212 



THE GARDENER'S MONTHLY 



[July, 



tion and much exposed to the cold winds. 

 Would be pleased to have you, if you deem it 

 worthy, give the Eureka a notice in the Gar- 

 dener's Monthly." 



[This Peach, like most of these very early 

 ones, is a cling-stone. not quite as small as some 

 of the very early ones, oval and pointed, and of 

 a pretty bright red on the sunny side. It 

 reached Germantown on the 22nd of May. It 



was not sweet, though the abundance of juice 

 was very pleasant. The lack of sweetness we 

 attribute to its being gathered before being quite 

 ripe in order that it might carry well. On the 

 whole it may be regarded as a promising variety. 

 Five days after this was written, two more 

 came, with the suggestion from the sender that 

 the others were not ripe. But the ripe ones 

 came rotten.— Ed. G. M.] 



Forestry. 



EDITORIAL NOTES. 



Aged Trees. — We think of the giant Sequoias 

 of California, and their great age, with wonder; 

 but the ages of English trees compare with 

 them. There is a Yew tree at Brabourne, in 

 Kent, which was perhaps a young seedling when 

 the Queen of Sheba paid a visit to Solomon, 

 and was 1.200 years old when Csesar landed on 

 Britain's shore. There are numbers of Yew 

 trees in England which are undoubtedly much 

 over 1,000 years old. In days when the arrow 

 furnished the chief wooden walls of old England, 

 the Yew furnished the bow-wood. 



End of a Historic Elm. — "The Parson's 

 Elm," the largest and handsomest tree in En- 

 field, Connecticut, dating back beyond the mem- 

 ory of living man, was laid low last year by its 

 owner to get thirty-five cords of fire-wood out 

 of it. 



Though one cannot dispute the right of an 

 owner to do what he likes with his own, it is to 

 be regretted that these monuments of the past 

 should one by one disappear. 



A Walnut Grove in Wisconsin. — It is an- 

 nounced in a London paper that a farmer in 

 Wisconsin planted a " grove" of black walnut 

 twenty years ago, and recently sold it (the 

 grove) for .f27,000. Can any one give us the 

 details of this transaction? As it is, the para- 

 graph is scarcely worth the paper it occupies. 

 Was the land valuable when the trees were 

 planted, and does the $27,000 represent the value 

 of the walnut trees ? In many places land 

 worth $5 per acre would increase enormously in 



twenty years, though not a tree grew on it. But 

 if the "grove" was not very large, the timber 

 here may have given the value. 



Poor Land for Forests.— The daily and other 

 "secular" papers, which give us alarming and 

 not always intelligent articles on Forestry, tell 

 us that wherever there is land too poor to pro- 

 duce fivrra crops, it should at once be devoted to 

 forestry. It is such views of forestry which 

 lead the community to believe that it is the 

 work of a long life-time to plant trees. Intelli- 

 gent forestry will get up a paying crop of timber 

 in twenty- five years, but for this the best land 

 and not the poorest should be chosen. It will 

 never pay to plant a forest on poor land. 



Timber in Michigan. — TAe College Speculum 

 says : "Dr. Beal read a paper on ' Some of the 

 best trees to grow for timber in Michigan.' Our 

 most valuable forest trees found in abundance 

 were black walnut, white pine, white ash, white 

 oak, shagbark hickory, black cherry, tulip tree, 

 rock elm, sugar maple and arbor vitae. Of these 

 white oak, tulip tree, rock elm, arbor vitse and 

 sugar maple grow too slowly to be desirable trees 

 to plant for timber. 



"The doctor had been Professor of Horticul- 

 ture for nine years, but he could not think of 

 any effort of his which gave more satisfsiction in 

 proportion to the cost than a couple of acres 

 planted with a large variety of the seeds of trees. 

 The interest in this little arboretum will con- 

 tinue to grow as the trees become larger. Some 

 trees of Catalpa speciosa, nine years old, had 

 been moved when three years old. They are 

 now sixteen to twenty-four inches in circumfer- 



