METHODS AND PROFIT OF TREE-PLANTING. n 



when exposed to moisture, and was formerly much used by the In- 

 dians for canoes. It has been a favorite material for fence and gate 

 posts, and posts are now to be seen which have been in the ground 

 from fifty to a hundred years, and show hardly any signs of/ decay. 

 It promises to be a very valuable tree for railway-ties, and some of our 

 railway companies, especially in the West, are planting it extensively 

 on this account. It is also an excellent wood for the uses of the car- 

 penter and the cabinet-maker. It resembles in color and texture the 

 chestnut, is easily worked, and takes a fine polish. The rapidity of its 

 growth in good soil is astonishing. A specimen from a tree which 

 grew in Nebraska, and shows but four annual layers of growth, meas- 

 ured nine and three quarters inches in circumference, and the growth 

 of the first two years was already turned to heart-wood. The tree is 

 easily propagated from seed, and will grow anywhere south of the 

 forty-second parallel. Specimens of it are to be found as far north as 

 the middle of Massachusetts, and along the sea-coast as far as Maine. 

 Wherever it can be established it will prove not only one of our most 

 beautiful but one of our most useful woods. There are two species 

 of catalpa indigenous* to the United States ; the Speciosa, flowering 

 three weeks earlier than the other, a native of the South, is the hardier 

 of the two, and preferable for planting. 



As showing how practical men regard the catalpa and the ailantus, 

 we may state that the Fort Scott and Gulf Railroad have made a con- 

 tract with Messrs. Douglas, of Waukegan, to plant for them in Kansas 

 several hundred acres of these trees. A Boston capitalist has also con- 

 tracted for the planting in the same way of five hundred and sixty 

 acres of prairie-land in Eastern Kansas. The plantation is to consist 

 of three hundred acres of the catalpa, two hundred acres of ailantus, 

 not less than twenty-seven hundred and twenty trees to the acre, 

 and sixty acres are to be held as an experimental ground to be 

 planted with several varieties of trees to be selected by Professor 

 Sargent. What is even more noteworthy, the Iron Mountain Railroad 

 Company, whose road runs for hundreds of miles through a heavily 

 timbered country, have made a similar contract for planting near 

 Charleston, Missouri, one hundred acres of the catalpa as an experi- 

 ment. This they do because, while they own some of the finest white- 

 oak timber on the continent, catalpa ties have stood on their road for 

 twelve years entirely unaffected by decay, and the demand for ties 

 and for posts of this wood far exceeds the present supply. It is esti- 

 mated that the new railroads built in the treeless States in 1879 

 required over ten million ties. 



The Australian eucalyptus, or blue-gum, though an Australian tree, 

 makes itself at home in California. It is a tree of astonishingly rapid 

 growth, yet, like the ailantus and catalpa, it produces heavy, solid 

 wood. In a plantation of it in Alameda County, California, in seven 

 years from planting the trees were generally ten inches in diameter 



