PRESERVATION OF TREES. 



PRESERVATION OF TREES OX TOWN" TLATS. 



BY T. M. COOLLY, TOLEDO, OniO. 



In all parts of tlie Western States are springing up towns that grow with great 

 rapidity. Some of these are destined to rival the Atlantic cities in population and 

 importance; many others will become second class towns of note, while a still greater 

 proportion, though destined to an humbler rank, have still an equal interest with 

 their more fortunate neighbors in attaining and preserving a character for pleasantness 

 and beauty. 



The sites of many of these towns are beautiful beyond description. Nature has 

 spent centuries in growing and perfecting for their adornment the most graceful and 

 most magnificent forest trees. She has diversified the surface with hill, and plain, 

 and dell ; she has sent sparkling rivulets among the woods, and festooned the trees 

 with the ivy and the grape. The Oak, and the Elm, and the Maple, mingle their 

 diverse beauties together, while modestly beneath their shade are to be found the less 

 ambitious but scarcely less indispensable trees that are needed to complete the picture. 



Unfortunately the founders of new towns are apt to be people who fail to appreciate 

 sufficiently such beauties. They are men whose thoughts are bent upon speculation, 

 and who find their highest and almost only enjoyment in the rapid acquisition of 

 wealth. They call around them to build their houses, dig their canals, and construct 

 their railroads, a population principally of needy emmigrants, transient persons, who 

 go to and fro with the demand for labor, and who, having no permanent interest in 

 the place, are only anxious while they i-emain in it to use as little as possible of their 

 dollar a day in current expenses. Among such a population a tree is of no value, 

 except as it may be tuined into lumber or firewood. Robbery of the woods is 

 universally esteemed fair plunder, and while the Yankee is stealing from the forest its 

 best timber, the Irish and the German laborer is cutting his fuel from the remainder, 

 with an equal disregard of titles and of division lines. 



During the present season I have occasionally spent some time in the outskirts of 

 the town from which I write, and which is a sample of many such places. But 

 although it has sufliered severely in the manner alluded to, it is not yet so unfortunate 

 but that, if the evil be now checked, a considerable portion of its natural adornments 

 will remain. The front of the town is already denuded of its trees, but elsewhere, in 

 the direction of its growth, and in close proximity to its building, are still to be found 

 forest trees in groat variety. Magnificent Oaks — the growth of centuries — have 

 stationed themselves at little intervals in all directions about the city. These Oaks, 

 if properly appreciated, are invaluable ; for they give us, ready grown, such grand old 

 shade trees, as generations must wait for from our own planting. 



A younger growth of Oaks in great variety is also here to be met with. The 

 White, the Red, the Black, the White Swamp, the Scarlet-leaved, the Chestnut, the 

 w-leaved, and perhaps other varieties that do not now occur to me, are h 



met with, and a selection of foreign trees could scarcely be made that would 



