158 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Almost everybody in our country is planting the Norway 

 sjoruce, and giving up our beautiful native spruces, — our 

 black and white spruces, the most beautiful trees of their 

 kind, I think, in the world. The Norway spruces grow, 

 some of them, very handsomely, and especially so until they 

 are twenty years old. They are objects of great beauty. 

 They seem to grow faster than the American. But I go and 

 look every day at my American spruces, creeping along surely 

 and beautifully, with smaller foliage, it is true, than the 

 foreign trees, but in their form I think they are more beauti- 

 ful. There is a native spruce in Mr. Lee's grounds, near me, 

 which I will venture to say is a more beautiful tree than any 

 Norway spruce you ever saw. These Norway spruces often 

 die after a time, from no cause, so far as can be seen, not 

 being in exposed positions, but standing just as the others do. 

 They fade out ; they begin to lose their foliage and dry up at 

 the ends, make a great many cones (w^hich is always a sign 

 of premature death), and finally die. 



So with the English elms on my own place. I have a large 

 number of English elms, which I most unfortunately planted 

 upon my avenue, at regular intervals, and depended upon 

 them for my permanent trees, to be objects of beauty to me 

 and the generations after me. These trees have their foliage 

 upon them, as Mr. Emerson says, five or six weeks longer 

 than the American elms, but I have lost two of the finest of 

 them; they died for no reason, that I could discover; and if 

 you look at the others, they present more or less the appear- 

 ance of our button woods at the present day in our forests, of 

 decaying at the ends. Here and there you find dead twigs 

 and occasionally a whole limb on every tree that is afiected. 



I am very earnest about this ftishion of importing and buy- 

 ing at nurseries foreign trees, in preference to our own beau- 

 tiful trees. The red pine of Maine, to which reference has 

 been made, is more beautiful than the Austrian pine, — far 

 more beautiful. It is of the same color and habit, only it has 

 longer spines, and it is a more beautiful and surer tree to 

 plant. Our own hemlock is the most beautiful evergreen in 

 existence, and our own spruces, as I said before, I think can 

 be better depended on, in the long run, than the Norway 

 spruce. 



