24 FOREST commissioners' REPORT. 



early in May. The hedge was apparently healthy in the fall 

 before, but now the foliage appeared practically dead. The 

 roots appeared perfectly healthy when dug up and the leaves 

 showed no sign of fungi upon them. 



Young pines which were badly injured when first seen in the 

 spring were kept under observation during the summer and 

 except in the few cases mentioned where the trees, like those at 

 Brunswick, were plainly affected with an entirely different 

 trouble, there was no sign of disease on the needles formed the 

 present year. The old needles and injured twigs gradually 

 dropped off, and many trees by the first of September had the 

 appearance of being severely pruned off on one side. About 

 July first it was noted that in almost every case adventitious 

 buds were showing and little tufts of new needles were forming 

 near the base of the injury on each twig. This is shown by the 

 accompanying photograph taken Octotber 7. The new needles 

 are not so long as those put forth in the spring but they 

 are now (November, 1908) entirely healthy, with no signs of 

 disease. 



It is plainly evident then that most of the so-called "white 

 pine blight" in Maine is not the same as what has been described 

 as due to an obscure cause and which according to the writer's 

 observations occurs only slightly and in a few scattered locali- 

 ties. Farther than that there is every reason to believe that the 

 present widespread injury is only temporary and due to adverse 

 weather conditions. This is not the place to discuss how and 

 why adverse weather conditions could produce the effects men- 

 tioned but attention should be called to the fact that winter 

 injury to trees is not necessarily due to extreme cold alone but 

 to the loss of water resulting from the action of cold, drying 

 winds when the ground is frozen and the roots not active. The 

 writer has shown that similar weather conditions have caused 

 extensive injury to Maine fruit trees.* 



* Transactions of the Maine State Pomological Society for the year 

 1907, PP- 36-45- 



That practically all of the so-called "pine blight" in Maine 



appeared in 1907 and 1908 and was coincident with the most 

 destructive winter injury to fruit trees known in the State in 

 the last hundred years ; that it appeared simultaneously in 1908 

 in all parts of the State at once ; that it was largely confined to 



