102 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



RED PINE, PLANTED SEVEN YEARS AGO ON A TWENTY-FIVE ACRE TRACT. 



vania, the granitic bases of New York 

 and Maine, and the Champlain gravels 

 of the Lake States. Given the one 

 requirement of moisture it is hard to 

 find a soil that will not grow white pine. 

 It will not however succeed in arid, 

 non-nutritive soils that will not hold, in 

 a reasonable fashion, the seasons' s 

 rainfall. The red and pitch pines are 

 better for such. Nor will it stand over- 

 much heat. South of Masons and 

 Dixon's line, except in the mountains, 

 it would be foolish to try it. Com- 

 mercially genuine white pine, pinus 

 strobus, stands at the top of our con- 

 struction woods, selling for $100 a 

 thousand board feet in the lumber yard. 

 In cold Northern places such as the 

 New England States, Northern New 

 York and the Northern border of the 

 Lake States, I would try spruce for my 

 planted forest. The market for it is 

 much more nearly to hand than with 

 white pine, as the paper pulp mills are 

 always hungry and th" stumpage of 

 spruce is steadily rising, having doubled 

 in the last ten years. You can sell 

 everything that you raise, including the 



thinnings, and all the timber in the tree 

 down to the four-inch cull of the top. 

 As to what spruce to plant you will find 

 yourself in a beautiful quandary just as 

 soon as you get well into the subject. 

 We have in the East the the beautiful 

 Canadian white spruce, hardly of large 

 enough growth to be a commercial 

 species; its sturdy brother, the Adiron- 

 dack red spruce; and its swampy 

 cousin, the black spruce. Then there is 

 the familiar, imported Norway spruce, 

 to which most of our big paper com- 

 panies are pinning their faith. I do not 

 like it; it's an exotic and a foreigner and 

 I have seldom seen one in a windbreak 

 or anywhere else in America that grew 

 over 60 feet high before it began to 

 peter out. Our climate does not agree 

 with them. I can show you Norway 

 spruces in the forest of Gilley in France 

 that are 150 feet high and three feet in 

 diameter: I have been through dozens 

 of spruce forests in Thuringia and Sax- 

 ony and have stood on the edges of 

 ravines with Norway spruces two hun- 

 dred feet high rising sheer up to me 

 from the bottom-most depths of the 



