246 On Hedges. 



are about six feet in circumference and perhaps eighty- 

 feet in height. The very great value of the larch tree 

 for timber seems to have been little understood in 

 Great Britain, till within a few years past ; and I be- 

 lieve that but few persons have any knowledge of it in 

 the United States : yet doubtless it is one of the most 

 useful trees that could be raised. Dr. Anderson's ex- 

 cellent directions for making plantations of them, are 

 to be found in his third volume of Essays on Agricul- 

 ture and rural affairs. Scotland, so remarkable for its 

 nakedness in respect to trees, they are now covering 

 with the larch. Dr. Anderson says that for many- 

 years, one person (the duke of Athol) had been in the 

 practice of planting out from his own nurseries, one 

 hundred thousand larches annually ; and the doctor 

 himself above two hundred thousand, for the three 

 years before he wrote. 



The Common Locust Tree. 



In your first volume of Memoirs is a communica- 

 tion from Caleb Kirk, near York in Pennsylvania, in 

 which he says, that after trying various trees and 

 shrubs for hedges, " he at length fixed on the common 

 locust. He tried for seven years to propagate this 

 tree, and at length adopted a method by which he 

 could make himself as sure of a plant from every seed, 

 as from Indian corn :" but what this method was he 

 does not mention. My own first experiment was by 

 sowing the seed in May, which produced plants from 

 two to four feet high the first year, although the soil 

 was poor. My other trial was two years ago ; sowing 

 the seed partly on the 10th and partly between the 



