212 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



is no trouble in turning a white-pine forest into cash at our 

 pleasure. 



Mr. Kline. What varieties of forest trees should be 

 planted ? 



Mr. Manntng. Plant the red oak, plant the white ash, 

 plant all the evergreens you can think of. It would be well 

 to plough the land before you plant, but you need not even 

 do that. Plant larch trees, plant maples, plant almost any- 

 thing ; but plani, them thickly, so that they will help each 

 other along, especially along the seashore, where they are 

 exposed to high winds. Plant them very thickly ; no matter 

 if there is a tree in every six inches square. Let them grow 

 up together ; one will help the other, and you can thin out 

 what you do not want. It is important to do that thinning 

 out in season. I was once through that wood lot of which 

 Mr. Slade spoke, with Mr. Robert Douglass of Waukeo-an, 

 111., who grows more trees from seed than any other man in 

 America. I went out to IMr. Richard S. Fay's in Lynn, and 

 saw his trees ; and then I went to his brother's at Wood's 

 Holl, and he showed us larch trees on a hundred acres that 

 were anywhere from twenty to fifty feet high, the seed of 

 which he had sowed on the sod in a pasture. He showed us 

 pines that were fifty feet high and more, that had been 

 planted twenty-nine years. Js^orway spruce and white pines 

 had come up to that height. Those trees he had planted on 

 the bleakest part of his land, where the sea winds come up 

 strong, and he had succeeded in getting the larches and other 

 trees up by planting them very thickly. There had been a 

 forest of oaks beyond that line, but they would only grow 

 up to a certain height ; the winds were so strong that they 

 stopped their growth. But when this forest had grown in 

 front of them they began to spring up, and grew thirty or 

 forty feet higher. The lesson is a very useful one, seeing 

 they were set out at so little expense. I agree with the sug- 

 gestion in regard to planting the white birch with the white 

 pine. The secret of transplanting trees is to plant them 

 thickly and let them hold each other up. 



I have seen those timber shelters in Dakota and various 

 other places. In 1875 I passed through Iowa and I did not 

 see but three or four timber belts at that time ; but last sum- 



