266 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



the rot continues from year to year until 

 the whole heart wood may be rotted. 

 In such cases the tree surgeon gets to 

 work and saves the tree for many years 

 of usefulness and vigor, for, while a 

 tree rotten at the heart will be as healthy 

 and vigorous as ever in its growth, it is 

 mechanically weak, subject to insect 

 and fungus attack and likely to be 

 wind thrown any time. 



Fire is an enemy that will not bother 

 the owner of a hardwood forest to any 

 great extent, except in the matter of 

 grotmd and brush fires, but as soon as 

 he plants or assembles a forest of ever- 

 greens he is in danger of fatal crown 

 fires from almost the first year. During 

 the early years of a plantation the 

 danger is of a brush or field fire, which of 

 course would kill the young transplants ; 

 and after the sixth year the crowns 

 get to such a size as to easily communi- 

 cate a fire even on six foot spacing. Fire 

 and logging lanes should be left every 

 four hundred feet in such a forest, and 

 these should be twenty-five or thirty 

 feet wide during the first twenty years 

 of the life of the forest, and later widened 

 to 50 and 100 feet. In planting for a 

 twenty-five-foot fire lane, leave forty- 

 five feet between the border transplants 

 to allow for side growth into the lane 

 from both sides, or branches, which 

 will easily attain ten feet in length 

 in the first fifteen years. A fifty-foot 

 European larch border around each 

 section is a good thing, not only because 

 it is the best way to grow such an 

 intolerant tree as larch, but because 

 it aids materially in the effectiveness of 

 a fire lane in a forest of spruce or pine, 

 the larches being less vulnerable to 

 crown fires. 



In the hardwood woodlot the fire 

 most often met with is the ordinary leaf 

 or brush fire. These seem harmless 

 enough, and might even be suggested 

 as a means of cleaning out underbrush 

 cheaply, but as a matter of fact they 

 are extremely harmful. At first nothing 

 imusual is apparent but some blackened 

 bark at the stimips of the trees. If 

 the bark is thick and the tree old, no 

 particiilar harm has been done, but the 

 sapHngs of three to six inches diameter 

 of all species will have been found to be 



badly scalded. In a year or so the bark 

 spalls off, showing bare heart wood 

 underneath ; the tree has only about half 

 the original number of sap fibres avail- 

 able to feed it and therefore cannot 

 circulate its sap from roots to crown 

 freely, and soon becomes peaked and 

 diseased. In time it may heal up the 

 scar, grow bark over it and put down 

 some roots on this side again; more 

 often a set of coppice shoots will start 

 from the root collet, and instead of one 

 tree you have a spindly sapling and a 

 lot of outlaw shoots, which fight with 

 it for light and moisture. We have one 

 patch of forest in Interlaken, burnt over 

 by one of these "harmless" ground 

 fires, in which every single sapling 

 shows a scar as big as a saucer, and on 

 the big trees some of them exhibit a 

 scald the size of a dinner plate. They 

 will all be taken out in time; at present 

 we have planted some three-inch nur- 

 sery white ashes and liriodendrons here 

 and there in the patch, which will be 

 the dominant trees in a few years, and 

 then the burnt growth will be taken out 

 entirely as none of it will ever make 

 good, sound trees. Wherefore, prohibit 

 brush fires in your woodlands, and be 

 keen to put out any accidental ones. 

 Very good apparatus for the purpose, 

 consisting of asbestos fire shields, pack- 

 sack fire extingmshers, etc., are now 

 being made commercially so there is no 

 necessity to go to the trouble of home- 

 made equipment. I have already pub- 

 lished what can be done with dynamite 

 in fire fighting, and would advise reserv- 

 ing a set of tree-planting cartridges, all 

 wired up for use in emergency brush 

 fires, as they often occur when sufficient 

 help cannot be gotten to the scene of the 

 brush fire quickly enough to save many 

 valuable saplings. I knew one leaf fire 

 that covered half an acre of ground in 

 ten minutes. 



The problem of light in the forest is 

 a fascinating one, and any forest owner 

 can get a good deal of pleasure out of 

 the study, using an ordinary photo- 

 graphic actinomcter to make his own 

 measurements . My good friend , Raphael 

 Zon, of the U. S. Forest Service, has 

 published an excellent bulletin on the 

 subject, which everyone should read to 



