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Page 71
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.
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