180 



THE GARDENER'S MONTHLY 



[June, 



EDITORIAL NOTES. 



Seedling Forest Trees. — Major Ben. Perley 

 Poore thinks the government should issue in- 

 structions to ignoramuses how to sow forest tree 

 seeds, so that they may be spared the results of 

 their ignorance in bad planting. He says : 



"The writers on forestry all begin by recom- 

 mending the purchase of tree-plant from the 

 nursery, and it is an undoubted fact that not 

 one-quarter of the tree-plants so purchased ever 

 grow into trees with butts as big as a hoe-handle. 

 I know, myself, a gentleman who owns one of 

 the finest farms in New England, who has pur- 

 chased, and had carefully planted, upwards of 

 60,000 young trees, and who admits that he can- 

 not show, as the result of his sixteen years of 

 experiment, 100 thrifty forest trees." 



It seems to us that ignorance is ignorance 

 whether in seed-sowing or seed-planting, and we 

 do not see why the ignoramus in tree seed- 

 sowing should be more entitled to national sym- 

 pathy and government cash, than the ignoramus 

 in tree-planting. By the way, who is this New 

 England gentleman who has thus sacrificed 59,- 

 900 trees to get less than 100 good ones ? His 

 careful planting and after management would 

 no doubt form one of the most instructive chap- 

 ters in American forestry. 



Legislative Forestry. — It would be an inter- 

 esting but curious subject of study to find out 

 who it is that gets up the forestry legislation 

 which takes place in so many States every year, 

 and which is remarkable for nothing but sheer 

 impracticability, or worse. Massachusetts is now 

 trying its hand. The proposal before the Legis- 

 lature is "to empower towns to take tracts of 

 land of suitable character, within their limits, 

 on the payment of a fair price, and to plant 

 them over with forest trees ; no tract thus planted 

 to be less than five hundred acres, and the State 

 is asked to remit taxes on the same." 



Mr. C. M. Hovey makes some sensible com- 

 ments on this in the Massachusetts Ploughman. 

 Such a scheme by towns, he well remarks, 

 means a new army of office-holders to oversee 

 and inspect these forests. He thinks, as will 

 most reflecting persons, that the same object 

 could be accomplished at half the cost, by en- 

 couraging private enterprise, as by encouraging 

 "towns." 



Cultivating Forest Trees.— It must not be 

 forgotten that the growth of forest trees left to 

 struggle as they may, and perhaps with poor 

 soil amongst other evils, affords no sort of guide 



as to the rapidity of growth, and time of coming 

 into profit, which well cared for trees exhibit. 

 In many cases there are sources of profit outside 

 of the mere ^timber in trees. A correspondent 

 of the Canadian Weekly Star makes a good point 

 of this : " A grove of large chestnut trees, with 

 about forty trees to the acre, has paid about 

 $120 yearly per acre, for many years, from the 

 fruit alone, which usually sells at $3 a bushel, 

 while trees so grown yield much larger crops 

 than the wild trees." 



Tree Planting in Australia. — The Colony of 

 South Australia encourages forestry in various 

 ways, even to the extent of giving the trees to 

 the planters. Before us we have a list of trees 

 on hand in the government nurseries, published 

 by the Forest Board at Adelaide, for the season 

 of 1882-3. We note that of the trees of our 

 country, there is some demand for White Ash, 

 Catalpa, Yellow Locust, which they seem to 

 know only as False Acacia, and the Pinus in- 

 signis of California. The most popular tree is 

 their own Blue Gum, Eucalyptus globulus. Of 

 these they have 162,000 young plants. There 

 are of Red Gum, Eucalyptus rostrata, 123,000 ; 

 and of Sugar Gum, E. corynocalyx, 109,000. 

 Other of the numerous species do not seem 

 popular, as of all kinds there are only 10,000 

 plants. Pinus insignis is the next largest in 

 stock, near 9,000. The Aleppo Pine and the 

 Carob tree are also in good demand. By the 

 look of the list we should judge that there must 

 be many trees of value to Australia yet to be 

 introduced from other countries. 



Forest Growth in America. — Mr. Fay planted 

 a forest on the poor sands of Cape Cod, the 

 land not worth fifty cents per acre. Scotch 

 pines, sown as late as 1861, were thirty feet high, 

 and ten inches in diameter a foot from the 

 ground. With such admirable results in the 

 most unlikely place, what may we not "look for 

 when American forestry is reduced to a science. 



Forest Fires. — The reader, no doubt, often 

 meets with paragraphs like this one, which we 

 take from the daily papers of May 3d : 



"On Tuesday sparks from a locomotive set 

 fire to the scrub oaks at Aquebogue, Suffolk 

 County, L. I., and ten acres of timber land be- 

 longing to Edgar E. Wells were destroyed. An- 

 other fire near Yaphank burned over eleven 

 miles of land. At Brookhaven, Joshua Car- 

 man's barn and dwelling-house and the residence 

 of Joshua Glover were burned to the ground. 

 After midnight the wind arose,, and tlie fire 



