To civilized man, trees are considered the most important production of the vegetable kingdom. They not only furnish the material on which the most useful and the most elegant arts depend for their very existence, but of all the ornaments which give variety and beauty to the surface of the earth, they are the most conspicuous.
One cannot pass the venerable majestic clan, without an involuntary emotion of reverence. Nor stand amid our fine forests without feeling them to be full of the mysteries of past ages, and that the rustling wind among their bough are whispering traditions of the ancient people. The oak, the maple, and the chestnut have their tales of beauty and of romance. What a tree, in short, which to the lover of nature hath not a voice of eloquent utterance. They are associated, says a beautiful writer, with all that is holy in nature, and with much that is tender and endearing in our mellowed recollections of the past. There is perhaps no inanimate object to which we may become so much attached as to a tree, the old ancestral tree, that seemed with a sort of silent pleasure to shelter the home of our childhood, and under whose paternal branches our children, and children’s children, may yet be seen to sport for many a summer day. Trees are mute companions that have known us in all our moods, and have almost shared them with us. Beautiful are they amidst the odors, and the gentle showers, and the young blossoms of spring; glorious are they in the gorgeous apparel of the blue-skied summer, with the wood-pigeons and many-colored birds cooing and singing, unseen, deep in the recesses of their umbrageous boughs; touching are they in autumn, and hallowed with a thousand moral meanings, in the decaying magnificence of their rainbow foliage; and venerable; ay, and beautiful are they in winter, bending their bare branches to the blast, or with all their twigs and sprays, stiff and motionless as coral, in the clear frosty air, and glittering in a white covering of snow.
We have been much gratified to learn that some of our citizens are about planting pine-seed upon our plains. The soil of this Island is naturally inclined to the growth of this tree, and the experiment will undoubtedly succeed well. The pine is a tree of great value, as well as beauty, and the property in that part of the Island will be greatly enhanced in price, should a vigorous growth of these trees shoot up and take the place of the barrenness which has so long prevailed in that neighborhood.
It is related of a farmer in Long Island, that he planted an ordinary field of fourteen acres, with suckers from the Acacia tree, (a native of this country,) in the year of his marriage, as a portion for his children. His eldest son married at twenty-two. On this occasion the farmer cut about fifteen hundred dollars worth of timber out of his acacia wood, which he gave his son to buy a settlement in Lancaster county. Three years after, he did as much for a daughter. And thus he provided for his whole family: the wood in the meantime repairing by suckers all the losses it received.
This article appears in May 14, 1846.