1276 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



life. The cotton tufted seeds of willows and poplars, 

 and the little winged seeds of the white birch are carried 

 by the wind in every direction, and they are produced 

 in such abundance, that every nook and patch of bare 

 soil receives its supply. The result is that these trees 

 generally reach vacant land sooner than any of their 

 competitors. The bare mud-fiat left by a flood, the 

 railroad gravel pit, the burnt-over and cut-over pinery 

 are nearly always pre-empted by willows, poplars, or 

 birches because their seeds are much more widely dis- 

 seminated than the seeds of any other northern trees. 

 Poplars and birches, however, are short-lived trees, and 

 within a century the dominant pines will supplant them. 



Shrubs and trees, as well as vines and herbs, that de- 

 pend on birds for the dissemination of their seeds run 

 the wind-planted species a close race. Woodbine and 

 wild grapes, elder, dog- 

 wood and hackberry, wild 

 cherries and plums, straw- 

 berries and raspberries 

 spring up as if by magic as 

 soon as the lumberman, fire 

 or storm have cleared the 

 ground for them. 



Of many plants it is not 

 very difficult to discover 

 their methods of traveling. 



The seed of maple, pine 

 and dandelion sail like par- 

 achutes away from the par- 

 ent plant. The gold-dotted 

 hedges of jewel weed, or 

 touch-me-not, which mirror 

 their delicate flowers and 

 foliage in the dark, silent 

 water of northern beaver 

 ponds are planted by the 

 beavers themselves as they 

 travel and work on their 

 dams ; while birds in their 

 daily and seasonal flights, 

 plant those remarkable 

 gardens of many kinds of 

 wild fruit, whose presence 

 on widely separated islands 

 and mountains and in the 

 depth of isolated canyons delights both the eye and the 

 palate of the explorer. 



There are, however, numerous instances of plant dis- 

 tribution which present most interesting puzzles to 

 naturalists and foresters. 



The limber pine is a fairly common tree at an altitude 

 of six thousand feet in the Rocky Mountains. It is 

 not found on the stretch of two hundred miles lying 

 between the Rocky Mountains and the Black Hills, but 

 on the trail to Harney Peak, in the heart of the Black 

 Hills, at an altitude of about six thousand feet, stands 

 a grove of about twenty-five limber pines, the only trees 

 of that kind thus far discovered in the Black Hills. How 

 they traveled over the intervening two hundred miles is a 



GIANT COTTONWOOD GROWING CLOSE TO THE RIVER 



A Cottonwood will grow eighteen feet high from a seed in three seasons. 

 Within sixty years it is a giant. 



mystery. One of the most puzzling cases of plant migra- 

 tion or distribution is that of the devil's club. This plant is 

 a common shrub in the moist forests of the Pacific coast 

 and in certain localities in the Rocky Mountains, where, 

 on account of its countless sharp spines it is the terror 

 of woodsmen and timber cruisers. It is not found in the 

 forests touching the Great Lakes, except in several spots 

 on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. By what means it 

 traversed the intervening thousand miles of plain and 

 forest and established itself on an island in Lake Superior 

 seems an insolvable riddle. 



One possible solution must not be overlooked in such 

 cases as that of the devil's club and the limber pine. 

 They may be cases of a remnant vegetation, just as 

 scattered groves of giant sequoias are undoubtedly only 



the remnants of former 

 large sequoia forests. 



Such remnants are not 

 rare. On Sheep Mountain, 

 in the Bad Lands of South 

 Dakota, I found isolated 

 groves of yellow pine sepa- 

 rated by a distance of fifty 

 miles from the yellow pine 

 forests of the Black Hills. 

 I was much surprised to 

 find that porcupines had 

 killed a large number of 

 these trees that were try- 

 ing to maintain their hold 

 on life under severe condi- 

 tions of climate and soil, 

 for one naturally thinks of 

 porcupines as inhabitants 

 of moist northern forests. 



There has just lately been 

 discovered a natural grove 

 of jackpine in the driftless 

 area of Minnesota, in 

 Houston county, the most 

 southeasterly county of the 

 state. These trees are out- 

 posts of a former period 

 and were left far behind, 

 as the belt of evergreens 

 retreated northward with the vanishing continental gla- 

 cier. On their shaded sandy hillside these northern trees 

 may keep a foothold for centuries to come, although the 

 jackpine forest has moved fully a hundred miles north. 

 The case of the Kentucky coffee tree has been a mys- 

 tery to me ever since I first saw its odd, bluntly ending 

 branches on a winter ramble in a Minnesota woods. The 

 tree bears large bean-like pods containing big hard-shelled 

 seeds resembling somewhat in appearance roasted coffee 

 beans. The great pods remain on the trees through the 

 winter. Neither the pods nor the beans float in water 

 and are, of course much too heavy to be carried by the 

 wind. The seeds are as hard as pebbles, and, as far as 

 I have been able to discover, no birds or animals eat 



