No More Learning

Indeed, I selected this wood because I thought it the
least likely to contain anything else. It stands on an open plain or
pasture, except that it adjoins another small pine wood, which has a
few little oaks in it, on the southeast side. On every other side, it
was at least thirty rods from the nearest woods. Standing on the edge
of this grove and looking through it, for it is quite level and free
from underwood, for the most part bare, red-carpeted ground, you would
have said that there was not a hardwood tree in it, young or old. But
on looking carefully along over its floor I discovered, though it was
not till my eye had got used to the search, that, alternating with
thin ferns, and small blueberry bushes, there was, not merely here and
there, but as often as every five feet and with a degree of
regularity, a little oak, from three to twelve inches high, and in one
place I found a green acorn dropped by the base of a pine.

I confess I was surprised to find my theory so perfectly proved in
this case. One of the principal agents in this planting, the red
squirrels, were all the while curiously inspecting me, while I was
inspecting their plantation. Some of the little oaks had been browsed
by cows, which resorted to this wood for shade.

After seven or eight years, the hard woods evidently find such a
locality unfavorable to their growth, the pines being allowed to
stand. As an evidence of this, I observed a diseased red maple
twenty-five feet long, which had been recently prostrated, though it
was still covered with green leaves, the only maple in any position in
the wood.

But although these oaks almost invariably die if the pines are not cut
down, it is probable that they do better for a few years under their
shelter than they would anywhere else.

The very extensive and thorough experiments of the English have at
length led them to adopt a method of raising oaks almost precisely
like this which somewhat earlier had been adopted by Nature and her
squirrels here; they have simply rediscovered the value of pines as
nurses for oaks. The English experimenters seem, early and generally,
to have found out the importance of using trees of some kind as
nurse-plants for the young oaks. I quote from Loudon what he describes
as "the ultimatum on the subject of planting and sheltering
oaks,"--"an abstract of the practice adopted by the government
officers in the national forests" of England, prepared by Alexander
Milne.

At first some oaks had been planted by themselves, and others mixed
with Scotch pines; "but in all cases," says Mr.
Milne, "where oaks
were planted actually among the pines and surrounded by them [though
the soil might be inferior], the oaks were found to be much the best. "
"For several years past, the plan pursued has been to plant the
inclosures with Scotch pines only [a tree very similar to our pitch
pine], and when the pines have got to the height of five or six feet,
then to put in good strong oak plants of about four or five years'
growth among the pines,--not cutting away any pines at first, unless
they happen to be so strong and thick as to overshadow the oaks. In
about two years it becomes necessary to shred the branches of the
pines, to give light and air to the oaks, and in about two or three
more years to begin gradually to remove the pines altogether, taking
out a certain number each year, so that, at the end of twenty or
twenty-five years, not a single Scotch pine shall be left; although,
for the first ten or twelve years, the plantation may have appeared to
contain nothing else but pine. The advantage of this mode of planting
has been found to be that the pines dry and ameliorate the soil,
destroying the coarse grass and brambles which frequently choke and
injure oaks; and that no mending over is necessary, as scarcely an oak
so planted is found to fail. "

Thus much the English planters have discovered by patient experiment,
and, for aught I know, they have taken out a patent for it; but they
appear not to have discovered that it was discovered before, and that
they are merely adopting the method of Nature, which she long ago made
patent to all. She is all the while planting the oaks amid the pines
without our knowledge, and at last, instead of government officers, we
send a party of woodchoppers to cut down the pines, and so rescue an
oak forest, at which we wonder as if it had dropped from the skies.

As I walk amid hickories, even in August, I hear the sound of green
pignuts falling from time to time, cut off by the chickaree over my
head. In the fall, I notice on the ground, either within or in the
neighborhood of oak woods, on all sides of the town, stout oak twigs
three or four inches long, bearing half a dozen empty acorn-cups,
which twigs have been gnawed off by squirrels, on both sides of the
nuts, in order to make them more portable. The jays scream and the red
squirrels scold while you are clubbing and shaking the chestnut trees,
for they are there on the same errand, and two of a trade never agree.
I frequently see a red or gray squirrel cast down a green chestnut
bur, as I am going through the woods, and I used to think, sometimes,
that they were cast at me. In fact, they are so busy about it, in the
midst of the chestnut season, that you cannot stand long in the woods
without hearing one fall. A sportsman told me that he had, the day
before,--that was in the middle of October,--seen a green chestnut bur
dropped on our great river meadow, fifty rods from the nearest wood,
and much further from the nearest chestnut tree, and he could not tell
how it came there. Occasionally, when chestnutting in midwinter, I
find thirty or forty nuts in a pile, left in its gallery, just under
the leaves, by the common wood mouse (_Mus leucopus_).

But especially, in the winter, the extent to which this transportation
and planting of nuts is carried on is made apparent by the snow. In
almost every wood, you will see where the red or gray squirrels have
pawed down through the snow in a hundred places, sometimes two feet
deep, and almost always directly to a nut or a pine cone, as directly
as if they had started from it and bored upward,--which you and I
could not have done. It would be difficult for us to find one before
the snow falls.