Page:Natural history of the farm.djvu/201

Rh the level of the mower, and such live on and renew each season their ill-fated attempts to rise in the world. The grass is full of them—little stubby fellows, each with only two or three small leaves that are put out early as if to take advantage of the leafless condition of the boughs overhead. But even such little unpromising stubs, if replanted in a favorable place, will make long leafy shoots the first season, and tall blossoming shrubs the second season. And if one will look about the borders of the lawn, he may find ready for planting some ninebarks of a larger growth that have escaped the mowing-machine. So one may find wild seedlings of many other sorts, such as june-berry and arrowwood and witch-hazel and of all the forest trees.

Trees whose seeds employ special agencies of transportation may spring up in a new place. Thus seedlings of plants whose fruits are eaten by birds are found about the open places where the birds perch; and those from seeds that are carried by water may congregate along shores and beaches. On sand-bars in stream or lake, one often sees thousands of little cottonwoods, willows, maples or sycamores, lined up along the shore as in a single extended nursery-row.

It is a rough-and-tumble world into which wildwood seedlings enter. When one thinks how small and tender they are at the first, and how both earth and air are filled with competitors and enemies, one wonders that any of them survive. Above them are great trees and lusty, smothering vines and bushes, all struggling to monopolize the light. Round about them are wild animals that trample and browze and burrow, and spread destruction. Drouth and flood and frost are constantly recurring perils while the seedlings are little and have but a tenuous hold upon the soil. Even the overturn of a single dead leaf, if it falls flat upon them and shuts out the light, may extinguish the lives of dozens of them.