724 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



for the last of it by replacing their 

 rock elm car sills and walking beam 

 frames with pressed steel. For com- 

 bined toughness and strength, no other 

 wood begins to approach the rock elm, 

 even longleaf yellow pine being a poor 

 second, while the oaks were not to be 

 thought of. Anyone who has worked 

 this wood with carpenter's tools will 

 appreciate this, and as it is not to be re- 

 placed with any material except pressed 

 steel, if I were growing elm at all as a 

 forest proposition, the rock elm would 

 be my choice. The characteristic fea- 

 ture of this valuable tree is the corky 

 ridge formation on its twigs. It is a 

 small and more compact tree than the 

 white elm, easily propagated from seed 

 in nursery beds, and readily transplant- 

 ed, as are all the elms, but it is not 



offered by nurserymen who usually con- 

 fine themselves to the more ornamental 

 white and weeping elms, both costing 

 about one dollar for 8 to 10 foot speci- 

 mens. They all require rich moist soil, 

 the red or slippery elm never straying 

 far from a river bottom, and the rock 

 elm taking the drier soils. The leaves 

 of all of them are much alike, with 

 characteristic parallel leaf veins, the 

 red and rock elms having longer and 

 thinner leaves than the white. The 

 last two are much less vulnerable to in- 

 sect attack, foreign insects in particu- 

 lar being a veritable scourge to the 

 white elm. 



Perhaps the most interesting of all 

 the trees in this group are the ash 

 trees. That poet who wrote the line 

 "The warlike ash, reeking with human 



Another Elm 

 note the great spread of the branches which makes it particularly desirable as a shade tree 



