A coffee tree much like our native species grows in China. We may believe that it is called by another name, for the people use its heavy pods for soap. Whether green or ripe, I do not know.
The club-like branches of our coffee tree give it a burly, clumsy appearance in winter, when nothing conceals them from view. The dangling pods rattle against the bare, stubby twigs, calling attention to their lack of grace and symmetry. Even the buds are out of sight, buried under the thin bark, just above the big leaf scars. All winter the wind strives with the stubborn pods. When one is torn off, it lies unopened until melt ing snow softens it, and the horny seed lies long before it is able to sprout.
A thin pod adorns the most delicate of the locust trees. This is the little red bud, a flat topped tree, of slender, thornless branches, most of them horizontal. Early in spring this tree earns its name. Quantities of rosy magenta, pea shaped flowers cluster on its slim, angular twigs, quite covering the smaller branches. It is an unusual colour, and an unusual time to see pea blossoms. You cannot forget it, if you have seen the tree once.
The leaves that soon follow are as unusual as the flowers. Roundish, heart-shaped, smooth, and shining as if polished, they flutter on thin, flexible stems, and the slim pods hang among them. They ripen and turn from green to rich purple when the leaves change to bright yellow. The hard little seeds are close together in the pods, so that they are numerous, though the pods are but two or three inches long.
I do not know when the red bud is most charm ing. Certainly its autumn garment of yellow is beautiful, trimmed with a fringe of purple pods. It is a royal robe, and so fresh and new-looking when the foliage of so many larger trees is faded and in tatters. The trees that hide in the shelter of larger ones can often save their leaves from wear and tear, and this the red bud does.
Judas tree is the name by which the red bud of Europe is commonly called. It is one of a few species to which an ugly tradition has been fastened by custom. It is said that this is the kind of tree upon which Judas Iscariot hanged himself. Our little American tree has had to share the disgrace, for it looks like its European cousin. The name to use is the true one.
Nurserymen have imported a large-flowered red bud from China. Its flowers are not only more showy, but they have a paler, prettier colour —a rosy pink, and lacking the sad, blue tone of the others.
It is easy to raise red bud trees, and they are admirable in the border planting of a garden or lawn. They begin to blossom when quite young,
and they never grow so large as to be out of place among shrubbery.
The yellow-wood has larger and lovelier blos som clusters than the black locust, with which it might most easily be confused. In autumn the flower stems hang full of thin pods, one to three seeds in a pod. No other locust is so scantily supplied with seeds in a pod.
In summer the leaflets prove that the tree is not a black locust. They are larger and fewer, though of the same feathered type. In the sea sons when the tree blooms freely, which is by no means every year, the twigs are loaded with clusters larger than any black locust produces. In winter it is the bark that distinguishes " tree. It is grey and smooth, like that of the beech; not at all like the dark trunk and rough limbs of the locust. The form of the tree is a regular head of horizontally-spreading limbs, ending in tapering twigs that droop gracefully. It is one of the handsomest trees in winter. The locust is one of the weediest and ugliest of trees when bare.
To find the yellow-wood in its native haunts, we must go to the mountains of Eastern Ten nessee and North Carolina. It goes farther north and south, but its range is scant. Better chance of our meeting it in our neighbour's yard. It is cultivated as a flowering tree by people who appreciate the finest trees that grow wild in Am erican woods. The nurserymen call it Virgilia. This is certainly a graceful name, fitted to a tree that deserves only the best.
The catalpas are pod-bearers of a different type. Their long pencils are green, and there is no sign of splitting until autumn. The seeds are not like those of the flat pods, set in a single row. They are thin as tissue paper, and packed in overlapping layers about the thin partition that divides the pod into two compartments.
The pods hang on after the large, heart-shaped leaves fall. Winter winds bang them against the few - and their two sides separate lengthwise.
Gradually the thin, two-winged seeds escape, and are scattered. The sowing lasts a long time.
Willows and poplars have pods of a sort, but like neither locusts nor catalpas. The seeds are very minute in each family, and carried in del icate wisps of cottony down. The pods open by splitting down their walls, along two or four lines, curling back the dry segments, and thus letting the seeds escape. These trees are early in scattering their seeds. The true pod-bearers are late about it.