TREES AND PLEASURE GROUNDS OF PENNSYLVANIA. 



THE RARE TREES AND PLEASURE GROUNDS OF PENNSYLVANIA. 



BY A MASSACHUSETTS SUBSRCIBER. 



If in this country, where the people from the highest to the lowest, profess to be pat- 

 riots, they can once be persuaded that planting is a patriotic work, or where all are close 

 calculators of profit and loss, it can be demonstrated to their satisfaction, that it is a pro- 

 fitable one — the end is attained. To those who ask why they should plant for posterity, 

 when posterity has done nothing for them, I would urge these two arguments, profit and 

 patriotism. With all due deference to the wisdom of the oracular Dr. JonxsoN, I deny 

 both his premises and conclusions, when he offers the following consoling paragraph to the 

 Scotch planters : " There is a frightful interval between the seed and the timber. He that 

 calculates the growth of trees, has an unwelcome remembrance of the shortness of life 

 driven hard upon him. He knows that he is doing what will never benefit himself, and 

 Avhen he rejoices to see the stem rise, is disposed to repine that another shall cut it down." 

 A less gloomy moralist, the good and gentle Herbert, in enumerating the advantages of 

 cultivating the earth, alludes to a common idea, and draws the beautiful simile, " that as 

 the smell of a fresh turned sod is good for the health of the body, so may the contempla- 

 tion of death be for the health of the soul." The first and last portion of Dr. Jonx- 

 son's assertion is easilj' controverted by the calculations and experience of English gentle- 

 men, Avho have estimated that "a single acre planted with the poplar or larch, will, in 

 favorable situations, and in no longer period than twenty years, yield a produce worth 

 ten times the fee simple of the land." The low price of labor and higher value of wood 

 in Great Britain is about equalised in this country by the lower value of land, so that while 

 the individual estimates are different, the aggregate account is similar. Walter Scott, who 

 was a practical planter, found that in eleven years the necessary cuttings and trimmings 

 from a larch plantation would pay the expenses attendant upon the first setting out, fen- 

 cing and rent of land; after that the value increases in a compound ratio. The larch tree 

 is not only a fast growing tree, but produces firm and durable wood, and is well adapted to a 

 soil and climate where little else will flourish. By it large tracts of country in the north 

 of Perthshire were converted from waste unprofitable land to fine woods and pasturage 

 for cattle. The Duke of Athol remarked that the Avhite clover sprung up beneath the 

 larch, the annual fall of the leaves manuring the ground, so that the seeds of this plant 

 which lay dormant beneath the sod, required only a little stimulant to bring them up, 

 after the sod had once been disturbed by the setting of the trees. I should like here to 

 speak upon the subject of spontaneous vegetation, an error very coinmonly maintained; 

 but the limits of this article will not allow such a digression. To return to our larches. 

 The poet of nature protested against a " vegetable manufactory" of them being carried on 

 his neighborhood, and I can well imagine tliat they would not harmonize with the rich 

 landscape of Cumberland and R3fdal Mount; but on the bleak hills and barren seashore 

 of Xew-Eugland, where Emerson, in his Report on the Trees of Massachusetts, has recom- 

 mended them to be planted, the scenery is far different. These hills, as well as the islands 

 on the Massachusetts coast, were formerly covered with wood, but the injudicious and care- 

 less felling of the outer trees first, let in the cold winds upon those which had been 

 tenderl}'^ sheltered, 



" And the shady nook 

 Of hazels and ihe green and mossy bower, 

 Deformed and sallied, patiently gave up 

 Their quiet being." 



