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The Christmas Spirits and the Trees: December: Cedar

Arbor-Vitce or White Cedar, shown in our illustration (L : 1/4; C : 1/3-1/2; 1 1/2 X 60), grows from Nova Scotia to Minn., south to N. C. Light, soft, and brittle, but very durable. Used for shingles, poles, and posts. White Cedar. (L : 1/4-1/2; C : 3/4-1; 8 X 200.) Southern Oregon and California. Weak and brittle, but durable. Shingles and general lumber. Lawson's Cypress. (L : 1/16-1/4; C : 1/3 diam.; 12 X 200.) Oregon and California, along the coast. Light, hard, strong, and durable. Flooring, ties, ships, matches, and general lumber.

Red Cedar. (L : 1/2-3/4; C : 1/4-1/3; 4 X 100.) Widely distributed east of the Rocky Mountains. Light, soft, and close-grained. Pencils, cabinets, posts, and chests.

II. THE GIFTS OF OTHER TREES In speaking of the gifts of other trees, where is there a better place for us to begin than right here, with the Ash Trees? The Ash people are not only in the front of the procession in the alphabet of trees, but the better uses to which men have learned to put them, in the course of the ages, express, in a most practical way, the Christmas spirit of peace and good-will; the beginning of the time when all the swords shall have been beaten into ploughshares and the spears into pruning-hooks. The wood of the Ash, which, from the dawn of history, has been the favorite material for spear-shafts, now helps to soothe the savage breast, since it enters largely into the manufacture of musical instruments, and in many other ways helps to further the arts of peace. For example, no other wood is so largely employed for the handles of tools--saws, chisels, files, planes, and other hand-tools that you use in manual training, and that the carpenter and the blacksmith use in their shops. From Ash wood are made, by the millions, those indispensable little tools of the household known as clothes-pins. It also enters intimately into our play, as well as our workaday lives, supplying us, among other things, with ball-bats and tennis-rackets; and helping us to go places, over the deep snows in winter and the deep water in summer, by allowing itself to be made into oars and snow-shoes. A recent census of the wood-using industries shows that the wood of the Ash enters into the manufacture of more than a hundred articles of every-day use.

WHY NOT START A LITTLE NURSERY?

Because Ash Trees are so easy to grow and forge ahead so fast into adult Ashhood, Mr. Illick suggests this as a particularly interesting field for experiment for groups of boys who can collect the seeds--they ripen in October and hang on all winter--and plant them in small nurseries. They will sprout early, and by the end of summer will have grown so you'll hardly believe your eyes. More than a million of these trees have been raised in the nurseries of Pennsylvania.

Most of this has been done by grown-ups, to be sure, but the young people have been of great service, both in raising and setting out trees of various kinds. Want to try Mr. Illick's suggestion? Well, then, in the April chapter you'll find out all about it--how to put the seeds to bed--not so simple a job as you may think--how to prevent certain little people from waking them up too early, how to prevent them from oversleeping; and everything! Aspen: The Aspen, the next tree that has presented itself for inspection (although I think it really ought to have taken its place, farther down the line, with the Poplars, since it is one of the Poplar family), says: "It's true I'm not an important lumber tree, but who goes farther than I do, with my winged seeds and the little flying-machines that carry them for miles and miles, in preparing the way for other trees? And the Aspens are the very first to spring up after forest-fires, and after the kind of lumbering that wipes out the forests like a fire. And look how, along with other Poplars, I'm helping publish this book. We've become so important in the paper-making business, since we are not only good for pulp but grow very fast, that we're being planted by the pulp companies by the thousands to help relieve the rapidly approaching pulp shortage."