Excerpt from Thirty Important Forest Trees of Maryland: How to Know Them The two kinds of flowers are at the end of minute twigs on separate trees. Blooming in February or March, the male trees often assume a golden color from the small catkins, which, when shaken, shed clouds of yellow pollen. The fruit, which matures in one season, is pale blue, often with a white bloom, one-quarter of an inch in diameter, berry-like, enclos ing one or two seeds in the sweet flesh. It is a favorite winter food for birds. The bark is very thin, reddish brown, peeling off in long, shred-like strips. The tree is extremely irregular in its growth, so that the trunk is usually more or less grooved. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.