Against The Blue October Sky

The common acorns of the white oak group are smooth

, light brown without any markings, and have none of the woolly covering beneath the thin shell as other acorns do. The white oak cup scales are more or less thickened so that the cup has a fine pebbly appearance. The white oaks ripen their fruit annually but do not bear well every year. Their acorns are sweet. The hickories and butternuts intend their fruits to bounce and roll to new homes, for both have fibrous fleshy, outer coverings and are rounded in shape. The hickories have outside their own shell husks that split either all or part of the way from top to bottom. Those hickories whose nuts are sweetest, the shagbark, kingnut, and mockernut, seem to realize their disadvantage and have thickened their husks for protection. Unfortunately squirrels' teeth in sharpness and in length have kept pace with the thickening of these outer coverings and most of these nuts are destined to become food. The thin-husked, small hickories, the hard pignut and bitter tasting bitternut, are usually left strictly alone under their trees. Butternuts, which grow singly or in groups of from two to five near the ends of stout twigs, are very conspicuous in outline against the blue October sky, when the yellow leaves of the tree are almost gone. When you gather them after a high wind from under the tree, their sticky, dark green, hairy jackets blacken the fingers. Unlike the hickories the outer leathery coverings of the butternuts do not split. Although we cannot all do as did Thoreau, who sat for days and watched the fuzzy seeds of the willow wafted on the gentle breeze, collect and germinate on the scum, and grow into seedlings in the river's mud when the freshet went down, we can derive much enjoyment from patient observation on our rambles and learn for ourselves interesting facts not easily obtained from books. We may discover why some fruits will not germinate until two years have elapsed, why some must freeze before they sprout, why some germinate with the outer covering on, and others cast it off, why some have better means for reaching homes away from the vicinity of the mother tree where the soil may be partially exhausted, and why some trees produce fruits alike in structure but different in germinating habits, so that portions of any one crop sprout at intervals of one, two, and three years after dispersal. We may be sure that Nature knows best and has wisely provided in the way she has, that some at least of these seed babies may find favorable conditions in which to live and grow to maturity that they may in turn carry on the work of distribution of their kind.

Against The Blue October Sky

By: David Bunch

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