10 MARCH 1894, Page 13

THE BUDS AND BLOSSOM OF TREES.

"A Belt of straw and ivy buds With coral clasps and amber studs."

T. know the beauty of trees, they should be watched from the first day of the New Year. To wait till the young leaves clothe the branches, is to miss half the early graces of the woods ; for the trees, like the sun-burnt maidens of the Southern Sea, wear ornament before drapery, and lightly wreathe their limbs with beads and coral stars and studs, little coquettish jewels, like shells and flowers, and, like them, often thrown away before the day is done, or exchanged for ornament more lasting and complete.

Nothing in the fall foliage of summer is more beautiful than the early buds and blossom of trees ; yet no "flower of the field" is doomed to blush unseen so often as the flowers of trees. The gaze, which is at once bent down towards the crocus or the primrose, is seldom raised to the crimson -blossoms which now cover the tops of the elms like drops of ruby rain, or to the pendent blossoms of the poplars, the little golden brushes on the ash, or the pink flowers which stud the larch boughs like sea-anemones. These are blosboms which appear on the naked limbs of trees. Later, among the young leaves of the oak and sycamore, the bunches of pale-yellow bloom are confused with the young leaf ; and it is not till the ground below the last is piled with golden, dustlike petals that we wonder whence they came, and what the flower was like that bore them.

One only among the hundred buds of trees is well known, and used for ornament in England—the "palms "—which will be gathered by every stream and pond next week before Palm Sunday. Even they have as many phases of beauty as -the rose ;—first, the tiny pearl-like studs of satin-white ; then -egg-shaped buds bound in grey plush like the lining of an opera-cloak ; and lastly, rounded golden thimbles, set with tiny blossoms. Or to follow the fancy of the Cheshire -children, the young buds are the goose's-eggs, and the golden dowers the goslings, hatched by the hot March sun, and bending to the river. But the beauty of the buds of trees is almost invisible against the sky. They are lifted too far from the eye, and their forms are too minute and their colours .too pale to break across the line of sight and play a part in broad effects of sylvan beauty. To be appreciated in mass the buds of trees must be viewed from above, from the opposite side of a glen, or in a copse below the observer. In the deep woods which cluster at the foot of the Hindhead, in the broken hollows -near Haalemere, the millions of buds and catkins so pervade the upper level of the copse that the distant trees seem to rime through vapour and smoke. Nearer, the smoke resolves itself into motionless flakes of white or grey, dotting each upright wand and branch like seed-pearls sewn on a velvet scabbard. But at a distance the whole wood seems blurred with motion- less puffs of white vapour, merging in the distance into a greyish haze. Plunge into the copse, and the source and -shape of the misty mirage is explained. Every chimp of uuderwood is studded with bud or blossom, though hardly a -leaf is out from fence to fence. The catkins of the hazel and the tiny pink star-fish flowers are almost over, but the cornel buds are formed and the masses of blackthorn are powdered -over with tight little globes no larger than a mustard- -seed, in which lies packed the embryo blossom. The black. poplars are still as leafless as in the bitterest December frosts ; *but their topmost twigs have lost their rigid look and are decked with little funeral plumes of sooty-black flower. At all the joints of the woodbine green buds are peeping out in pairs, and on the sunny edges of the copses the dog-rose is opening its leaves to the winds and frost. The elder is the only other native tree in leaf so early, though why this, the softest and weakest of the woodland shrubs, should share with the climbing woodbine and rose the honour of being the first to wear the ,colours of spring, is still among the secrets of the wood. On the wild-cherries, the flower-clusters are shown in miniature globes, which stud the upper branches with whity- brown knobs and clusters, and the Lombardy poplars, as yet leafless and dry, have a false foliage of splen- Aid crimson catkins, which lie tumbled, like crimson and -yellow -caterpillars, -upon the ground below. But the buds

of the willows are the main feature in the phase of beauty in the woodlands in March which precedes the bursting of the leaf. The tall osier rods are of all colours, grey and green, yellow and scarlet, maroon and black, and these, from root to top, are studded with white satin buds. The most beautiful of all have a deep purple bark which shines with a polish like Chinese lac, against which the velvet-white of the buds stands out in perfect contrast of texture as well as of colour.

It is these beautiful and exactly placed ornaments that make the silver haze in the woods before Palm Sunday; and it is perhaps of their silver fleeces that Shelley thought when he wrote of the spring— "Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air."

In the sunny March mornings, when the sun is up at seven, and a choice band of native songbirds, the thrush, the blackbird, the robin and the hedge-sparrow are singing their pertest and loudest, unchallenged by a single note of song from the earliest of the warblers from beyond the seas, every tree shows some slight, half-hinted shadow of spring change. It is like the change of breathing as sleep is ending, or the swelling of wetted grain. At every joint, and at the end of every twig, there is ever so slight a swelling of the bud; and though the change of shape and colour in each is hardly discernible till held in the hand, the multiplied myriads of tiny curves change the whole aspect of the tree. In the sycamore, the points of the lower buds are slipping from their sheaths, like long green olives of Italy. The downy sumach tips are rough with swelling knobs, the laburnums are flecked with silver-grey, and even on the planes, where last year's fruit still hangs, the buds are swelling. But perhaps the most beautiful of all are the sprays of the hawthorn. Where each thorn leaves the stem, a tiny, gemlike globe has appeared upon the bark, laced on the sides with green and gold, and tipped with rosy carmine. The sharp thorn mounts guard above it, and protects it from harm,—one thorn to a bud, all the tree over. But where the young shoots end—where there is no protecting spear—there the bads are clustered, that if one fail another may take its place.

It is true of most English woods and gardens that the larger the tree the smaller is its flower. Few people could describe the blossom of the oak, or trace its change from the tiny pale-green flower to the infant acorn, in its miniature cup no bigger than an ivy-berry; or paint from memory the flower-clusters which nestle among the beech-leaves in early June. Except the horse-chestnut, we have no native flower- ing timber-tree to take the place of the tulip-tree of North America, or the mimosa groves of the African plains. Yet the tulip-tree, with its broad, flat-headed leaves, and fine orange blossoms, like single inverted bells of the crown imperial, will flourish like the poplars in an English garden or hedgerow, and is far more useful as timber than the quick- growing and ornamental abele. We need another flowering tree. Even the blossoms of the lime would be less seen and admired were it not for their scent and the attraction which they offer to the bees. Were the flowers of oak and elm, of poplar and of fir dependent on the bees, rather than on the wind, for fertilisation, and the carriage of the pollen from flower to flower, they would be better known and appreciated than they are. But the pines at least attract the early bees. Never perhaps was there such a harvest for the hives as was won from their blossoms in the warm days of last Epring. The upright spikes of yellow, clustering flowers On the Austrian pines, were crowded with the working bees, which laboured among the dusty piles till their bodies were covered with pollen, like flour-porters in the docks. The blossoms of the silver firs, the" balm of Gilead" of rural botanists, usually borne so high on the lofty summits, that no bee would soar to reach them, studded even the lower branches, and revealed to ground-walking mortals a new feature of the flower-garden which lies in the upper stories of the woods. But we still lack flowering trees. Now that the pear and the cherry, the peach and plum, the apple and the quince, and above all, the early and beautiful almond, are once more hastening into blossom, can we not take a lesson from Japan, and plant, not in isolated trees, but in orchards and groves, the doable plum, and the pink-flowering cherry, which, for a few weeks, will fill our parks and gardens with the Mossom and colour which even March winds cannot kill?