THE FORWARD MOVEMENT IN HORTICULTURE. 421 



The patient wife is fighting flies in summer time, sickened with 

 barnyard smells, and almost dying with longing for a beautiful 

 home, which she ought to have. Now, I don't know what this man 

 will do when he gets to "sweet fields beyond the swelling flood and 

 never withering flowers." He don't care for flowers and there 

 won't be any shorthorns up there, poor man ! 



I visited another man. He was president of an agricultural 

 society. His wife was worn out and sick, and he, kind fellow, filled 

 his front yard with sick pigs so they could sympathize with each 

 other. No fresh papers or magazines in the house, only some agri- 

 cultural reports. He showed me a fine field of alfalfa. "There," 

 said he, "is all the flowers I want." He had added acre to acre — 

 had 354 sections. The next I heard of them that noble wife was 

 dead, a sacrifice to his cattle and hogs. 



I will speak briefly of something we can use for home planting. 

 Eastern experimenters are on the alert to find sports or variations 

 among native trees. For instance, you may find a hardy weeping 

 elm or one with very large leaves, or you may introduce new kinds. 

 It is very expensive to get many rare trees from eastern nurseries, 

 so I bought eighteen kinds of elms alone and then commenced 

 grafting them on one-year-old seedlings, just as the nurserymen 

 grafts his apples in winter. In this way you can test the newer 

 sorts. Some are too tender, and some are all right. The Scotch elm 

 is a noble tree with very small leaves. On its own roots it sprouts 

 like a locust ; grafted on native stocks it is all right. 



For evergreens use your own as far as possible. Your northern 

 white spruce is a fine tree. It is the same as the Black Hills spruce. 

 Most of the Rocky Mountain conifers will do well. It is claimed 

 that some of them, even the concolor, is not quite hardy enough. 

 That may be because the seeds were gathered in the foothills. Un- 

 derstand that in the Rockies we have the temperate and the frigid 

 zones. The picea pungens is hardy in Manitoba because its habitat 

 is on the north side of the mountains, growing at an elevation of 

 9,000 to 10,000 feet above the sea level. The concolor, ponderosa 

 and Douglas spruce are found growing with them at this elevation. 

 So for the frozen north get seeds from the Rocky Mountain frigid 

 zone. 



The Engleman spruce is a tree of great beauty, but in southern 

 Minnesota it sunscalds badly. In the northern part of the state it 

 would do well, and it may come in play when you come to reforest 

 your waste lands. It is the giant of the high altitudes. I wish you 

 could try the aristata, or foxtail pine, and also the contorta, which 

 grows ail through the Yellowstone Park. 



The pinus ponderosa is a grand and heroic tree. You will see it 

 growing in some of the most bleak and forbidding places on the con- 

 tinent. It will cling to the brow of a precipice, waving defiance to 

 cold and drouth. Sow the seed in the fall, and it will come up like 

 peas in the spring and put on the extra set of leaves which makes it 

 immune from the damps when the hot weather comes. 



You will find the silver cedar, juniperus scopulorum, a very beau- 

 tiful as well as hardy tree. There are some fine specimens up at 



