104 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



Plantation of Scotch Pine, Six Years Cld, Near Lake Placid, New York. 



ravine. The Norway spruce cannot be 

 made to grow like that here, except in 

 nurseries and arboretums — not in the 

 rough-and-tumble of a stand of growing 

 forest. 



Our own red spruce will. There are 

 lots of them in favorable localities in the 

 Adirondacks, reaching 3 feet in dia- 

 meter — and every place in a well 

 managed forest is a "favorable locality." 

 The red spruce is a slower grower than 

 the Norway and as the pulp men are 

 after quick results they plant Norway 

 and cut at 12 inches diameter growth. 

 At least that is their present intention. 

 They will eventually realize, as the 

 European foresters have, that during 

 those years aHer the twelve inch dia- 

 meter, during the prime of its life, the 

 tree puts on a far greater vohmie of 

 wood per year, and that it is better to 

 wait an extra twenty years thereby 

 more than doubling the volumetric 

 yield. 'Tis then that they will wish 

 they had planted the tree that Nature 

 has fitted to do that very thing, our 

 own Adirondack red spruce. 



And, let me caution against attempt- 



ing any experiments with the various 

 Pacific Coast spruces, the magnificent 

 Engleman Spruce and the Douglas Fir 

 (which treC; in reality, is a hemlock). 

 While they have all been successfully 

 raised in arboretums, they are entirely 

 unsuited to our climate, and practically 

 all the plantings that our state forest 

 services have attempted with them have 

 been complete or partial failures. The 

 Western pine alone seems to thrive 

 equally well here in the East, and to 

 them may be added Parry's blue 

 spruce, which is hardy throughout the 

 "peach belt." Do not however con- 

 ceive the idea that if you plant a forest 

 of blue spruce you will shortly have a 

 collection of young specimens worth a 

 dollar a tree. The beautiful light blue 

 spruce which delights the eye on every 

 suburban lawn is the so-called Koster's 

 blue spruce and was got by grafting 

 selected light blue shoots on Parry 

 spruce roots. The seeds from it revert 

 to the original stock, which has a dark, 

 .silvery, bluish tinge, except in the young 

 spring shoots. The natural home of the 

 Parry spruce is in the canyons of South- 



