A Natural History of North American Trees (Donald Culross Peattie Library)
Donald Culross Peattie
Language: English
Pages: 512
ISBN: 1595341668
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Here you'll learn about everything from how a species was discovered to the part it played in our country’s history. Pioneers often stabled an animal in the hollow heart of an old sycamore, and the whole family might live there until they could build a log cabin. The tuliptree, the tallest native hardwood, is easier to work than most softwood trees; Daniel Boone carved a sixty-foot canoe from one tree to carry his family from Kentucky into Spanish territory. In the days before the Revolution, the British and the colonists waged an undeclared war over New England's white pines, which made the best tall masts for fighting ships.
It's fascinating to learn about the commercial uses of various woods -- for paper, fine furniture, fence posts, matchsticks, house framing, airplane wings, and dozens of other preplastic uses. But we cannot read this book without the occasional lump in our throats. The American elm was still alive when Peattie wrote, but as we read his account today we can see what caused its demise. Audubon's portrait of a pair of loving passenger pigeons in an American beech is considered by many to be his greatest painting. It certainly touched the poet in Donald Culross Peattie as he depicted the extinction of the passenger pigeon when the beech forest was destroyed.
A Natural History of North American Trees gives us a picture of life in America from its earliest days to the middle of the last century. The information is always interesting, though often heartbreaking. While Peattie looks for the better side of man's nature, he reports sorrowfully on the greed and waste that have doomed so much of America's virgin forest.
southwesternmost Utah, and eastern Arizona, and at the bases or on the talus slopes of various desert mountains and in mountain passes, usually between 2000 and 6500 feet above sea level. Tradition has it that the Mormons gave the Joshuatree its name. Certain it is that in 1857 Brigham Young, wishing to concentrate the power of the Latter-day Saints in Utah, summoned a Mormon colony from San Bernardino, California, to join him. They left by way of the Cajon Pass, and just on the other side of
Queen Marie Antoinette dispatched a large part of Michaux’s collection, which was sent to Versailles (since he was a royal botanist), to her father, the Emperor of Austria, after which all trace of them is lost. Others were banished to Marly, that simple little country place which the kings of France had established to get away from the fatigues, splendors, and lack of privacy at Versailles (which had also started out as a simple country place). But Marly soon came to rival Versailles in cost and
staminodia). A sterile or aborted stamen, without anthers or pollen, usually more or less modified in form (club shaped, flattened, etc.) or even petal-like. Standard. The upper petal of a flower of the pea family. Stem. The main axis of growth above ground, bearing the buds, leaves, and flowers, as contrasted with the root-bearing axis. Stigma. The part of the pistil that receives the pollen. Generally it is somewhat sticky and of a definite form, but it may occupy only an indefinite (see
they did, Oak and grass took up their ancient quarrel. As a Bur Oak may not reach productivity for fifty years, while the prairie grasses begin seeding themselves almost at once, it would seem that all the advantage must lie with the grass. 204 Yet that depends upon the climate of the interglacial periods (of which the present era is probably one), which have been alternately dry and moist. Whenever the climate tended to the dry side, the grasses advanced; in moister periods the forest
still surviving here and there where realty development goes on apace, as in the San Fernando Valley, there is no new growth coming on, and the loss of each old tree is irreplaceable. Throughout the season this Oak presents a gentle drama which evergreen trees do not offer — the tender haze of color when leaves and catkins first appear, in late spring, the beauty of the long summer shade, which is not dim and stuffy like that in a dense growth of young Redwood, Douglas Fir, and Laurel, but