SCHOOL IN THE OPEN.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17343, 16 July 1924, Page 12

SCHOOL IN THE OPEN.

i STUDIES IN THE GREAT OUT-OF-DOORS. I!

(By

J.J. S. Comes, 8.A., B.Sc.)

The “ Star ” lias arranged with Mr J. J. S. Cornes, 8.A., B.Sc., to write a series of illustrated articles which will give teachers and others a fuller appreciation of the Great Out-of-doors. They will deal with various aspects of plant and animal life, as well as with inanimate nature. Questions and material for identification will be welcomed.

FIR, SFRUCE, LARCH AND CEDAR. (Vtn.) To the small bov whose great <Ti'ght is to carry birds’ eggs safely to the ground—in his mouth—T do ro-np-ectfully suggest that he climb the next tall fir he sees and try to bring to earth, just on© of the ripe erect cones without allowing it to crumble !

trig, after the fashion of a Silver Fir, they have no silvery lines beneath, and the cones, instead of being large and upright, arc small and pendulous on

The pine, cono has hard scales, each showing a thick square head, but tho fir cone is made of broad, papery scales, with thin .<**'g£s laid neatly one over another. Never did ice melt so readily in the pocket as do these scales fall away * from their ccjitrau Each stiff little leaf has its edges rolled under as if ready for hemming, and on this under side, between thji h ms and tho central green rib are two silver lines. "Whence the tree called “ Silver FiV’ Tn Europe, th© Silver Fir does not like quite such cold places as does tno Spruce. Even in Central Europe it dwells lower down ilie mountains; and It is not at home in Norway. In 1810, when all Europe was at war with Napoleon, the deal traffic- on the Baltic Sea was stopped. What was to be done? Near Lake Lucerne 13 a high mountain. Mont Pilate, covered with great forests of pine and spruce. A tremendous slide was made, front Mont Pilate to the lake. It was six fc-et broad, and six feet deep, and eight miles long, and twenty-five thousand pine trees were used in making it: When water had been pour ad down and had frozen, the great trunks were started one at a time: Down the slippery way they shot—what fun it must have bpen ! —-and, when running “express,” when rain had frozen on the slide, they were only three minutes on the way. One hundred rnd sixty miles per hour average speed —the water-chute “ isn’t in it !” But there wero other builders who sought the spruce, glowing m its gran, dour of loneliness, its fibres moved and stirred to resonance by “ the whistling of the wind, the melodious noise of lorcK among branches, and the ph-is-mg fall of waters running violently.” They were the great makers oi the violin, “That small, sweet* thing. Devised in love and fashioned cunningly, Of wood and strings.” To the fiddle-lover the spruce conjures up visions of Antonius Stradivari ns and the violins of Cremona; of old Jacob Steiner of Salzburg, exploring tno forests and tapping. like a hungry woodpecker, lhe tree-trunks, to test the musical vibration of their response, cr listening, on th > precipitous- edgo of a ravine, for some stray tone or overtone as they toppled and crashed down crag and rock, felled by the hand of skilled men.

Douglas fir. or Oregon pine, is unlike a fir, and resembles a spruce, you remember, in having pendant, cones. It was introduced into England in 1827 by the ill-fated traveller, David Douglas, wbo met a tragic end'in tho Sandwich Islands in 1833. While sea rolling in the forest for rare plants, l.e fell into a trap-pit. designed to catch, wild cattle, and already occupied by .1 maddened beast. 44 O Hemlock tree! O Hemlock tree! How faithful are thy branches * Green not. alone in summer-time. But in the winter's frost and rime.” —Longfellow. let us not confuse the. Hemlock spruce with the small heib of the carrot family from which was concocted a certain deadly drug, which tho Athenian authorities handed to tho oiator .'Socrates and the general Fhocion, whpse further company had become politically inconvenient This graceful tree is absolved from all connection with such tragic scenes. There is no more goodly tree in Christendom. "While its (eaves are slightly ‘‘parted” right and left along the

the tips of twigs, with persistent scales. There is a beautiful specimen half-wav down the northern border of tli« Archery. There is n- tree that, like a. spruce or pine, produces cones with persistent scales, which arc yet of upright posi-. tion like those of fir or cedar. It has rosettes of needles like those of cedar, but softer, and shed enrh winter -for this tree, like many natives of the far north, has the custom of hibernation. and takes off its clothes before hand, though at the first sign of spring it hurries them oti again and sets an example of early rising. This tree is

: the Larch. No other tree, perhaps. j has been so exploited commercially.. 1 yet n a other is so I ‘eh lit! ill 1 in spring II grows in Europe as high as I lie | spruce, higher than the Silver Fir, but preiori in>z the southerly, sunny aspect : Co the Alps and Apennines it grows ! to a height oi two 'hundred feet. Lt ! is often felled and thrown athwart | some yawning chasm, where, it. affordj a perilous passage irom cliff to cliff while tho cataract. roaring many j fathoms below, is hi lden bv surges of I rising vapour. Livy tells us that - w hen Hannibal, in his. passage aeross tno Alps, laid the cliffs bare and | lie a pod up piles of timber to melt th- ! rocks, the larch was his fuel. : The wood of larch is sairl to he more I durable even than oak and from tb ■ J groat quantity of resin it’ containI resists admirably the effects of damn’ used by painters before the PaV! aI F ociu ‘ r " r,ocl - and several of Raphael s pictures are painted on ooards of larch, while the very houses Oi tears ago on piles of this timber, still fresh and ,sound. As early as 1774 the Duke of Atholl planted fifteen thousand acres of waste land with twenty-seven million larch trees. He was called the Tree Monger, for then, a:- now. there were croakers and blind worshippers of tho Eternal "V. esterdav, who deprecate the introduction of new plants from distant lands. of marshy swamp and dreary morass, has earned, fame for the part it played in the construction of Hiawatha’s “ Give me of your roots. O Tamarac, Of your fibrous roots, O Larch Tree, My canoe to bind together. So to bind the ends together That tho water may not enter, That tho river may not wet me.” But wo are more familiar with Japanese Larch, Larix leptolepis. or European Larch. Larix Europoea. Nesbit, ! speaking of the fieslmess of its early | spring attire, says : Such a green gown God gave the larches. As green as He is good.” But the Larch is so serious a business proposition that most of the poets have I left it alone. Tennyson, telling of the j mansion wherein dwelt- “ Maud, with j her exquisite face.” places it “amid i perky larches and pines ’’—for “perky” 'veil describes the trees’s neat >shapelij Bushmen and settlers seem to take an unholy delight in upsetting the names which botanists have prescribed. Not that'it is done out of sheer bravado. Tor example, in the North Island they actually call a broadleaf tree a Cedar but it is because the reddish wood reminds them of Cedar. Perhaps the poets are less ' excusable. Longfellow, for instance, calls the American Red-wood. Sequoia sempervirens, by that name, and helps to make confusion confounded in minds where light j might have dawned *i As the muezzin from his minaret de--1 dares that there is but one Prophet, so do we from our housetops proclaim | that there is but one family of true ! cedars, and that the Cedar of Lebanon, j the Cedar of India (Cedrus deodarai I and the Cedar of the Atlas Mountains j (Cedrus at I an tic a),, they three, and they

only, are the trinity of true Cedars, and that all your others, your incense Cedars and your pencil Cedars, do but masquerade the colour of the true Tho Deodar a, from the humid Himalayas, is the tree-god of tho Shasterthe sacred Hindoo Book. It was the Devadara, Tree of the Gods (Sanscrit Deva.-, deity and -data, wood). Tt can be distinguished easily by its longer leaves, and drooping terminal shoots fringing the flat branches. Of the other two. Atlas Cedar has the stiffer shape, its branches being more ascending. its head less flattened. If trees were divided 4 into two classes, pretty and majestic, the Oak among broadleafs. and the Cedar among Coni-" fers, would go in the latter class, as

Sword, as th© Oak is King of the trees of the Shield, it was to the Cedar that Isaiah turned when he wished to typify tho might of Jehovah, “ The voice of the Lord breaketh the Cedars of Lebanon.” The name recalls the building of the Temple of Solomon, where all was cedar, there was no stone seen.” Far away, shut in between snowy mountain-peaks. stands the little grove, all that remains of the forests to which Hiram of Tyre and Solomon of Israel sent their armies of wood-cutters. In.agination and poetical license have invested these remaining trees with an age that varies from the time of the Song of Solomon to that of the Garden of Eden. Certainly the Cedar can grow to great age, quite 800 years, for so bitter is its

surely as Silver Birch and Larch, those delicate, light-demanding trees, would go in the former. The prophet Ezekiel thus describes the Cedar of Lebanon : “A cedar in Lebanon with fair branches, and with a shadowing shroud, and of a. high stature; and his top was among the thick boughs. The waters nourished him; the deep made him t-o grow. The firtrees were not like his boughs, and the plane trees were not as his branches, nor was any tree in the garden of God like unto him for beauty.” Thus did the Jewish exile recall its thick leaf-canopy: “ A shadowing shroud,’ and its long and flat, often down bending, topmost branches, “among thick boughs,” giving it what wo describe brutally as a “ clump-headed oppsarTo Biblical writers the Cedar was an emblem of strength. "While in most cases the branches of trees spring from the trunk, in Cedar tho trunk seems rather to lose itself in those great, muscular arms—this tree is the Karnes© Hercules, rather than Apollo Belvedere. Iving of the Builders of the

resin that it has not the insect ant other foes to which Larch is victim So well does its very wood keep (ha, it was long t.lio favourite for writing tablets. * Many years ago a Frenchman stooc in reverence before a grove of Cedarin Lebanon. He noticed a tiny seedling at his feet, lifted it gently, and pottec it in his hat. On the home-voyage water ran short, on the ship, but cad day he shared his half-glass of precious fluid with his little tree. Reaching harbour, be showed it to th© Custom.' officer, who, suspecting that goods were being smuggled in under the soil, was with difficulty prevented from uprooting the plant. But the Frenchman got it home safely, and il grew to be the ornament of thai countryside, yet always its drooping liep-d repined for its homeland. <f Oh! Art thou sighing for Lebanon Sighing for Lebanon, dark Cedar.” Tennyson. (To be continued on Saturday.)