THE BUR OR MOSSY-CUP OAK The largest acorn I know is the fruit of the bur oak, and it is borne in a mossy cup, indeed. The cup's scales are drawn out into long, hairy points, and those near the rim form a loose fringe. Once in a while you may find an acorn almost covered up in its husk. But as a rule, the nut is a little more than half-covered. Some times these nuts are two inches long, but this is not usual. They are over an inch long, and almost as broad, and the meat is white and sweet. No wonder squirrels harvest the crop, and young trees spring up wherever an acorn is missed by the hungry creatures.
The bur oak is a shaggy tree, for it sheds its bark in big flakes, like the sycamore. The small branches are stout, and their bark is developed into corky wings, like the sweet gum. The tree is irregular in shape, too, its gnarled limbs are thrown out in any direction, and so the top is often unsymmetrical. But it is a rugged and picturesque tree, in spite of all its faults, and it adds beauty of an unusual kind to parks and woodlands.
In Sioux City, Iowa, an aged bur oak stands in Riverside Park. It is called " The Council Oak," for it was a venerable tree in the days when the Indians lived on the banks of the Missouri River. Under this tree their chieftains used to meet the white men, and talk over the questions that interested both. Here treaties
were drawn up and signed that kept peace be tween the red and white men.
I promise a great deal of pleasure to any one who plants a mossy-cup acorn. The seedling tree is wonderfully vigorous in growth. The leaves are often a foot long in the first years of the tree's life. The blades are thick, lustrous above, and woolly lined, the finger lobes irregu lar, and two opposite, deep sinuses near the middle of the leaf cut it almost in two! Before the tree is more than a sapling it blossoms and bears big acorns in their handsome mossy cups. There is no stage in the life of one of these oaks that is not beautiful and in teresting.
This tree is found from Nova Scotia to West ern Texas. It forms forests in Winnipeg, and " oak openings " in Minnesota and Dakota. It is as much at home in the hot, arid stretches of the plains of the West and Southwest as in the raw, damp air of the New England coasts. In the rich valley of the Ohio River it reached nearly two hundred feet in height in the virgin forests.
Unlike many oaks, it may be safely trans planted while young.