TREES WE KNOW BY THEIR THORNS In winter time, the bare limbs of trees reveal many strange secrets, which the leaves cover up in summer. Some trees we may know by the thorns they wear.
The honey locust scarcely conceals in summer the three-branched thorns, for which it is famous. ' These thorns are twigs, but they rarely bear leaves. Each is sharpened to a needle point, and highly polished. Sometimes it is single, oftener with a main thorn and two side branches; some times short, but often reaching over a foot in length, and growing stronger and more wicked looking with age. Sometimes a honey locust has a crowded group of these thorns growing out of the trunk and large limbs. Once in a great while a honey locust is thornless, growing wild. From such trees a thornless variety has been developed. It is, therefore, possible to obtain from nurserymen trees of this variety.
The unbranched spines of the osage orange trees make it a formidable hedge plant, and no fences are needed where green barriers of these trees grow. Each shining leaf has a spike at its base, stout and sharp as a needle, and strong as steel.
Two spines stand guard at the base of each leaf of the yellow or black locust, and each leaf let has two little spines of the same type. The basal spines remain after the leaves fall, so that in winter we shall find these pairs of sentinels guarding the leaf scars up and down the ridged twigs. On the thicker stems the thorns are larger, and the tree is thus well-armed and able to do duty as a hedge plant, when thickly planted.
These thorns come off with the bark, hence they are more properly called prickles. They are not rooted in the wood of the branch as the thorns of the honey locust are, but they belong in the class with rose and raspberry prickles, which are mere outgrowths of the bark.
The hawthorn trees have single spines, some long and curved, some short, some branched. All
are rooted in the pith of the twig that bears them; therefore, they are not prickles, but true thorns.
The wild plum trees have a strange habit of ending their shoots with thorny tips, as if the branches needed such defence against browsing cattle. Certainly these stunted, sharp-pointed twigs are useful as weapons of defence to the little trees that grow slowly in poor soil, and are sufferers from poverty and abuse. Perhaps it is their hard luck that makes them crabbed and thorny. Wild apple trees show the same tend ency to have thorny twigs. The same little trees, transplanted to mellow soil, grow soft and leafy twigs, and abandon the carrying of weapons.
Hercules' club is a tree which beats the ailan thus at its own game. Stems ten feet high and two inches in diameter at the base sometimes shoot up in a single season. These clubs of Hercules are covered with spines as thickly set as on a gooseberry bush, formidable and vicious, though only skin deep.
On account of its tropical growth, this tree is planted for ornament in gardens where there is room. Its leaves are wonderful. They come out with a rich, silky, bronze sheen in spring, and when they reach full size are often four feet long, and more than half as wide. Each one is branched and branched again, and ends in a multitude of small oval leaflets. These giant leaves sway in the summer winds, giving the tree the grace of a tree fern. In late summer a great pyramid of bloom rises above the foliage. Purplish berries, which succeed the flowers, make a fine showing in fall and winter, when the leaves have turned to red and gold. • We dare not touch this spiny tree, but we may come close and admire its wonderful crown of umbrella leaves, the biggest by far borne on any tree outside of the Tropics.