evenly spaced broad V's, about a quarter of an inch apart from stem to tip. You might think these veins were laid off with a ruler. Isn't that a satisfactory kind of leaf? You could almost draw it without seeing it, couldn't you?
The leaf of the beech tree is something like that of the elm, but thinner, softer, often fringed as well as saw-notched along the edges, and it is irregularly net-veined, not strongly feather-veined like the elm. The tree, too, is so different that you could not mistake them. The beech is a broad, low-branching tree, leafed all over as heavily as the maples.
The orchard fruit trees, wild and tame, all have rose-like leaves. Apple tree leaves are a soft green above, lighter and furry underneath. They grow in tufts around the fruit and along the stems. The cherry leaf is smaller, darker, brighter, and more blade-like than the apple leaf. The foliage of the pear tree is larger and thicker; of a peach a long, slender, bright green blade like a very large, rather curly willow leaf. On the thorny canes of the briar berries are broad, spiny compound leaves that tell very plainly their kinship to the rose. In open spaces of the woods, the wild grape spreads its tent of broad, deep lobed and toothed leaves. They are very glossy and dark green above, hairy and pale underneath. And among them are curling tendrils and bunched clusters of little green fruit.
In every forest you will see several trees that have what are called pinnate leaves. Such leaves have three or more pairs of leaflets set on opposite sides of a central stem, with a single leaf at the tip. So, in a pinnate leaf, there are always an odd number of leaflets, five or seven in the rose, about nine in the leaf of the white ash tree. This is a beautiful shade tree, of hard wood, ranking with the rock maple and the elm. The leaf is quite nine or ten inches long, and the leaflets long oval blades very bright and clean. The mountain ash, or rowan tree, has as long a leaf but with a greater number of narrow leaflets, giving the tree a feathery, almost fern-like look. The honey locust, too, has this feathered leaf of many drooping leaflets.
Many of the nut trees have these beautiful drooping pinnate leaves. The black walnut is hung all over its high crown with long plume-like leaves with from seventeen to twenty-five slender leaflets. The leaf of the butternut, or white walnut tree, has from seven to nine. The horse chestnut, buckeye and hickory trees have palmate leaves. That is, the broad oval leaflets are all set around the tip of a common leaf stem, spreading in a circle, like the ribs of a palm
