42 ADVICE OF MR. GREELEY UPON TREE-PLANTING. 



for the direct, but also tbe indirect profits to be derived from this sonrce. 

 In a little manual, well kuowu, and full of sound advice in matters re- 

 lating to the general interests of husbandry, this writer gives the fol- 

 lowing suggestions as to the advantages and best methods of forest 

 culture : 



I have said that I believe in cutting trees as well as in planting them. I have not 

 said, and do not mean to say, that I believe in cutting ever^'thiug clean as you go. 

 That was once proper; * * * it is still advisable in forest-covered regions, 

 whero the snn must be let in before crojis can be grown ; but in nine cases out of ten 

 timber should be thinned or culled out lather than cut off; and for every tree taken 

 away at least two should be planted or set out. » » » Why do not farmers 

 infer readily and generally, that growing indifferent timber, where the best aud most 

 valued wonld grow as rapidly, is a stupid, costly blunder? It seems to me that who- 

 ever has attained the conviction that apple-trees should be grafted, ought to know 

 that it is wasteful to grow red oak, beech, wbite maple, ami alder where white oak, 

 hickory, locust, and white pine mighr, be grown witli equal facility, in equal luxuri- 

 ance, provided the right seeds were planted, aud a little pains taken to keep down for 

 a year or two the shoots spontaneously sent up by the wrong ones. 



North of the Potomac and east of the Ohio, and, I presume, in limited districts 

 elsewhere, rocky, sterile woodlands, costing $2 to $.50 per acre, according to location, 

 «&c.,are to-day the cheapest property to be bought in the United States,' even though 

 nothing were done with them but keep out lire and cattle and let the young trees 

 grow as they will. Money can be more profitably and safely invested in lauds covered 

 by youug timber than in anything else. Tbe parent who would invest a few thousand 

 for the benetit of his children or grandchildren, still young, may buy woodlaud-i which 

 will be worth twenty times their present cost within the next twenty years. But bet- 

 ter even than this would it be to buy up rocky, craggy, naked hill-sides and eminences 

 which have been pastured to death, and shutting out cattle inflexibly, scratch these 

 over with plow, mattock, hoe, or pick, as circumstances shall dictate, plant them 

 thickly witb chestnut, walnut, hickory, white oak, and the seeds of locust and white 

 pine. I say locust, though not yet certain that this tree must not be started in garden 

 or nursery beds and transplanted when two or three years old, so puuy and feeble is 

 it at the outset, and so likely to be smothered under leaves or killed out by its more 

 favored neighbors. I have experiments in progress, not yet matured, which may shed 

 light on this point before I tinish these essays. 



Plant thickly, and of diverse kinds, so as to cover the ground promptly an* choke 

 out weeds and shrubs, with full purpose to thin aud prune as circumstances shall 

 dictate. 



Many farmers are averse to planting timber, because they think nothing can be 

 realized therefrom for the next twenty or thirty j-ears, which is as long .is they expect to 

 live. But this is a grave miscalculation. Let us suppose a rocky, hilly pastnre lot of 

 ten or twenty acres, rudely scratched over as I have suggested, and thickly seeded 

 with hickory-nuts and white-oak acorns only ; within five years it will yield abun- 

 dantly of hoop-poles, though the bt tter, more promising half be left to nature, as they 

 should be ; two years later, another aud larger crop of hoop-poles may be cut, still 

 sparing the best; and thenceforth a valuable crop of timber may bo taken from that 

 land ; tor, if cut at the proper season, at least two thrifty sprouts will start from every 

 stump ; and so that wood will yield a clear income each year, while its best trees are 

 steadily growing and maturing. I do not advise restriction to thole two species of 

 timber; but I insist that a young plantation of forest-trees may aud should yield a 

 clear income in every year after its fourth. 



As to the far West — the plains, the parks, and the Great Basin — there is more money 

 to be made by dotting them with groves of choice timber than by working the richest 

 veins of the adjacent mountains. Whoever will promptly start, near a present or 

 prospective railroad, forty acres of choice trees— hickory, white oak, locust, chestnut, 

 and white pine — within a circuit of three hundred miles from Denver, on land which 

 he has made or is m.iking provision to irrigate, may begin to sell trees therefrom two 

 years hence, and persist in selling annually henceforth for a century, at first for trans- 

 planting — very soon for a variety of uses in addition to that. 



EVELYN'S MAXIM FOR THE PREPARATION FOR PLANTING. 



The keeping of soil around the roots of a tree when taken up for 

 planting, is no new notion, for Evelyn, in writing two centuries and more 

 ago, reminds us that — 



Theophrastus, in histhird book, De Causis (cap. vii), givesus great caution in planting 

 to preserve the roots, and especially the earth adhering to the smallest fibrils, which 



