with the branch before us. We have identified the slender terminal part, No. 1, as the growth of 1920. We are now to account for all the remaining buds and branchlets. If No. 1 grew in 1920, then the main shoot of No. 2 grew in 1919, from the point o o. It is also one foot long. Near its base are four small buds that remained dormant in 1920.
A prostrate, branching-stemmed, small-growing kind, very proliferous, with roots along the main stems; branchlets upright, five-angled, with slightly raised points, or tubercles, upon which are ten short hair-like spines, arranged in a star, and surrounding three or four central erect spines, all whitish and transparent.
The buds will probably be too small for examination by the pupils, at present, but their position and development can be studied, and are very instructive. As the leaf-buds are all on the ends of the branchlets, the twigs and branches will be just below the bud-rings, and then there will be a space where no twigs nor branches will be found, till the next set of rings is reached.
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