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A year among the trees

Chapter 23: THE HOP HORNBEAM.
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About This Book

The volume offers a seasonal tour of New England woodlands, combining natural history, species descriptions, and landscape observation. It profiles many native trees and shrubs, noting forms, foliage, and identifying features, and organizes scenes by seasons and habitats. Interspersed essays examine trees' relations to soil, water, climate, electricity, birds, and insects, and discuss their roles in health, shade, and ornament. Practical and aesthetic considerations mingle with reflections on poetic and folkloric associations, while guidance on planting, forest rotation, and the varied expressions of trees rounds out a handbook for both the curious walker and the practical planter.

THE HOP HORNBEAM.

The Hop Hornbeam is a very different tree from the one just described, resembling it only in the toughness of its wood, whence the name of Lever-Wood has been very generally applied to it. This tree is rarely seen by the wayside. Those only know it whose occupation has led them to seek it for its service in the arts, or those who have examined it in their botanical rambles. It is a small tree, that affects the habit of the elm in its general appearance, of the birch in its inflorescence, and of the beech in the upward tendency of its small branches. It is so much like the elm in the style of its foliage, in the fine division and length of its slender spray, and in the color and appearance of its bark, that it might easily be mistaken for a small elm, without any of its drooping habit. It does not, like the elm, however, break into any eccentric modes of growth. A striking peculiarity of this tree is the multitude of hop-like capsular heads that contain the seeds.