512 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



most valuable rail or post timber we have here is white oak. Though cut 

 when the sap is not flowing it is yet quite durable, but if cut in August or 

 early September it is much more durable. 



The Hardy Catalpa. — The following letter by Mr. Bobert Douglas to 

 President Lyon we are allowed to use as a contribution to our portfolio: 

 I have often felt like getting out of patience with some of the eastern writers 

 for their prejudice against this western tree; but when I consider that there 

 are only three writers, and they are all my personal friends, and know that 

 they are all perfectly honest in their convictions, and are really friends of 

 the west as much as of the east, I am convinced that local prejudice does not 

 enter into their minds at all. I have traveled long journeys with two of 

 them in the west (Meehan and Hoopes), climbed the mountains and slept on 

 the plains with them, and it is a common saying in the west that you never 

 know a man till you have camped with him on the plains. 



The third writer, A. S. Fuller, I am not acquainted with, but I should 

 like to show him, near his old home in Wisconsin, a western catalpa standing 

 on a bleak knoll, where it has stood twelve or fifteen years, and have him 

 count the years' growths and see how it has stood the terrible winters; while 

 the so-called ironclad apple trees have died outright. After that, with 

 friends Meehan and Hoopes, we might go down to Princeton, Illinois, and 

 put a measure around a western catalpa tree, grown from see,ds collected by 

 Arthur Bryant at New Madrid, and they would find that it measured over 

 three feet in diameter, stump high. They would also learn that eastern 

 catalpas were planted freely in Princeton, and that many years ago they had 

 all succumbed to the severe winters. I would take them to St. Louis, where 

 eastern men all visit Shaw's garden ; at the end of the streetcar track on our 

 journey thither, I will show them a street planted with the eastern catalpa, 

 where they can see how the poor misshapen trees have suffered from killing 

 back during severe winters. 



I will give you a short history of my connection with the western catalpa: 

 During February and March, 1877, I received letters from E. E. Barney, of 

 Dayton, Ohio, Dr. Warder, of Ohio, Suel Foster, of Iowa, and Prof. C. S. 

 Sargent, of Massachusetts, all urging me to grow the catalpa speciosa in large 

 quantities, believing it to be the most valuable tree. They did not all call it 

 speciosa, although Dr. Warder had given it that name in 1883. Mr. Barney 

 called it the early blooming catalpa, owing to its flowering three weeks earlier 

 than the common sorts. [The hardy catalpa blooms at the R. G. while the 

 common is in bud. — Eds.] Suel Foster called it the hardy catalpa, for the 

 reason that his partner came into the office one morning in spring and told 

 him they had two kinds of catalpa. Mr. Foster dissented ; they went into 

 the nursery, and found that one lot was uninjured and the other lot killed to 

 the ground, and that the uninjured had come from Indiana; the tender ones 

 from the east. I traveled weeks with Dr. Warder studying the two trees. 

 I confess I was surprised when I saw the marked difference, and wondered 

 how botanists had failed so long to make a distinction. It seemed to me that 

 any man that could distinguish the difference between the bark on a white 

 elm and an, American beech could not help seeing the same difference in these 

 two trees. 



Mr. Bryant went with us (Dr. Warder and myself) to examine a grove of 

 a few acres near the Illinois Central railroad, down in La Salle county, Illinois. 



