I suppose botanists, some at least, hardly know what a balloon tree is. But I must preface with a word about my guide. While I know but little of botany - only read a book or two on it - my guide never saw a book on botany. He is a farmer's son, twenty-three years old; still he has made a greenhouse some forty feet long. I'll take you through it before we start for the balloon tree. He did all the work himself, even to making the brick flues and chimney. On one side we find over eighty varieties of begonias - the best collection I ever saw. His Rex are grown mostly in manure, and are very fine. There are over forty varieties of fuchsias and a good collection of geraniums. One also sees palms, dracaenas, crotons, orchids, camellias, besides too many things to mention. But this is not all he attends to. In the summer he goes into the field, drives the reaper, follows the plow barefooted, and helps milk the cows at night. Well, he had a balloon tree, and I wanted one. So he led the way down a deep ravine, where one finds several trees not very common in the woods, such as black-haw (Viburnum prunifolium), wahoo (Euonymus), red bud, or bean tree (Cercis Canadensis). Juneberry (Amelanchier botryapium), and the balloon tree (Staphylea trifolia), I guess it.

While none of these are quite as good for lawn trees as the large flowering dogwood (Cornus "Ohioensis"), they are all good in some places. The dogwood is too common, some say; still I have a good one. There is a white pine and Norway spruce some thirty feet high in the background, that help show it off and make it much admired, when in full bloom; this, too, when the woods are full of them. Indeed, one might make a dogwood worth ten dollars by pulling it sideways with cords and by weighting the limbs with stones, to make it weeping.