220 NEBRASKA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



or north-west where with care they cannot be made to grow. 

 People have had a prejudice against them because they could 

 not transplant them readily from the woods. They did not 

 have roots enough. I have often had a stand of fifty per cent, 

 .and if I could select and dig the right sizes in the right kind of 

 soil, I could save seventy-five per cent of collected ones. I have 

 had perhaps as much experience with these as any man living. 

 I know them. Treat them right, and they are all you can ask 

 for. The Black Hills Spruce is all right unless you take three 

 years of consecutive drouth beyond the 100th meridian. In 

 such case they cannot live. I see our Forestry experts are 

 recommending the Scotch Pine for south-western Kansas. 

 The west is now having its wet cycle of years. Kansas realizes 

 this; so does the Kaw river. During the wet cycle trees will 

 live which will be utterly blotted out when the dry years come. 

 A man to be a Government expert, or any other kind of an ex- 

 pert, needs to be with his trees and summer and winter them, 

 and stay by them. A man never can be an expert by graduat- 

 ing at a Yale School of Forestry. The Scotch Pine can no more 

 live in south-western Kansas twenty-five years than an orange 

 tree can live in the open on the Nebraska Experiment Farm. 

 It is hardy in Minnesota and the Dakotas. It can stand the 

 cold, but cannot stand the heat like the Austrian and the Pon- 

 derosa. Our reliance for forests will be the Douglass where 

 you can i)ut it in the center, the Chinese Aborvitae which is the 

 best tree to propagate we have, for the seedlings never damp 

 off. Black Hills Spruce and the White Spruce from northern 

 Minnesota, the Austrian and Ponderosa Pines for wind breaks 

 and general planting. White Pines may do for river counties, 

 but as far west as York county we have perhaps a dozen that 

 have survived the thousands that have been planted, and under 

 the 100th meridian it is utterly impossible for them to live. 

 The Platte Cedar may do for the extreme west in the semi-arid 

 belt, but it has no business in the eastern part of the state. 



WHAT IS NEEDED. 



I think the state, in consideration of the fact that it is"a'wind 

 swept country, should have an experiment station for growing 

 evergreens. For most kinds they are past experiment; we 



