The cucumber is the hardiest member of the magnolia family. It is found in natural growth farther north than any other, yet it has the appearance of a southern tree. All magnolias look like trees belonging in the South. Their large leaves indicate as much, and some of them do not venture far outside of the warm latitudes. It is one of the oldest of all the families of broadleaf trees, and it has been a family that during an immense period of the earth’s history has clung near the old homestead where it came into existence countless ages ago. There were magnolias growing in the middle Appalachian region, and eastward to the present Atlantic coast, so far in the past that the time can be measured only by hundreds of thousands of years. Leaf prints in rocks, which were once mud flats, tell the story--though but a page here and there--of the magnolia’s ancient history, doubtless antedating by long periods the earliest appearance of man on earth. Next to the yellow poplar, the cucumber tree is the most important species of the magnolia family, at least as a source of lumber. As an ornamental tree it may not equal some of the others, particularly certain of the southern species which are evergreen and produce large, showy flowers. The cucumber tree receives its name from its fruit, which looks like a cucumber when seen at a distance, but it is far from being one. Its intense bitter makes it safe from the attacks of birds and beasts. So far as known, it is not eaten, tasted, or touched by any living creature--except man. Some of the pioneer settlers, in the days when there was precious little to eat on the frontiers, discovered a way of extracting the bitter from the wild cucumber, and making some sort of a pickle of the remainder; but the art seems to have been lost with the passing of the pioneers of the Daniel Boone type, and the wild cucumber now hangs untouched, and tempts nobody. It is three inches or less in length, generally slightly curved, and is green in color until fully ripe. Even the flowers which produce the fruit are green, with the merest suggestion of yellow. They are so inconspicuous that few persons ever notice them, even though cucumber trees stand in door yards. The ripe cucumbers are dark red or scarlet, or rather the seeds are, which grow on the surface like grains of corn on a cob, though fewer in number and farther apart. Something seems to be lacking in the machinery by which the flowers are fertilized, with the result that often nearly half the seeds which ought to cover the surface of the cucumber, fail to materialize. There are many blank spaces representing flowers which the pollen missed.