FOREST CULTURE. 231 
quick-growing trees, planted in rows four feet apart and one foot in the 
rows, will, in eight years from setting, furnish fuel for one stove con- 
tinually, by thinning out as the trees increase in size, and the grove will 
be growing better from year to year. He favors planting groves closely. 
The trees quickly shade the ground and prevent the growth of weeds. 
In their stretch upward for light and heat, they send up straight, clean 
stems, requiring no labor with the pruning knife and little care from 
the husbandman until they are six years old, when one-half will need to 
be cut out. n 
Mr. Ames has @ grove of white willow, (Salix alba,) planted five years 
ago, which will now average twenty to twenty-five feet in height; and 
two cotton-wood trees, (Populus monilifera,) which grew up spontane- 
ously seven years ago, now thirty feet high and measuring, respectively, 
thirty-eight and thirty-nine inches in circumference; also a row of Lom- 
bardy poplars, (Populus dilatata,) three years from the cuttings, which 
average twelve feet in height. 
When a quick-growing grove is desired for immediate returns or for 
Shelter-belts around houses, barns, stock-yards, orchards, and gardens, 
he recommends to plant cuttings of the white willow and cotton-wood. 
Cuttings ten inches long and of the preceding year’s growth should be 
set in rows, as given above, the ends being left one foot above the 
ground, and the earth pressed firmly around them. Sixteen rows will 
make a good wind-break. For general cultivation he recommends soft 
and maple, (Acer rubrum,) white ash, bass-wood, (Tilia Americana,) and 
uropean larch, (Larix Huropewa.) The young maples planted in June 
appear above the ground in about ten days. He has a grove of soft 
‘maples planted six years ago. Many of them‘are twenty feet high 
and ten inches in circumference. White ashes planted seven years ago 
are fifteen feet high and eight inches in cireumference. The seeds ripen 
in the fall, and should be gathered after the first hard frost and planted 
immediately. It is estimated that 15,000,000 trees have been planted in 
Iowa in 1870, and that the average for several years past is about 
5,000,000. Two farmers of a town in this State have planted 25,000 
forest trees this year. 
The Farmers’ institute of the Kansas Agricultural College, at Man- 
hattan, recommends the following species of trees as most suitable for 
cultivation in Kansas; the ailanthus, ash, box-elder, catalpa, cedar, 
chestnut, coffee-bean, willow, cotton-wood, elm, hackberry, hickory, 
larch, linden, locust, maple, cak, Osage orange, pine, poplar, tulip tree, 
and walnut. More than half of these trees are native in that State. 
Two gentlemen near Omaha, Douglas County, Nebraska, have about 
one hundred acres planted with black walnut, and the same number with 
cotton-wood and the soft and the ash-leafed maple, (Negundo aceroides.) 
This fall (1870) they intend to add seventy-five acres to the walnut 
plantation, and next spring two hundred more, principally black walnut, 
but some cotton-wood and maple. 
_ In the counties of Nemaha and Richardson, Nebraska, at least a million 
sprouts of the cotton-wood have been pulled up from the bottom lands 
and islands of the Missouri River, and carried back, in some instances 
one hundred miles, and set out for timber lots. One individual took 
30,000 in one week to Pawnee County for this purpose. Each farmer 
sets a forest in that part of his farm which is most convenient, and best 
adapted to its growth. 
Mr. F. F. Aiken, of Sacramento County, California, has planted this 
year 5,000 Lombardy poplar and Balm of Gilead trees; 10,000 Cali- 
fornia black walnut; 4,000 American white maple; 5,000 American 
