ous there is equal beauty. Each shrub has
its own peculiar type amidst the broken drift. The red cedar, which is
Iowa's nearest approach to a pine, except in a few favored counties,
hangs from the top of the crag heavily festooned with feathery snow.
Those long creeping lines on which the crystals sparkle are only
brambles, and that big rosette of rusty red and fluffy white is the
New Jersey tea. Those spreading, pointed fingers of coral with a
background of dazzling white are the topmost twigs of the red osier
dogwood. The strip of shrubs with graceful spray, now bowed in beauty
by the river's brink, is a group of young red birches, and this bunch
of downy brown twigs, two feet above the snow, sparkling with frost
particles, is the downy viburnum. The great tangle of vine and lace
work mixed with snow is young hop hornbeam, supporting honeysuckle.

* * * * *

Viewed from the window of a railway train, the February fields and
woods seem dead and dreary. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Every twig is lined with living buds, carefully covered with scales.
Inside those scales are leaves and blossoms deftly packed, as only
Mother Nature could pack them. Split one down the middle and examine
it with your lens. You will see the little tender leaves, and often
the blossoms, ready to break out in beauty when the warm days come
and flood the world with color. Men try to photograph nature, but no
photograph could do justice to the clustered buds of the red maple or
the downy buds of the slippery elm. The long green gray buds of the
butternut, pistillate flowers in some, staminate flowers in others;
the saffron buds of the butternut hickory; the ruby buds of the bass
wood; the varnished bud scales of the sycamore and the poplar; the big
gummy scales which protect the pussy catkins of the aspen; the queer
little buds of the sumac and the rusty buds of the ash; every one of
these refutes the aspersions cast upon the winter woods by those who
never go out to see. In their noble beauty of massive and graceful
form, with their exquisite symmetry of outline, their varied
arrangement of branches and twigs, giving to every species an
individual expression, every twig studded with these gem-like buds,
how very beautiful are the winter trees! One might almost find it in
his heart to feel sorry that this rare mingling of sculpture and
fretwork and lace is soon to be draped with a mantle of green.