see it clearly

Aspen Trees

Like the Willows, with which group they constitute the natural order Salicaceae, the Poplars are so variable a series of trees as to present considerable difficulties to the systematic botanist. They are all of them deciduous trees, flourishing in moist but not stagnant soil, especially near running water, though singularly tolerant of the smoke of cities. Their rapid growth often renders them valuable as screens, and their broad and tremulous leaves give them a cheerfulness which does not belong to the narrow-leaved Willows. This constant agitation of the foliage by the least breath of wind, owing to the unusual length and flattened form of the leaf-stalk, though common to the whole genus, is most conspicuous in the case of the Aspen (Populus tremula). In all Poplars the trees are unisexual; the vinous-red, caterpillar-like catkins of anthers that color the leafless trees and strew the ground in April being as conspicuous in the case of the male plants as are the thickly-packed woolly seeds in summer in that of the females.

The wood of all the Poplars is soft, light, and white or pale yellow, durable if kept dry, and with that remarkable resilience and freedom from splintering which, occurring as it does likewise in Willows and Alders, would seem to be characteristic of the rapidly-grown timber of water-side trees.

The chief structural characters of the Aspen are that its shoots are downy, and its leaves on very long stalks; those on the suckers heart-shaped, pointed, but not toothed; those on the branches rounded, with incurved teeth; and all of them silky on the under surface when young, though generally becoming smooth later. Its buds are slightly viscid, and the flowers in the female catkins are densely crowded together. The lobed catkin-scales are fringed with hairs; the two stigmas are each divided into two erect segments; and in the male plant each catkin-scale bears generally eight stamens in its axil.

The Aspen is not usually a large tree, though Loudon records a specimen at Castle Howard, in Yorkshire, one hundred and thirty feet high, and three and a half feet in diameter, and various other examples reaching diameters of four feet, and one at Bothwell Castle, Renfrewshire, one hundred and seventeen feet in the spread of its branches. This latter tree was eighty years old; but the species is not a long-lived one, and, like all Poplars, is very liable to rot from the tearing off of boughs by wind, and to subsequent attacks by various insects. As the tree gets older its horizontal branches become pendulous. The young shoots are generally reddish, with prominent brown hairs--or both these shoots and the root-suckers may be hoary--but they are never cottony as in some other species.

Like all trees having a wide geographical range, the Aspen, though not now much esteemed as timber, has been applied to a variety of uses. In Asia it occurs mainly in the north and in Asia Minor; it is abundant throughout Russia from the White Sea to the Caucasus, and throughout Northern Africa and the South of Europe; and it is indigenous in Ireland and as far north as Sutherland. In America it is represented by the closely allied forms Populus tremuloides and P. grandidentata. The Athenian Poplar (Populus graeca, Ait.) is apparently also an American form, deriving its name from Athens in Georgia. Its bark has been employed in tanning, and its wood is used in turnery and cooperage, as well as for many minor purposes such as sabots, clogs, and to a small extent for gunpowder charcoal.

In the past it was valuable, provd by the fact that in the reign of Henry V. an Act of Parliament was passed (4 Hen. V., c. 3), which was not repealed until the reign of James I., to prevent its consumption otherwise than for the making of arrows, with a penalty of a hundred shillings if used for making pattens or clogs. Spenser alludes to it as "the Aspine good for staves."

Where the beaver lingers the bark of the Aspen forms its principal food; and deer, goats, sheep, and cattle are fonder perhaps of green Aspen leaves than they are of those of any other tree.

Its roots, running near the surface, are apt to impoverish the soil, and its leaves, when fallen, kill the grass; though, whilst on the tree, their constant motion so permits the passage of light as to render its shade but very slightly injurious to any plants beneath it. The profusion of suckers springing from its roots, however, make the Aspen an undesirable tree for lawns, meadows, or hedgerows. They yield an abundant supply of faggots, or poles, if the tree be treated as coppice-wood, and cut down either every seven or eight, or every fifteen or twenty years. The rapid growth and usefully-moderated shade of this species adapt it well to act as a "nurse" in moist woodlands for the Oak, or even for the Beech; and it may be propagated either by cuttings, or more readily by seed.

It is, however, chiefly for the grace and beauty of the grey bark of its stem and its rustling leaves that the Aspen is now valued in our marshy woods and by the waterside. This rustling of the leaves, which are scarcely ever still even in the stillest air, is the most striking feature of the tree, and the point of most allusions to it in literature. Mr. Ruskin, in whose "Modern Painters" the Aspen is treated with such loving detail, when discussing Homer's treatment of landscape, writes as follows on the scene between Ulysses and Nausicaa:

"The spot to which she directs him is another ideal piece of landscape, composed of a 'beautiful grove of Aspen Poplars, a fountain, and a meadow,' near the roadside; in fact, as nearly as possible such a scene as meets the eye of the traveller every instant on the much-despised lines of road through lowland France--for instance, on the railway between Arras and Amiens: scenes to my mind quite exquisite in the various grouping and grace of their innumerable Poplar avenues, casting sweet tremulous shadows over their level meadows and labyrinthine streams. We know that the princess means Aspen Poplars, because soon afterwards we find her fifty maid-servants at the palace, all spinning, and in perpetual motion, compared to the 'leaves of the tall Poplar;' and it is with exquisite feeling that it is made afterwards the chief tree in the groves of Proserpine, its light and quivering leafage having exactly the melancholy expression of fragility, faintness, and inconstancy which the ancients attributed to the disembodied spirit. The likeness to the Poplars by the streams of Amiens is more marked still in the Iliad, where the young Simois, struck by Ajax, falls to the earth 'like an Aspen that has grown in an irrigated meadow, smooth-trunked, the soft shoots springing from its top, which some coach-making man has cut down with his keen iron, that he may fit a wheel of it to a fair chariot, and it lies parching by the side of the stream."

From Homer to Thomson is indeed a fall; but there is true observation in the latter's description of

"A perfect calm; that not a breath
Is heard to quiver through the closing woods,
Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves
Of aspen tall."

The grace of the whole tree would seem more than once to have suggested the ladies to writers on the Aspen, though their remarks are hardly complimentary. Thus Gerard says of it:--"In English Aspe and Aspen-tree, and may also be called Tremble, after the French name, considering it is the matter whereof women's tongues were made (as the poets and some others report), which seldom cease wagging." Among many other allusions to this tree, Scott's address to woman in Marmion, as

Variable as the shade
By the light quivering aspen made,"

is one of the best known. Far more strikingly poetical is the old Scottish and English legend on the subject, so beautifully told by Mrs. Hemans:

"--a cause more deep,
More solemn far, the rustic doth assign
To the strange restlessness of those wan leaves;
The cross, he deems, the blessed cross, whereon
The meek Redeemer bowed His head to death,
Was formed of aspen wood, and since that hour
Through all its race the pale tree hath sent down
A thrilling consciousness, a secret awe,
Making them tremulous, when not a breeze
Disturbs the airy thistle-down, or shakes
The light lines of the shining gossamer."

This quivering, to which the tree owes its French name, is explained scientifically by the length of the slender leaf-stalk and its lateral compression, so that the broad and heavy leaf is suspended on a support which is itself readily acted on by the smallest atmospheric movement. The rustling noise, as of a babbling brook, is produced by the friction of the leaves on one another. The physiological significance of the movement may be to aid in that pumping process by which moisture travels rapidly up from the roots to replace that given off in the transpiration of the leaves. Mr. Herbert Spencer has suggested that movement of branches and leaves in the wind may subserve this purpose in all cases, and it might well be specially advantageous in the case of such a rapidly-growing group of trees as the Poplars.

In March or April the bare gray boughs or brownish shoots are thickly covered with catkins, and the male ones produce a general effect of warm vinous red, until, having fulfilled the object of their existence by discharging their pollen, they fall before the gales of the equinox. When the foliage appears, associations of refreshing coolness and of irresponsible laughing mirth, suggested by the resemblance of the sound made by the leaves to the music of a brook, mingle, as we gaze at their pallid color, and as the rising wind changes the rippling laugh into a longdrawn sigh, with those of the deepest melancholy; and though, when autumn, "with his gold hand gilding the falling leaf," spreads its badge of splendid decay over each leaf in succession, the tree gains in variety of color, its rustling gives it then--in that season whose every suggestion is of death--even a more melancholy effect than it had before.

From its more spreading habit of growth the Aspen has none of the formality in landscape effect of the Lombardy Poplar, and, though useful, along with its congener the Abele (Populus alba), in the marshy wood, deserves a place in the foreground of the copse bordering a lake or stream. A row of Aspens in such a situation, relieving the heavy foliage of the lower-growing Alders or Rhododendrons, would prove very effective, reflecting, as it were, in their quivering leaves, the ripple of the water at their feet.