Another of the early spring-flowering small trees--indeed, the earliest one that blooms in white--is the shad-bush, or service-berry. Again the "common" names are trifling and inadequate; shad-bush because the flowers come when the shad are ascending the rivers along which the trees grow, and service-berry because the pleasant fruits are of service, perhaps! June-berry, another name, is better; but the genus owns the mellifluous name of Amelanchier, and the term Canadensis belongs to the species with the clouds of little white flowers shaped like a thin-petaled star. The shad-bush blooms with the trilliums--but I may not allow the spring flowers to set me spinning on another hank!
Searching for early recollections of trees, I remember, when a boy of six or seven, finding some little green berries or fruits, each with its long stem, on the pavement under some great trees in the Capitol Park of my home town. I could eat these; and thus they pleased the boy as much as the honey-sweet flowers that gave rise to them now please the man. The noble American linden, one of the really great trees of our forests, bears these delicate whitish flowers, held in rich clusters from a single stem which is attached for part of its length to a curious long green bract. If these flowers came naked on the tree, as do those of the Norway maple, for instance, they would be easily seen and admired of men, but being withheld until the splendid heart-shaped foliage is well out, the blooms miss the casual eye. But the bees see them; they know the linden for their own, and great stores of sweetest honey follow a year when abundant pasture of these flowers is available.
[Illustration: Flowers of the American linden]
A kindly tree is this linden, or lime, or basswood, to give it all its common names. Kindly as well as stately, but never rugged as the oak, or of obvious pliant strength as the hickory. The old tree invites to shade under its limbs crowded with broad leaves; the young tree is lusty of growth and clean of bark, a model of rounded beauty and a fine variant from the overworked maples of our streets.
Again, the tale of woe! for the great lindens of our forests are nearly all gone. Too useful for timber; too easy to fell; its soft, smooth, even wood too adaptable to many uses! Cut them all; strip the bark for "bast," or tying material; America is widening; the sawmills cannot be idle; scientific and decent forestry, so successful and so usual in Europe, is yet but a dream for future generations here in America!