trees
...porary of Evelyn, mentions the species as growing in Bishop Compton's garden at Fulham; whilst by 1731, as recorded by Philip Miller in his "Gardener's Dictionary," it had become common, and was known as ripening seed in this country. THE small order of catkin-bearing trees, the Betulaceae, includes only the two genera Betula, the Birches, and Alnus, the Alders. These are mainly distinguished by the character that, whilst in the Birch the scales constituting the fruit-bearing catkin are thin, and fall off simultaneously with the fruit itself, in the Alders these scales become thick and woody, and remain on the tree as a minute cone after the fruits have been discharged. The few species constituting the genus Alnus are shrubs or trees, seldom reaching a large size, and range from Japan through Asia, to the north of the Himalayas, throughout Europe, North Africa, and North America, and along the Andes into Chili; and one representative of the group is confined to the Old World. Its distinctive feature is its leaves, which are roundish, with a wedge-shaped base, a wavy and slightly-toothed margin, and a short stalk, whilst they are hairy and glutinous when young--whence the specific name, A. glutinosa--and glossily dark olive green on both surfaces later on. Though it may grow to a tree of considerable size, even reaching a height of seventy feet, and more than nine feet in girth, it does not usually exceed thirty or forty feet in height, or six feet in circumference, and is so commonly treated as coppice that it is most familiar to us in rounded clumps of a bushy habit, with several stems, none of which exceed half that size. Then it is that what beauty it possesses is revealed, as it grows, either with Willows or isolated, on the banks of streams in our midland or northern counties. Gilpin indeed speaks of it as growing in perfection on the banks of the Mole; but there are far finer specimens by many more northern streams. "He who would see the Alder in perfection," he writes, "must follow the banks of the Mole, in Surrey, through the sweet vales of Dorking and Mickleham, into the groves of Esher. The Mole, indeed, is far from being a beautiful river: it is a quiet and sluggish stream; but what beauty it has it owes greatly to the Alder, which everywhere fringes its meadows, and in many places forms very pleasing scenes, especially in the vale between Box Hill and the high grounds of Norbury Park." AMONG fruit-trees, the Apple is perhaps more characteristic of the north temperate zone than is any other. The whole genus of rosaceous plants to which it belongs, known by the Latin name of the pear, Pyrus, is confined, in a wild state, to the temperate and cold parts of the northern hemisphere, though Apples are now cultivated at the Cape, in Australia, and in New Zealand. The Apple species cannot be grown within the tropics or north of the Arctic Circle; but it rejoices in the dry climate and warm summers of Canada and the United States, and thus the white and pink blossoms of this tree and of its allies, the pears, services, and rowans, brightening the spring landscape in woodland and hedgerow when bare of leaves, are a peculiar glory of our latitudes. The Apple stands possesses a colored corolla, the greater number of arboreal flora have inconspicuous flowers without any corolla at all, and the rest, such as cherry, hawthorn, thorn, elder, and guelder-rose, are of so pure a white that we often feel in spring as though we had returned to the sight of winter's snows. As the fruit par excellence of the Teutonic area, the Apple has appropriated as its popular name what was once a common Germanic term for fruit of any kind, Appfel being once apl, and often apulder, connected with "maple" and "mapulder," and being still extended to many totally different fruit-bearing plants, such as thorn-apples and love-apples. The Anglo-Saxon name for the blackberry, for instance, was the bramble-apple; and that rare old traveler, Sir John Mandeville, speaking of the cedars of Lebanon, says, "they be...