THE WESTERN SYCAMORE

THE WESTERN ycamore

Here is a tree that might have been created as the friend of mankind. Out of all the western sylva, the forests vast and somber, the ranked species in their cohorts, each with its boast of economic value, this one stands apart. For it grows singly or in little groves in the interior valleys, along the sandy washes, the upside-down rivers of the desert, in the cool of the canyon walls, more needed where you find it than valuable if felled, sawed, dressed, and exported. With its intimately leaning trunks it seems, even in the wild, to be pre-formed for bending above the rooftree that will come to it. The quality of its shade-broad but filmyleaved (more like some Eastern hardwood's) is never so dense as to be stuffy; ever the breeze moves under the boughs, and any stir of air, in the warm habitats it chooses, even the rangeland's or the wheat field's, is better than none. So the white-faced Herefords stand or lie for hours in the long burning summers beneath the Sycamores. Whether this tree throws shadows of palmate leaf and zigzag twig upon the stone of a canyon's walls or on doorstep and lintel, that scrawl is like a loved and familiar handwriting to the westerner. And that marbled bark, forever sloughing off in irregular mottled flakes of brown, tan, green, gray, and off-white, is a detritus not so much rubbishy as comfortably homelike. Certainly there is a pleasant quality about the shade cast by this, the outstanding shade tree of the Southwest. Forone thing, the leaves are not glittering on the upper surface -a great relief in the hard-leaved evergreen woodlands of the desert and southern California where so many leaves are blades turned against the tired eyeballs. Sycamore leaves have at most a soft shine to them, when the down wears off, and the undersides remain permanently coated in rusty or gray woolly hairs so that when the breeze spins the blades over they gleam silvery but cool. More, the shade, though so ample in summer, is taken down by Nature in the short period of Southwestern winter, allowing all the warmth and light in the sky to penetrate to soil or roof. Unlike the conifers, the Sycamore does not hold the cold, but scouts it. All species of Platanus have as their outstanding beauty their massive trunks and mottled, smooth bark. The species Platanus orientalis, native from southern Europe to India, was thousands of years ago a favorite shade tree; it was planted in the Greek schoolyards, just as Elms are the traditional academic trees of America, because its boughs were so wide, its shade so good, its trunks so like stout marble columns. Or perhaps, rather, the school came to the tree, at least the informal assemblies of Plato did so; under the tree that he called platanos (whence French, platanier, and English Plane) he paced with his following, discoursing of his republic. Call it Plane, or Sycamore, or Buttonwood, or aliso as the Spanish-speaking pioneers of the Southwest did, our Western Platanus cannot help falling into picturesque atti-tudes, and a Sycamore that looks regular, like forest-grown type of tree, is a rarity. When growing on stream banks the tree is almost certain to lean, sprawl, or fork deeply, oftenest in a V-shape. But a trunk with a J-shape is common too, even well back from water, in the dry ranch-land grass, for there is something slouching about most bottom-land Sycamores. Indeed, some pasture specimens never stand up at all, but may be seen lying down on their backs, as it were, in a meadow, sending up vertical branches all from one side, like a horse scratching his back on the ground and kicking up his legs! But in general the trees on rich alluvial lands that, however, stand well up and away from the actual stream or gully bank have very straight but short trunks clear of branches. As time goes on, this rapid-growing tree will thicken the base of the trunk into a great barrel-shaped affair, without pruning many of its lower branches, so that the true trunk ends abruptly in a perfect jet of trunk-like branches and these, in turn gracefully arching, may sweep low at the tips. This is the grandest, most lovable form of the tree, and it may perhaps be called the normal form.

tudes, and a Sycamore that looks regular, like forest-grown type of tree, is a rarity. When growing on stream banks the tree is almost certain to lean, sprawl, or fork deeply, oftenest in a V-shape. But a trunk with a J-shape is common too, even well back from water, in the dry ranch-land grass, for there is something slouching about most bottom-land Sycamores. Indeed, some pasture specimens never stand up at all, but may be seen lying down on their backs, as it were, in a meadow, sending up vertical branches all from one side, like a horse scratching his back on the ground and kicking up his legs! But in general the trees on rich alluvial lands that, however, stand well up and away from the actual stream or gully bank have very straight but short trunks clear of branches. As time goes on, this rapid-growing tree will thicken the base of the trunk into a great barrel-shaped affair, without pruning many of its lower branches, so that the true trunk ends abruptly in a perfect jet of trunk-like branches and these, in turn gracefully arching, may sweep low at the tips. This is the grandest, most lovable form of the tree, and it may perhaps be called the normal form.

In general, the Western Sycamore is about 40 or 50 feet high when mature, but specimens up to 8o feet are known, with trunks 5 feet in diameter. What must have been one of the biggest Sycamores in existence still stands, a truncated wreck, on Milpas Street, in Santa Barbara.

Though once so lofty that, in the days when this city had no harbor and yet could be satisfactorily reached only by boat, a lantern was hung from this great tree's topmost boughs. Captain George Nidever, an old sailing master, reported that it was the mariners' custom to sight their course, by day, by this tree. That custom began back in 1800; today the tree is still alive though its top has been broken by storms and its great boughs were cut off some years ago to relieve their strain upon the hollow heart. In one respect only is it the tree it once was-in girth; it now measures 11 feet, 11 inches around at breast height.The whitish woolly hairs on the undersides of the leaves are deciduous and so a nuisance to some persons. For several weeks they drift on the atmosphere, setting up an acute inflammation of the mucuous membranes of sensitive noses. This is the only drawback to such a fine tree, unless we add the brittleness of the living wood. "Of its want of tenacity," said Dr. J. S. Newberry, surgeon-botanist of the Army reconnaissance that surveyed in 1855 for a railway from San Francisco to the Columbia River, "we had a striking illustration when we encamped under the tree. Our beds were spread on the ground under its branches, nearly touching each other. During the evening-a fresh breeze blowing, but not a high wind-we were warned by a cracking overhead that danger was impending, and had just time to 'stand from under' when a branch about eight inches in diameter came crashing down directly where we had been lying."

The Sycamore's greatest moment of beauty comes to it in earliest spring or at the end of winter. For then the flowers bloom upon the crooked, golden-fuzzy twigs. The heads of the male flowers are no bigger than peas, and filled with long-haired scales, so that they seem like little greenish or yellow chenille balls. The female heads are the showy ones, the size of big marbles, with deep and bright brown and remarkably long and thread-thin styles bristling out all over them. Coincidentally the leaves begin to unfold, like opening hands; all covered with golden down the palmate blades shine in the sunlight as if rimed with a glow. Then in summer when the foliage is full but fresh, the female heads ripen into fruit, each tiny seed-like nutlet deeply imbedded in a tuft of silken gray hairs. In winter these break up like so many dandelion heads blowing, and so the nutlets go gliding away on the wind to some other canyon or pasture.

The Arizona and New Mexican specimens differ so markedly in leaf that they have been described as a separate form, variety Wrightii (Watson) Benson. It has deeply 5to 7-lobed leaves, with slender and elongate lobes and the bases deeply heart shaped. This is a more beautiful foliage than the Californian, but as there are only leaf differences, the desert trees are not quite valid for a separate species.

The Sycamore is the largest desert tree of Arizona, growing up to 80 feet in height. Sycamore Canyon is but one of the many places where one can see the Arizona variety, but it is certainly the most romantic, and still, because of the rugged nature of the country, little visited. It lies for some 25 miles in the deep-cut bed of Sycamore Creek, which flows into the Verde River in the Coconino National Forest. Indian caves are still found in it and once, according to local legend, it was a hide-out of bad men and renegade Indians. Today the great Sycamores throw their shadows on the canyon walls in peace. One specimen measures 17 feet in circumference, perhaps the doughtiest hardwood tree in the Southwest.

Many birds love the desert Sycamore. The red-tailed hawk will commonly nest in it and will perch all day in its groves on the look-out, sallying forth with its cry of killee, killee! Because Sycamores are so often hollow, Gila and Lewis and Arizona woodpeckers all delight to nest in them. And if ever you find yourself down on the Border, in the Chiricahua and Huachuca Mountains, in summer, watch for a tiny comet of a bird with bronzy green back, metallic purple cap, and emerald-green gorget. That will be the rare Rivoli Hummingbird, up from Central America, that commonly nests in the canyon Sycamores, at 5000 to 7000 feet altitude, and sometimes lines its babies' cradle with down of the swinging fruit-balls plucked from the tree.