88 State Horticultural Society. 



cheap lands, they can be bought at from two to five dollars per acre, 

 and, while they are rough and rocky, yet the second growth of timber 

 will rapidly enhance their value, and pay as well if not better than any 

 other investment, and that, too, without the worry and vexation that so 

 often besets the fruit grower and farmer. 



At present we find in most all of the lumber yards of north Mis- 

 souri, cedar posts from the Pacific coast selling at high prices, and they 

 will last no longer than black locust posts, enough of which might have 

 been grown on the farms of Missouri to supply all our own wants at a 

 trivial cost. 



We of the present owe it as a duty to coming generations to reforest 

 a portion of our lands. We have been reaping where nature planted 

 the forests with a lavish hand, then let us plant forests and groves with 

 a liberal hand, and thus provide a blessing for those who shall come 

 after we are gone to our reward. * 



EVERGREENS. 

 A Plea for Their Use and Not Their Abuse in Landscape Planting. 



(Sid J. Hare, Kansas City, Mo.) 



My first recollection of an evergreen carries me back to my child- 

 hood. When scarcely three years of age, I saw an evergreen, and I 

 have always remembered it because it was so ridiculous. I can give no 

 other reason why the recollection of this tree has remained in my mem- 

 ory these many years. It was one that had been sheared into a series 

 of balls, one above the other, reminding one of "time balls," of various 

 sizes, all on one pole, the larger at the bottom, diminishing to the smaller 

 at the top. I remember also that people's clothes were just as ridiculous 

 in their cut as was the tree referred to. 



In some neighborhoods the topiary craze seemed to be infectious. 

 Evergreen trees were sheared into all manner of ridiculous forms, pea- 

 fowls, tea-pots, pigs, cranes, bears, chairs. We send missionaries to the 

 heathen Chinese who distorts the foot of his child, yet we do even worse 

 in many ways. There was a time when it would have been a sight 

 good for sore eyes to have seen a natural evergreen tree. Times have 

 changed, yet today there still lives some old fossil of former days who 

 now practices the art of butchery on our city shade trees, and hopes to 

 keep them looking "just so round like a bullet," as one said to me not 

 long since. 



