* 
100 _ ANNUAL REPORT. 
which could be advantageously cultivated for profit, if not for 
timber. 
The cranberry is at home on low marshes, and grows on 
land that is wet three-quarters of the year. If that sort of 
land is improved and drained to some extent, and that crop 
- does not pay, tamarack seeds will grow if the water is drained 
in early spring, and in a very short time will be a forest, if the 
fire is kept out. Next we find the whortleberry, or low bush 
blueberry ; next, the high bush black whortleberry ; next are 
willows of various kinds ; next, the red swamp birch and alder. 
On a little drier soil, yellow birch, tamarack or larch, check 
or pin oak, white birch and black pine. These must have 
shelter when young. Next we-find bur oak, black oak, poplar, 
hazel, black cherry, and occasionally choke cherry. When 
we get where there are running streams, and where the wet 
- had kept out the fire and preserved the underbrush and young 
seedling trees, we find swamp or white elm, black ash, yellow 
birch, red, sugar and ash-leaf maple, rock and red or slippery 
elms, and upon places, cottonwood, poplar and butternut ; 
also, white oak, where the land gets better ; pitch or Norway 
pine, and white pine, and in rare places red cedar, and in 
swamps white cedar, hemlock, balsam, and white and black 
spruces on a little drier soils. 
All these different varieties of wood, trees, bushes and vines 
can be raised with profit, if a man with a determined mind 
and good judgment takes it in hand to doso. For instance, to 
grow forest trees on sandy soils, when there is substance 
enough to have a covering of grass to hold the ground or sods 
together, so as to make ridges that will withstand the rains 
and wind for one season without washing or blowing away _ 
by the wind, we shall commence with the seeds of the white 
birch, as that is about the only tree seed that will stand drift- 
sands, and washings and drouths. If the ridges are made 
with the plow or spade they should always be east and west, 
say from three to five feet apart, and the seedlings will be best |. 
always on the north side of these ridges, as a little shade is 
secured on that side, and as soon as they get well started and 
a year or two old, so as to make more shade, other varieties 
of evergreens, tree seeds, and tamarack or European larch, 
can be sown broadcast. 
American larch or tamaracks will do best where quite wet ; 
so will white cedar, balsam fir and hemlock, but the spruces 
and pines of the different varieties of our native sorts, also 
the Austrian, Scotch and Rocky Mountain, will do the best on 
drier and sandy soils; but all the evergreen tree seeds require 
shade the first two or three years, or until the roots have pen- 
