American Plants for American Gardens

VI. THE OAK WOODS

CHAPTER VI THE OAK WOODS OAK woods are found on uplands. They rise above the streams and ponds, surround the sunny fields, fringe the juniper slopes, and cover many a hillside. Sometimes, on the one hand, there are aged white pines left among them on the ridges, and on the other hand the oaks themselves are left on the sides of ravines among beeches, maples and hemlocks. There are many different kinds of oaks, white oaks and red oaks, scarlet, black and chestnut oaks. The white oaks and the red oaks grow side by side in about equal numbers and sometimes become great gnarled wide-branched trees. Because of their dominance, this woodland which is really composed of a rich variety of vegetation, is called the Oak Association. In this woods, there are tulip trees, hickories and basswoods, which together with the oaks, make the highest growth. Below them are small trees and shrubs; dogwoods, hop hornbeams and sassafras, bladder nuts, witch-hazels and alternate-leaved dogwoods , pinxter flower, blue tangles, huckleberries and low sweet blueberries, New Jersey teas, arrow-woods and mountain laurels. In their midst honeysuckles, grapes, purple-floweringraspberries and Clematis verticillaris twine and tumble, and many herbaceous£43] American Plants for American Gardens plants and ferns grow underneath. This makes a definitely layered formation which is distinctive of the oak association. The sequence of its effects is also characteristic. At the very approach of spring the daintiest flowers find their way up through the fallen leaves; pasteltinted hepaticas, rose-veined spring beauties and grayrosetted saxifrages, snow-white arabis, tinted anemones and golden-stemmed gray-white blood-roots, anemonellas, heucheras, and bishop's caps. At the same time the oaks are opening their leaf buds in hazy grays, or in warm rose and copper tones. A little later die hickories unfold gray petal-like buds with reflexed scales glistening in gold, salmon and rose. And the ferns beneath are also uncurling their russetscaled green fronds. There are other flowers, too, tiny groundnuts, violet -fringed polygalas and all kinds of dainty violets. There are also wild gingers, solomon seals, yellow star grass and greenish yellow bellworts. There are wild geraniums, meadow rues, sarsaparillas, baneberries and false spikenard. Some of these are in bloom when the fleeting whiteness of dogwoods edge the woods, some accompanythe clustered pink of Rhododendron nudiflorum, and some supplement the flowering of the mountain laurels; occasionally, arbutus is found. At mid-summer, foxgloves and yellow loosestrifes, lavender and purple-flowered milkweeds, Anemone virginiana and Cimicifuga racemosa, the snake-root, rise here and there. Later still come the blue and [44] The Oak Woods white asters. They mingle their ethereal coloring with the richer autumn tones of the trees and shrubs. Bronze thickets of huckleberries are everywhere under the trees. Above them rise the lithe stems of the arrow-woods with clustered purplish black berries and rose-suffused leaves that have a marvelous mosaic translucence. Abovethere is the burnished rose, yellow, red and mahoganyof the dogwoods, contrasting masses of red and yellow sassafras, the clear yellow of witch-hazels, the pale gold of tulip trees, the straw and russet brown of hickories, intermingled with the rich red and warm rose tones of the turning oaks. And here and there are scarlet dogwood berries that are but a glint and a gleam to be caught before the birds and squirrels make way with them. Then in the winter the flaky silver-gray of the white oak trunks, the russet-touched huckleberry twigs, the green blueberrystems, and the bark brownsand grays of the other trees and shrubs are all held together by the soft burnished brownsof the dried oak leaves that stay on some of the oaks and form the ground cover of the woods. Then, the bared trees and shrubs exhibit the structural beauty of their trunks and branches, twigs and buds as at no other time. The stiff angular branching of the oaks, the lacy twiggage of the hop hornbeams, the loosened slabs of the shagbark hickories, the arching witch-hazel stems, the scalloped seed vessels of the tulip trees, the horizontal dogwood branches with their gracefully curved-up tips terminated by round turban-like buds, are all beautiful in their linedrawing whilethe patterns made [45] American Plants for American Gardens by the intermingled vegetation are veritable etchings . These oak woodlands are found near the shore line of the Atlantic coast, all through the rolling...