256 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



RE-FORESTATION IN NEBRASKA. 



(A talk.) 



Prof. S. B. Green : I was very much interested this summer 

 in some work I saw down in Nebraska. I happened to go down 

 there through the kindness of Mr. Harrison. I went down to talk 

 to their forestry association, and while there I went out to 

 what is known as the sand hills of Nebraska. They have got some 

 good land out there. It is a kind of a "garden of the Lord" where 

 Mr. Harrison lives, but 150 miles northwest of there I got into one 

 of the most desolate and forsaken looking pieces of country I know 

 of, and yet I kind of liked it. That is the sand hill region. That 

 kind of country is blowing about and moves from one place to an- 

 other. The high hills have steep sides, and the sand is constantly 

 blowing about. It looks almost like an ocean with rolling waves 

 after a storm. There is no general direction to those hills ; they 

 run in every direction. You can feel the sand moving all the time. 

 The government has undertaken to establish a reservation down 

 there, known as the Dismal River Forest Reserve. They have 

 undertaken to plant that country with trees. It is quite a proposi- 

 tion. They have a lot of energetic young fellows down there from 

 the Bureau of Forestry, and they are carrying out that work in good 

 shape. They propose to plant down there the hardiest of our pines 

 or anything, in fact, that will hold those sand hills in place and make 

 them worth something. At present they do not grow anything ex- 

 cept a scanty crop of herbage. They are using lots of seedlings 

 there. I think Mr. Scott, the man in charge, wrote me he had about 

 a million he had raised this year which he proposed to transplant 

 into nursery rows next spring. I also got a letter from Mr. Mast, 

 who is Mr. Scott's assistant, written from New Mexico, in which 

 he said he had gathered 1,100 bushels of pine seed. They have four 

 or five acres of screen put up this autumn. They are right on the 

 banks of the river. There is nothing pretty in that country. The 

 houses are generally sod houses. I do not believe those trees will 

 grow very fast, but they will get something out of it, and if the wind 

 is prevented from sweeping over those hills they will produce better 

 and more nutritious grasses. 



I have seen something of the same formation, similar in appear- 

 ance although covered with different material, in Denmark. That 

 was in a moist country where they get the wind from the North Sea, 

 but the ridges there are covered with heather, and it looks just as 

 bad as the sand hills of Nebraska. The Danes think it is a great lot 

 of country, but it is nothing compared with Nebraska. They say 

 in Europe we beat them in everything. Speaking along that line, 

 they have an interesting practice over there. I was going at one 

 time through the Forest of Hessen in the Vogel Mountains. The 

 country there was sparsely settled, and the farms looked like the hill 

 farms of New England and New York. They have fine roads 

 through their forests, and they have blockhouses at short distances 

 from each other. They try to make their forests a sort of park. 

 They have a little guide book in those blockhouses, and when vou 

 want to take a nine-mile walk, for instance, you follow the blue 



