SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



tangible returns within a reasonable time. To most men, 

 planting trees for posterity makes a pretty weak appeal 

 to the pocketbook motive, but here is a tree crop a 

 man can cultivate with the prospect of harvesting it 

 annually himself. In addition, if handled correctly, he 

 can leave a valuable legacy to his children, which comes 

 close to eating one's cake and having it. 



An inch a year added to the diameter of a growing 

 pine sounds too good to be true, but I have measured 

 it. Mounted on the office walls of a lumber company at 

 Crossett, Arkansas, and of a paper mill just outside 

 Mobile, Alabama, are the planed and polished cross 

 sections of pine tree trunks that measure I laid a ruler 

 across them eleven inches. The clear, dark, annual 

 growth-rings I counted them number exactly ten. A 

 hard-headed lumberman in Jacksonville told me of 

 young pines that made up to twelve inches diameter, 

 two feet above the ground, growing between the ties 

 of the roadbed of a departed railroad. "It isn't ideal 

 soil," he commented dryly, "but it kept down competi- 

 tion, and the end of railway traffic gave a date fixed 

 beyond any argument/' 



Those trophies on the office walls are in reality targets. 

 Admittedly, they are specimens above the average 

 growth. They are not so exceptional, however, but that 

 with care and climate they may not become the average. 

 There is plenty of latitude in climate : the entire coastal 

 plain from North Carolina to East Texas. There is not 



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