WHITE PINE GROVES 253 



as great in diameter of trunk and with as abun- 

 dant a leafage as it will ever have. 



Watching seedling pines grow year by year it 

 is difficult to see how the great, clean trunked, 

 old-time pines that towered over two hundred 

 feet tall and were from four to six feet m di- 

 ameter came about. The free growing pasture 

 pine makes a round headed shrub, for the first 

 ten years or so of its life, with abundant long 

 limbs, and is clad in profuse foliage from top to 

 bottom. Even as decades pass its limbs still re- 

 main numerous and though there is abundant 

 wcJod in the half century old pasture pine it is 

 of little use for lumber, for the limbs, young and 

 old, have filled its trunk with knots. Where our 

 present day trees have seeded in thickly and uni- 

 formly over considerable space it is different. 

 Then as the trees grow old they grow taller, each 

 struggling to outdo its neighbors and get more 

 light and air. Lower limbs decay in time and in 

 the progress of forty or fifty years we get a 

 "second growth" pine which is fairly limbless for 

 a height of forty or fifty feet. Give the trees 

 another half century if you will. I know many 

 groves that have had that and still their trunks, 



