Recollections of a Gifted Woman - Page 2

that of most varieties of American oak; nor do I mean to
doubt that the latter, with free leave to grow, reverent care and
cultivation, and immunity from the axe, would live out its centuries as
sturdily as its English brother, and prove far the nobler and more
majestic specimen of a tree at the end of them. Still, however one's
Yankee patriotism may struggle against the admission, it must be owned
that the trees and other objects of an English landscape take hold of the
observer by numberless minute tendrils, as it were, which, look as
closely as we choose, we never find in an American scene. The parasitic
growth is so luxuriant, that the trunk of the tree, so gray and dry in
our climate, is better worth observing than the boughs and foliage; a
verdant messiness coats it all over; so that it looks almost as green as
the leaves; and often, moreover, the stately stem is clustered about,
high upward, with creeping and twining shrubs, the ivy, and sometimes the
mistletoe, close-clinging friends, nurtured by the moisture and never too
fervid sunshine, and supporting themselves by the old tree's abundant
strength. We call it a parasitical vegetation; but, if the phrase imply
any reproach, it is unkind to bestow it on this beautiful affection and
relationship which exist in England between one order of plants and
another: the strong tree being always ready to give support to the
trailing shrub, lift it to the sun, and feed it out of its own heart,
if it crave such food; and the shrub, on its part, repaying its
foster-father with an ample luxuriance of beauty, and adding Corinthian
grace to the tree's lofty strength. No bitter winter nips these tender
little sympathies, no hot sun burns the life out of them; and therefore
they outlast the longevity of the oak, and, if the woodman permitted,
would bury it in a green grave, when all is over.

Should there be nothing else along the road to look at, an English hedge
might well suffice to occupy the eyes, and, to a depth beyond what he
would suppose, the heart of an American. We often set out hedges in our
own soil, but might as well set out figs or pineapples and expect to
gather fruit of them. Something grows, to be sure, which we choose to
call a hedge; but it lacks the dense, luxuriant variety of vegetation
that is accumulated into the English original, in which a botanist would
find a thousand shrubs and gracious herbs that the hedgemaker never
thought of planting there. Among them, growing wild, are many of the
kindred blossoms of the very flowers which our pilgrim fathers brought
from England, for the sake of their simple beauty and homelike
associations, and which we have ever since been cultivating in gardens.
There is not a softer trait to be found in the