HOW TREES SPEND THE WINTER. Nine out of every ten intelligent people will see nothing of interest in a row of bare trees. They casually state that buds are made in the early spring. They miss seeing the strength and beauty of tree architecture which the foliage conceals in summertime. The close-knit, alive-looking bark of a living tree they do not distinguish from the dull, loose-hung garment worn by the dead tree in the row. All trees look alike to them in winter.
Yet there is so much to see if only one will take time to look. Even the most heedless are struck at times with the mystery of the winter trance of the trees. They know that each spring re enacts the vernal miracle. Thoughtful people have put questions to these Sphinx-like trees. Secrets the bark and bud scales hide have been revealed to those who have patiently and importunately inquired. A keen pair of eyes used upon a single elm in the dooryard for a whole year will surprise and inform the observer. It will be indeed the year of miracle.
A tree has no centre of life, no vital organs corresponding to those of animals. It is made up, from twig to root, of annual, concentric layers of wood around a central pith. It is completely covered with a close garment of bark, also made of annual layers. Between bark and wood is a delicate undergarment of living tissue called cambium. This is disappointing when one comes to look for it, for all there is of it is a colourless, slimy substance that moistens the youngest layers of wood and bark, and forms the layer of separation between them. This cambium is the life of the tree. A hollow trunk seems scarcely a disability. The loss of limbs a tree can survive and start afresh. But girdle its trunk, exposing a ring of the cambium to the air, and the tree dies. The vital connection of leaves and roots is destroyed by the girdling; nothing can save the tree's life. Girdle a limb or a twig and all above the injury suffers practical amputation.
The bark protects the cambium, and the cambium is the tissue which by cell multiplication in the growing season produces the yearly additions of wood and bark. Buds are growing points
set along the twigs. They produce leafy shoots, as a rule. Some are specialised to produce flowers and subsequently fruits. Leaves are extensions of cambium spread in the sun and air in the season when there is no danger from frosts. The leaves have been called the stomachs of a tree. They receive crude materials from the soil and the air and transmute them into starch under the action of sunlight. This elaborated sap supplies the hungry cambium cells during the growing season, and the excess of starch made in the leaf laboratories is stored away in empty wood cells and in every available space from bud to root tip, from bark to pith.
The tree's period of greatest activity is the early summer. It is the time of growth and of preparation for the coming winter and for the spring that follows it. Winter is the time of rest—of sleep, or hibernation. A bear digs a hollow under the tree's roots and sleeps in it all winter, waking in the spring. In many ways the tree imitates the bear. Dangerous as are analogies between plants and animals, it is literally true that the sleeping bear and the dormant tree have each ceased to feed. The sole activity of each seems to be the quiet breathing.
Do trees really breathe? As truly and as incessantly as you do, but not as actively. Other processes are intermittent, but breathing must go on, day and night, winter and summer, as long as life lasts. Breathing is low in winter. The tree is not growing. There is only the necessity of keeping it alive.
Leaves are the lungs of plants. In the growing season respiration goes on at a vigorous rate. The leaves also throw off in insensible vapour a vast quantity of water. This is called transpiration in plants; in animals the term used is perspiration. They are one and the same process. An average white-oak tree throws off 15o gallons of water in a single summer day. With the cutting off of the water supply at the roots in late fall, transpiration is also cut off.