Deciduous Forests of America
The second great type of American forest is deciduous. The trees have
broad leaves quite unlike the slender needles or overlapping scales of the
northern evergreens. Each winter such forests shed their leaves. Among the
mountains where the frosts come suddenly, the blaze of glory and
brilliance of color which herald the shedding of the leaves are surpassed
in no other part of the world. Even the colors of the Painted Desert in
northern Arizona and the wonderful flowers of the California plains are
less pleasing. In the Painted Desert the patches of red, yellow,
gray-blue, white, pale green, and black have a garish, almost repellent
appearance. In California the flame-colored acres of poppies in some
places, of white or yellow daisylike flowers in others, or of purple
blossoms elsewhere have a softer expression than the bare soil of the
desert. Yet they lack the delicate blending and harmony of colors which is
the greatest charm of the autumn foliage in the deciduous forests. Even
where the forests consist of such trees as birches, beeches, aspens, or
sycamores, whose leaves merely turn yellow in the fall, the contrast
between this color and the green tint of summer or the bare branches of
winter adds a spice of variety which is lacking in other and more
monotonous forests.
From still other points of view the deciduous forest has an almost
unequaled degree of variety. In one place it consists of graceful little
birches whose white trunks shimmering in the twilight form just the
background for ghosts. Contrast them with the oak forest half a mile away.
There the sense of gracefulness gives place to a feeling of strength. The
lines are no longer vertical but horizontal. The knotted elbows of the
branches recall the keels of sturdy merchantmen of bygone days. The acorns
under foot suggest food for the herds of half-wild pigs which roam among
the trees in many a southern county. Of quite another type are the stately
forests of the Appalachians where splendid magnolia and tulip trees spread
their broad limbs aloft at heights of one hundred feet or more.
Deciduous forests grow in the well-balanced regions where summer and
winter approach equality, where neither is unduly long, and where neither
is subject to prolonged drought. They extend southward from central New
England, the Great Lakes, and Minnesota, to Mississippi, Arkansas, and
eastern Texas. They predominate even in parts of such prairie States as
Michigan, Indiana, southern Illinois, and southeastern Missouri. No part
of the continent is more populous or more progressive than the regions
once covered by deciduous forests. In the United States nearly sixty per
cent of the inhabitants live in areas reclaimed from such forests. Yet the
area of the forests is less than a quarter of the three million square
miles that make up the United States.
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