THE MAGAZINE 



OF 



HORTICULTURE. 



MARCH, 1837. 



ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS. 



Art. I. Forest and Timber Trees, the Osage Orange, ^-c. 

 By William Kenrick, Author of the New American Or- 

 chardist. 



I AM induced to send you a few remarks on timber trees, to 

 which I shall add some observations on other subjects. I was 

 induced to this by an observation in one of the late numbers of 

 The Cultivator, a valuable work published by Judge Buel, at 

 Albany, wherein, speaking of the Osage orange, (Madura au- 

 rantiaca,) he says, " The Osage orange is tender, even more 

 tender than the Morus viulticaulis, as it had there been killed 

 down to the ground every winter.'''' These are the words, as nigh 

 as I can recollect, in substance. I had stated, in some of the 

 periodicals last spring, v.hich I have seen copied into other jour- 

 nals at Hartford and Albany — that the Osage orange was a hardy 

 tree, as it had sustained the .rigors of the last seven years near 

 Boston. I have two trees standing on the hill where I reside, 

 one seven, and the other eight inches in circumference — the one 

 ten feet high, and the other eleven feet; here they have stood 

 since the spring of 1829, Vvithout any protection, and are yet 

 uninjured by our worst winters; one in a northerly and bleak ex- 

 position, the.otlier north-westerly — the soil loamy, springy, resting 

 on a solid hard pan of gravelly clay. The tree being yet rare here, 

 I know none so large in this state, except at the Botanic Garden, 

 in Cambridge, where I think I have seen them. I have general- 

 ly bought these trees, but never recollect to have lost one single 

 tree by winter. 



Yet when I had read the account of Judge Buel, and towards 

 the last of December, and some time after winter had set in, re- 

 collecting I had a nursery of a few thousands of these trees on 



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