196 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
when, if drouth continues, water again. The first watering should 
not be delayed too long, for, if a tree begins to wither, watering is 
not likely to save it. 
Another way of guarding against drouth is to protect trees from 
the force of hot winds and the direct rays of the summer’s sun. 
This may be partially done by driving stakes and stretching can- 
vas two or three feet from the tree on the south and west. The best 
protection is an open windbreak on the south and west from thirty 
to fifty feet from the tree needing protection. 
If we can plant on a north slope orhillside, the hot winds will 
have less force, and the sun’s rays will strike so obliquely as to do 
little harm. 
In drouthy sections, we find it advantageous to plant such var- 
ieties as are known to be good foragers and make rapid growth. 
Where it is difficult to make trees grow at all, we can scarcely tol- 
erate slow growing or short lived trees; but there are places where 
this class of trees can be used to good advantage. Many lawns and 
parks are ruined by too many trees planted for immediate effect 
and want of courage later on to remove enough of them so as to 
give those remaining ample room. It were better in lawn planting 
to have an eye to the future and plant a few trees for permanent 
growth and then fill in for immediate effect with dwarfs and such 
short lived trees as balsam firand white birch, which are likely to 
look well for a few years and die out as soon as the space would be 
needed by other trees. No tree or man can take on majestic 
beauty without room to expand. What would Lincoln have been 
but for the rebellion? 
As an ornamental tree for favorable localities in southernMinne- 
sota, I place the Norway spruce at the head of the list. It is quite 
sensitive to extreme cold and issometimes killed when small or has 
its branches killed at the snow line, making it difficult to get trees to 
limb down to the ground except in highly favored localities. When 
we get it up a little from the ground, it makes a rapid growing, ro- 
bust tree and stands drouth well. Trees thirty years old, about 
Owatonna, seem in perfect health. White spruce comes next. It 
can stand more cold than the Norway, is less likely to turn brown 
in spring,and I don’t know as it has ever been winter-killed here; 
and, until the lessons of the past season of severe drouth, we gave 
it first place. Side by side with the Norway, and subjected to exactly 
the same conditions and treatment, fully twenty per cent. of the 
white spruce died, while of the same number of the Norway spruce 
(about three hundred) not a tree was harmed. 
From this we may conclude that varieties are not likely to with- 
stand great extremes of both heat and cold and that the natural 
place for white spruce to grow most successfully will be a little to 
the north of that of the Norway spruce. If we are near the south- 
ern limit of the former and near the northern limit of the latter it 
will be hard to determine to a certainty as to which is best for our 
immediate locality. 
The Colorado blue spruce is the most beautiful evergreen or 
ever-blue tree that I have ever seen. In hardiness, it seems about 
