wood sprites of seeds seem to ripen and vanish in a day. The birds use the cottonwood and willow seeds to line their nests with down.
A great many trees flower in April, when the wild flowers in the ground are just poking little green cones through the warm blanket of last year's leaves. The pollen-making blossoms of the elms are little chimes of bells, yellowish or reddish green and, in some kinds, greenish purple. They have so many sturdy little yellow-tipped clappers that you almost expect to hear them ring. In the elm, as in nearly all forest trees, it takes two kinds of flowers, working together, to make seeds. So some of the blossoms of the elms have no clappers, but hairy arms that reach for pollen food. The wind brings it from other trees.
The elm seed is a round, notched and fringed and double-walled green scale, with the seed between two layers, just like the powder in a toy pistol cap. The seed hang in bunches, by inch-long hairs, until the wind tears them loose and scatters them. At the same time in May, the red maple drops its two-winged seeds. They look very much like the thumb screws that you use to tighten bolts, only, of course, they are thin and green.
Oak trees also have two kinds of flowers. One kind is a dwarf catkin or cone, with several double pockets full of gold-dust. The egg flower is a tiny pink knob. It sits away out on the end of the twig in a scaly cup, often snuggled up to a sister or two, like a little bump on a log. Its pink mouth is as wide open as a baby robin's when crying for worms. It wants that pollen! You see, it is a baby acorn. When it gets the pollen it swallows the food, shuts its mouth tight, turns green, and just sits there and grows all summer.
The acorn is really a kind of nut. And you might say that all of our forest nuts are made in much the same way as acorns. The chestnut seed-cone grows on the same twig as the pollen-catkin. As there are to be three nuts in one bur, it has three mouths to be fed with pollen, all set in one prickly cup.
The black walnut doesn't bloom until May. It's catkin has forty pockets of gold-dust, each one a sort of treasure shelf under a green scale. But the nut blossom is no bigger than a grain of wheat. You have to look sharp to find it. Two or three of them often grow together, on the tip of the branch, after the leaves come out. Small as they are, each has two mouths open for pollen. Why two, for one nut? Crack a walnut, a hickory nut, an English walnut or a pecan. These nuts are in two, fat, wrinkled leaves, with a woody
