THE WHITE OAK Those who know trees best agree that there is no nobler broad-leaved tree in the American forests than the White Oak. Tree lovers in England have but one native oak upon which to spend their loyal devotion, the tree worship inherited from Druid ancestors, whose temples were their sacred groves of oaks. The same feeling is in our blood, and roused at sight of an aged white oak, with stout, buttressed trunk, and great horizontal limbs supporting a rounded dome, much broader than high.
The tree is grey in winter. It stands bare of leaves, clothed in its pale, scaly bark. This is the time to study the framework of the dome. The limbs are twisted and gnarled, and their branches end in dense thickets of twigs. Each twig bears the winter buds, and five buds are clustered at the tip of each.
In spring these buds open, and a leafy shoot comes out of each. At the base are the yellow, fringed catkins of the sterile flowers, and above them, in the angles between leaves and twig, the fertile flowers thrust out forked tongues for pollen. These will be acorns next autumn, if the pollen falls upon them, and thus sets seed.
All summer the leaves are green, with pale linings, and when summer ends, they turn to rich shades of purplish red. The sweet acorns are ripe, and as they fall, thrifty squirrels are all about, gathering them into their hidden store houses for winter use. Plenty of the thin, shal
low cups we shall find, but the kernels are scarce, unless we come when they are falling in October.
The Indians taught the early colonists in America to use acorns of this species for food. They boiled them, like hominy, and found them not only nourishing, but good to eat.
If you find solitary white oaks growing here and there in a mixed woods, you may wonder how they were planted thus. The tree cannot scatter its own seeds. It depends upon the work of scampering nut-gatherers, in fur coats, that put away more acorns than they can eat during the long winter. An acorn that is left over in one of the dark pockets along a squirrel's run way sprouts in the spring, and in a few years it is a sturdy oak sapling. All oaks are dependent on outside help in planting.
White oak lumber is very high-priced. The wood of this tree we rarely see nowadays except in the most expensive oak furniture. The beau tiful satiny streaks that are the chief ornament of the grain in polished table tops, are bands of fibres that radiate from the central pith to the bark. When oak is " quarter-sawed," these pith rays, called " mirrors," show to best advantage. They are most numerous in the wood of the white oak.