“Spared by the axe, the poplar rises in a majestic obelisk of verdure. The willow, so ungraceful in appearance along the banks of our ditches, with its shapeless top bristling with shoots sticking out in all directions, is, in its natural state, a tree of rare elegance on account of the suppleness of its branches and the fineness of its foliage. Considered as a thing of beauty, it certainly has nothing to gain by man’s interference with its mode of growth. But, alas, productivity does not always go hand in hand with beauty; and if it is desired to make these two trees, the poplar and the willow, produce a great mass of branches and fire-wood, decapitation, repeated periodically, transforms them into pollards, seamed with scars, gaping with bleeding wounds, disfigured with bruises, but at the same time contending against all this hard usage by a never-failing growth of adventitious buds which constantly replace with increasing prodigality the brushwood that has fallen victim to the axe. “To finish the subject of adventitious buds—buds that persist in multiplying even when the parent stock languishes, and that withstand destruction until utter exhaustion has set in—let us recall for a moment certain weeds such as dog’s-tooth grass, cock-spur grass, and other grasses that are so hard to keep out of our garden paths unless we do something more than merely rake the surface of the ground. You may have taken infinite pains, we will say, to clean the paths, and have left them immaculate, or at least you think so. But you are mistaken. In a few days the grass has all come back in richer tufts than ever. The reason is plain enough now: your raking simply cut back the stems, leaving wounds that immediately covered themselves with adventitious buds, which quickly sent up new stalks. Thus, instead of destroying, you have multiplied. The only way to clear the ground of weeds is to pull them up by the roots; that done, you may consider the job well done.” CHAPTER XVIII BULBS AND BULBLETS “After attaining the requisite degree of strength the buds of certain plants leave the parent stalk and, if we may so express it, emigrate; that is to say, they detach themselves and take root in the earth, to draw nourishment directly therefrom. Now it is evident that a bud designed for independent development cannot have precisely the structure of one destined never to leave the parent stem. To satisfy its first needs before roots capable of nourishing it have been sent down into the soil, it must of necessity have a certain prepared store of nutriment. Therefore every bud that emigrates carries a supply of food with it.