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Page 72
South of the Alleghany Mountains I have not found as fine specimens of
this tree as I have in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. Everywhere the
saw-mills are fast making sad havoc. The walnut and the tulip are soon
to be no more as "trees with the trees in the forest." Those growing in
the almost inaccessible "pockets" of the Kentucky and Tennessee
mountains may linger for a half-century yet, but eventually all will be
gone from wherever a man and a saw can reach them.
The oak of England and the pine of Norway are not more typical than the
tulip-tree. The symmetry, vigor, and rich colors of our tree might
represent the force, freedom, and beauty of our government and our
social influences. If the American eagle is the bird of freedom, the
tulip is the tree of liberty,--strong, fragrant, giant-flowered,
flaunting, defiant, yet dignified and steadfast.
A very intelligent old man, who in his youth was a great bear- and
panther-hunter, has often told me how the black bear and the tawny
catamount used to choose the ample "forks" of the tulip-tree for their
retreats when pursued by his dogs. The raccoon has superseded the larger
game, and it was but a few weeks ago that I found one lying, like a
striped, fluffy ball of fur, in a crotch ninety feet above ground. "Our
white-wood" lumber has grown so valuable that no land-owner will allow
the trees to be cut by the hunter, and hence the old-fashioned
'coon-hunt has fallen among the things of the past, for it seems that
the 'coon is quite wise enough to choose for the place of his indwelling
the costliest tulip of the woods. I have already casually mentioned the
fact that the tulip-tree's bloom is scarcely known to exist by even
intelligent and well-informed Americans. Every one has heard of the
mimosa, the dogwood, the red-bud, and the magnolia, but not of the
tulip-bearing tree, with its incomparably bold, dashing, giantesque
flower, once so common in the great woods of our Western and Middle
States. I have not been able to formulate a good reason for this. Every
one whose attention is called to the flower at once goes into raptures
over its wild beauty and force of coloring, and wonders why poems have
not been written about it and legends built upon it. It is a grander
bloom than that which once, under the same name, nearly bankrupted
kingdoms, though it cannot be kept in pots and greenhouses. Its colors
are, like the idiosyncrasies of genius, as inimitable as they are
fascinating and elusive. Audubon was something of an artist, but his
tulip-blooms are utter failures. He could color an oriole, but not the
corolla of this queen of the woods. The most sympathetic and experienced
water-colorist will find himself at fault with those amber-rose,
orange-vermilion blushes, and those tender cloudings of yellow and
green. The stiff yet sensitive and fragile petals, the transparent
sepals, with their watery shades and delicate washing of olive-green,
the strong stamens and peculiarly marked central cone, are scarcely less
difficult. All the colors elude and mock the eager artist. While the
gamut of promising tints is being run, he looks, and, lo! the grand
tulip has shrivelled and faded. Again and again a fresh spray is fetched
in, but when the blooming-season is over he is still balked and
dissatisfied. The wild, Diana-like purity and the half-savage,
half-�sthetic grace have not wholly escaped him, but the color,--ah I
there is the disappointment.
I have always nursed a fancy that there is something essential to
perfect health in the bitters and sweets of buds and roots and gums and
resins of the primeval woods. Why does the bird keep, even in old age,
the same brilliancy of plumage and the same clearness of eye? Is it
because it gets the _elixir vit�_ from the hidden reservoir of
nature? Be this as it may, there are times when I sincerely long for a
ball of liquidambar or a mouthful of pungent spring buds. The inner bark
of the tulip-tree has the wildest of all wild tastes, a peculiarly
grateful flavor when taken infinitesimally, something more savage than
sassafras or spice-wood, and full of all manner of bitter hints and
astringent threatenings: it has long been used as the very best
appetizer for horses in the early spring, and it is equally good for
man. The yellow-bellied woodpecker knows its value, taking it with head
jauntily awry and quiet wing-tremblings of delight. The squirrels get
the essence of it as they munch the pale leaf-buds, or later when they
bite the cones out of the flowers. The humming-birds and wild bees are
the favored ones, however, for they get the ultimate distillation of all
the racy and fragrant elements from root to bloom.
The Indians knew the value of the tulip-tree as well as its beauty.
Their most graceful pirogues were dug from its bole, and its odorous
bark served to roof their rude houses. No boat I have ever tried runs so
lightly as a well-made tulip pirogue, or dug-out, and nothing under
heaven is so utterly crank and treacherous. Many an unpremeditated
plunge into cold water has one caused me while out fishing or
duck-shooting on the mountain-streams of North Georgia. If you dare
stand up in one, the least waver from a perfect balance will send the
sensitive, skittish thing a rod from under your feet, which of course
leaves you standing on the water without the faith to keep you from
going under; and usually it is your head that you are standing on. But,
to return to our tree, I would like to see its merits as an ornamental
and shade tree duly recognized. If grown in the free air and sunlight,
it forms a heavy and beautifully-shaped top, on a smooth, bright bole,
and I think it might be forced to bloom about the fifteenth year. The
flowers of young, thrifty trees that have been left standing in open
fields are much larger, brighter, and more graceful than those of old
gnarled forest-trees, but the finest blooms I ever saw were on a giant
tulip in a thin wood of Indiana. A storm blew the tree down in the midst
of its flowering, and I chanced to see it an hour later. The whole great
top was yellow with the gaudy cups, each gleaming "like a flake of
fire," as Dr. Holmes says of the oriole. Some of them were nearly four
inches across. Last year a small tree, growing in a garden near where I
write, bloomed for the first time. It was about twenty years old. Its
flowers were paler and shallower than those gathered at the same time in
the woods. It may be that transplanting, or any sort of forcing or
cultivation, may cause the blooms to deteriorate in both shape and
color, but I am sure that plenty of light and air is necessary to their
best development.
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