American Forestry 



VOL. XX 



JANUARY, 1914 



No. 1 



FORESTRY ON THE COUNTRY ESTATE 



BY WARREN H. MILLER. 

 I. THE WOODLOT. 



IN almost every newly purchased 

 country place there is considerable 

 wooded area and rocky ground, the 

 woodlot and stony pasture of the 

 erstwhile farm. The new owner looks 

 them over in some perplexity. He had 

 set out to plan his estate with an eye 

 to aesthetic beauty, to surround himself 

 with pleasing vistas, rolling swales of 

 green things growing, live stock and 

 buildings that would be a pride and 

 pleasure to the eye ; but here are some 

 thirty or forty acres of "just woods," 

 with perhaps a brook, for the most part 

 brush and thicket, and, as for the stony 

 pasture he sees a debit of a good many 

 hundred dollars spent on stoning it be- 

 fore it will ever be ready for the plow. 

 In fact an eye-sore of several acres of 

 stony ground has often been the deter- 

 rent to the purchaser of an abandoned 

 farm having otherwise excellent possi- 

 bilities. 



Yet the exercise of a little practical 

 forestry, such as every country gentle- 

 man should be reasonably conversant 

 with, would cover the stony pasture 

 with thriving trees at far less expense 

 than stoning, and transform the brushy 

 woodlot into a noble forest that will 

 be a favorite place in your walks in the 

 cool of the evening when the thrushes 

 are singing. 



Forestry does not mean, as popularly 

 supposed, a mere knowledge of the 

 various tree species plus a familiarity 

 with mensuration and log scaling. It 

 goes far beyond that. It is the science 

 of handling large masses of trees, of 

 securing their reproduction in the same 



species over vast areas, of protecting 

 them from fire and insects, of seedling, 

 nursery and planting operations done on 

 a scale of millions of trees. Not only 

 must the forester be familiar with the 

 identifying characteristics of our forest 

 tree species but he must know what soil 

 base a given tree prefers, what its cli- 

 matic requirements are, what rain sup- 

 ply it thrives best under, the years a 

 stand takes to reach maturity, the 

 strength and value of its timber, the dis- 

 posal of its by-products and thinnings, 

 its autumn coloration, date and dura- 

 tion of spring flowering, seed distribu- 

 tion a thousand details which act 

 and react in the busy life of a forest 

 of growing trees. It is a fascinating 

 profession, and one that will appeal 

 strongly to our youths of the future, a 

 profession that will be a long while be- 

 coming crowded, for our State and na- 

 tional forest services are destined to be 

 the greatest of all our Government en- 

 terprises and can at present use every 

 graduate of our forest schools. 



But the country gentleman requires 

 no such formidable array of scientific 

 attainments as does the trained forester 

 in order to practice the simple opera- 

 tions of making a forest of his woodlot 

 and reclaiming his stony pasture. Let 

 us assume at the outset that he already 

 has all the arable land that he can man- 

 age ; that the correct balance of plant 

 and animal life has been already seen 

 to or planned for ; that the land to be 

 devoted to forestry will give its very 

 best commercial yield when so treated. 

 \Yhile it is well to combine the aesthet- 



