150 



THE GARDENER'S MONTHLY 



[May. 



sight." And now " brooks, creeks and smaller 

 rivers have dried up." 



The property owned by the editor of this 

 magazine, is perhaps the first piece of forest 

 land that was cleared in Pennsylvania. The 

 " spring house" is known to be 150 years old — 

 how much longer is lost to history. There are 

 numberless other "spring-houses" in an area of 

 twenty mile's. For the last 150 years the forests 

 have been cleared ott". till now there are none 

 worth speaking of within a hundred miles at least. 

 In this county, of one hundred square miles, 

 there is not, all told, one hundred acres <»f forest. 

 But the springs and spring houses are there as 

 they always were; and the Wingohocking, which 

 winds through the editor's grounds, is just as full 

 as it was when the Indian took the name of Lo- 

 gan in exchange for the name which the stream 

 bears. We doubt very much whether there is a 

 single spring-house in Pennsylvania which has 

 had to be abandoned through the spring drying 

 up, unless it were from a railroad cut, or some 

 similar work cutting through the underground 

 stream , 



Growth of Forest Trees — It has often been 

 noted in our magazine, that Forestry experience 

 in Europe is of little value for forest culture in 

 our country. The English Oak, for instance, 

 which is so slow a grower in England, that it 

 lasts for a thousand years in some instances, 

 will reach its climax, and get on a downward 

 track in less than a hundred in our country. It 

 is of amazing growth in America. The writer 

 has had twelve posts made of a tree which was 

 planted but twelve years before. How slow the 

 same tree grows in England is palpable from the 

 history of the tree in which King Charles hid 

 himself in the waod of Boscabel, after the battle 

 of Worcester, in 1651. This must have been an 

 old tree, of some size then, to be able to hide 

 from view, by its ivy-covered trunk, the poor, 

 pursuit-pressed King, from the troopers who 

 passed beneath its branches Yet at the present 

 time it is only twelve feet three inches in girth 

 at four feet from the ground. This would give 

 only about two feet of growth from the centre 

 of the tree, and gives but sixty hundredths of an 

 inch increase per annum in 400 years! 



No wonder Europeans look upon forest grow- 

 ing as the work of centuries ! There is no doul t 

 but with the light of American experience, a 

 j udiciously planted and properly cared-for forest 

 would be in good timber use inside of fifty years. 



This thought may be of comfort to those who 

 are so much worried over the future of Ameri- 

 can timber. We can soon reforest whenever it 

 shall be really profitable to do so. 



European Forests. — The Journal of the 

 Society des Agriculteurs de France publishes- 

 some interesting particulars with regard to the 

 forests of Europe and the rapid consumption of 

 the timber which they contained. Sweden and 

 Norway, which still do a large export trade in 

 pine, are now compelled to buy their oak in 

 Poland ; and in Russia the forests along the 

 shores of the Baltic, in Finland, and in the 

 Southern provinces, are so rapidly thinning that 

 the forest acreage of the empire is now only one 

 in ten. There are about 34,000.000 acres of 

 forest in Germany (of which 20,000,000 are in 

 Prussia), bringing in an income of $50,000,000 

 per annum. The State forests are taken great 

 care of in all parts of Germany, in Prussia alone 

 $500,000 being spent every year in replanting. 

 The imports of timber exceed the exports by 

 over two million tons. Austria and Hungary 

 have upward of 43,000,000 acres of forest; but in 

 Austria proper the State does not possess more 

 than seven per cent, of the wooded area, and 

 Austria is now obliged to buy most of her timber 

 in Bosnia and Montenegro. Servia and Rou- 

 mania have some very fine forests ; but Italy,, 

 though her forest area extends over nearly 14,- 

 000,000 acres, does not do much in the way of a 

 timber trade, as the roads leading to the forests- 

 are so bad that it is almost impossible to move 

 the timber when cut. Much the same is the 

 case with Spain which has 8,500,000 acres of 

 forest; while Portugal, which has only a milliori 

 acres, finds a good market for her timber. 



SCRAPS AND QUERIES. 



The Romance of Forestry. — A New Jersey 

 correspondent, whose official position gives 

 weight to his words, says : " Allow me to com- 

 mend heartily your pertinent and opportune 

 criticisms upon the various forestry schemes and 

 papers on forest legislation. A very careful 

 study of our rainfall in New Jersey (see Ann. 

 Rep. of State Geologist for 1881, pp. 60-91), has 

 convinced me that so far as New Jersey is con- 

 cerned, there is no noticeable diminution in the 

 mean annual or seasonal amount. And the ex- 

 tent of forest in our State is diminishing very 

 slowly ; in some sections it is increasing." 



