A Unique Utah Tree

A Unique Utah Tree By Prof. Frank R. Arnold, U. A. C. A TREE beloved by game birds and deer, by Utah pioneers, poets and fireplace worshipers, that is by all home-loving folks, is the mountain mahogany, or cercocarpus ledifolius. Just as the oleander and the olive tie France to the Mediterranean, Spain and Africa, so the mahogany in Utah occupies the middle country between the north and the south and thus links the yellow pine of Arizona with the white pine of Idaho, though it invades Arizona far more than it does Idaho. Your first impression on seeing the low groves on the steep mountain side, at heights from five thousand to nine thousand feet, is that you are looking at an olive grove. Same gray bark in the young trees, same sturdy, gnarled individu- ality in the old, and the same grayish, green leaves. But as you draw near you get faint elusive puffs of an aromatic perfume, if the sun is strong, and you see that the leaves, though leather-like, are smaller than those of the olive, and the bark of old trees has furrows often an inch deep. All the same, if you want to find a Mount of Olives in the Wasatch Mountains you can easily create illusions for yourself with this tree. It is the most distinctive tree in the Wasatch and when you make its acquaintance you meet something as unique as the ghinko tree of the cypripodium. Although the groves of mahogany arc to be found in the altitudes usually above five thousand feet, still as an ornamental shrub it is to be met in nurseries at slightly lower elevations. The leather-like leaves stay on until the second year and have revolute margins. The trees rarely grow higher than half stunted apple trees and are apt to sprawl in old age like California sycamores. The akene has a tail-like lengthened style clothed in pale or tawny hairs which take on a corkscrew effect in autumn and are eriophilous enough for Maeterlink or Havelock Ellis to call their parent stem a human being. The wood is very hard, of so close a grain you can't count the rings in its red heart, as red as mesquite and surrounded with white sap wood, which when bruised or injured immediately bleeds into a mahogany hue. The specific gravity of the wood is 1.0371. Closely related to the cercocarpus ledifolius is the cercocarpus parvifolius but the latter has deciduous leaves with tooth- ed edges. It is because of its many uses that the tree was beloved by Utah pioneers. You may think that the best wood for a fireplace is old

000 IMPROVEMENT ERA Oct.. 1919 apple tree logs but that's because you don't know mountain mahog- any, which burns as long as coal, far better than soft coal, and holds the fire as long as hard coal. Even today the Utah farmer who can get a load of mountain mahogany thinks he has the ideal fire wood and he can still get it, if he will go into the hills for it, as it is to be found on all the hills around Bear Lake in the north and in the south on the head waters of the Virgin. To cut it you have to use an axe with a thick edge, nick the tree all the way round and then break. It is too hard for turning as it will keep you constantly sharpening your tools but it takes such a glass-like polish that it is sometimes used in high school woodwork classes for inlays, candle sticks and napkin rings. Dr. William Jardine, former Secretary of Agriculture, and his brother, when they rode the range as boys in southern Idaho, used to make canes of the wood and give them to their college friends. They would cut them from young growth, polish them with sandpaper and leave them near the fire over night to take on a mahogany shad*, just as in Brittany the sabot maker after he has measured your foot for a pair of wooden shoes and gouged them out of a block of beech wood will set them in the fireplace over night to give them a reddish- brown tinge and a bucolic perfume that they never lose. The Utah pioneers were accustomed also to use the mountain mahogany as run- ners on their winter sleds, working the wood down with an adze. You can still find them in Summit county in Utah, though in other counties the pioneer often thought that mountain maple was tougher and less likely to break. However, the mahogany runners took on A Veteran Mahogany Tree in the Wasatch Range

Oct.. 1929 A UNIQUE UTAH TREE 1001 a marvelous patina with use and children especially used them on their sleds for coasting, sleds that they called "go-devils," and that men who had not joined the Latter-day Saint faith designated as "Mormon bobs." The wood also makes valuable charcoal for smelting silver ore. Deer get shelter in winter in the mahogany groves and browse on the leaves and small branches. The blue grouse, or pine hen, also feeds on the leaves in winter and even some- times in summer you'll find their crop full of mahogany leaves. The poetical connotations of the tree are as infinite as human imagination. If Maeterlink could see the seeds, he would have a new chapter for his Intelligences of Flowers. When you see the long, feathery, glistening styles of the akenes in September you can easily believe that some wood nymph is concealed within and is shaking out her hair, so soft and silky has the whole tree surface become. When you catch the faint perfume of the leaves distilled by the hot sun, for the tree loves the sun and grows open and scrawny so that each leaf may have its place in the sun, then you think instinctively of Morocco or the azure coast of France where the mimosa, especially ■the Farnese variety, distils from its yellow pincushion flowers a perfume as unforgettably unique and pleasing as that of the moun- tain mahogany. You can't get the perfume from the crushed leaves of the mahogany. The tree nymph must shake it out for you in small faint whiffs. In many ways the mahogany solves the problem of how to change cattle and sheep range into forest on our western national forests, which are more likely to be grazing grounds than genuine for- ests. Every mahogany tree has a clan of seedlings all around it which are easy to transplant. They will not develop so fast as the Douglas fir and the yellow pine, but like all slowly maturing trees they arc worth waiting for. They will grow on dry rocky hillsides where only sage and Indian paint brush flourish. All Western forests to which the tree is native should have large plantations of it if they are to attain their maximum development, for both cattle and deer browse on the mahogany and it supplies firewood that needs no pro tective screen in the fireplace and that lasts all night. In short, the mahogany furnishes a rare combination of range browse and forest tree. Out of the dusk a shadow, Then a spark: Out of the cloud a silence. Then, a lark; Out of the heart a rapture. Then, a pain. Out of the dead, cold ashes. Life again. "EVOLUTION." BY JOHN BANISTER TABB.