I have always nursed a fancy that there is something essential to perfect health in the bitters and sweets of buds and roots and gums and resins of the primeval woods.  Why does the bird keep, even in old age, the same brilliancy of plumage and the same clearness of eye?  Is it because it gets the elixir vitae from the hidden reservoir of nature?  Be this as it may, there are times when I sincerely long for a ball of liquidambar or a mouthful of pungent spring buds.  The inner bark of the tulip-tree has the wildest of all wild tastes, a peculiarly grateful flavor when taken infinitesimally, something more savage than sassafras or spice-wood, and full of all manner of bitter hints and astringent threatenings:  it has long been used as the very best appetizer for horses in the early spring, and it is equally good for man.  The yellow-bellied woodpecker knows its value, taking it with head jauntily awry and quiet wing-tremblings of delight.  The squirrels get the essence of it as they munch the pale leaf-buds, or later when they bite the cones out of the flowers.  The humming-birds and wild bees are the favored ones, however, for they get the ultimate distillation of all the racy and fragrant elements from root to bloom.

The Indians knew the value of the tulip-tree as well as its beauty.  Their most graceful pirogues were dug from its bole, and its odorous bark served to roof their rude houses.  No boat I have ever tried runs so lightly as a well-made tulip pirogue, or dug-out, and nothing under heaven is so utterly crank and treacherous.  Many an unpremeditated plunge into cold water has one caused me while out fishing or duck-shooting on the mountain-streams of North Georgia.  If you dare stand up in one, the least waver from a perfect balance will send the sensitive, skittish thing a rod from under your feet, which of course leaves you standing on the water without the faith to keep you from going under; and usually it is your head that you are standing on.  But, to return to our tree, I would like to see its merits as an ornamental and shade tree duly recognized.  If grown in the free air and sunlight, it forms a heavy and beautifully-shaped top, on a smooth, bright bole, and I think it might be forced to bloom about the fifteenth year.  The flowers of young, thrifty trees that have been left standing in open fields are much larger, brighter, and more graceful than those of old gnarled forest-trees, but the finest blooms I ever saw were on a giant tulip in a thin wood of Indiana.  A storm blew the tree down in the midst of its flowering, and I chanced to see it an hour later.  The whole great top was yellow with the gaudy cups, each gleaming “like a flake of fire,” as Dr. Holmes says of the oriole.  Some of them were nearly four inches across.  Last year a small tree, growing in a garden near where I write, bloomed for the first time.  It was about twenty years old.  Its flowers were paler and shallower than those gathered at the same time in the woods.  It may be that transplanting, or any sort of forcing or cultivation, may cause the blooms to deteriorate in both shape and color, but I am sure that plenty of light and air is necessary to their best development.