leaf fan. The largest, middle leaflet of the horse chestnut leaf is often ten or twelve inches long, and four or five wide.
It is a wonderful thing to see a horse chestnut burst into leaf in April. This tree has thick stems and big, scaly leaf buds like little pine cones. The outer scales are brown, and water-and-frost-proofed with gum. Inside is layer after layer of green scales each lapping over the next. Inside of all these is a tender, pink, leafbud baby, snuggled in a blanket of fleecy white wool. Now watch and see one of these undone, for all the leaves of all trees come out in much the same way. You can study Mother Nature's way of wrapping up and taking out her leaf-bud babies in the horse chestnut best, because its buds are so large. One by one the cover scales are turned back as the baby stretches too big for its cradle. Then, on a warm day, five crumpled pink toes wriggle through the fleecy blanket. Suddenly, the bed clothes are kicked off, the pink toes spread into five leaflets and the whole tree tumbles, green in a day, into the sunlight. But it takes the leaves days and days to grow up.
The paper or canoe birches have the prettiest fairy-like leaf in the world! It is a broad oval, three or four inches long, with finely toothed edges. The pointed tip is often curved over a little, in a graceful, tricksy way. This is a way many leaves have of being a little out of balance. If you fold any leaf along the midrib you will find the two sides are never exactly alike. This is just as it is in the faces of little boys and girls. One cheek has the dimple, one eyebrow is lifted or eyelid drooped more than the other. It is these little things that keep any two faces, even of twins, from being exactly like any other, and gives every face what we call character, or individuality.
The birch leaf has this little tilt at the tip, now on one side, now on the other, with a little hollow cut out below it. A thin, fluttery, transparent leaf, scantily scattered over the lace-like twigs of the slender white-barked trees, it glances like a butterfly and sifts sunlight. A group of birches always have a dryad, wood-fairy look. Step softly when you come upon them in some shy retreat in a forest. They look as if a snapping twig might startle them into taking flight.
