82 PLANTING OF SAND DUNES. 



successfully used in fixing loose sands, and serves the purpose admirably. 

 Its roots creep to a great distance, with short, flattish leaves, sending 

 up flowering shoots a few inches high at intervals, which bear seed and 

 spread. An officer of the engineer service who has had experience with 

 this plant at Saint Augustine, Fla., describes it as running over the 

 sand in zig-zag form, with joints at each angle six or eight inches apart, 

 from each of which a root strikes into the ground, soon forming a very 

 successful network of roots through the loosest sand. 



In the vicinity of Key West, and as far north as Jupiter Inlet, the 

 cocoa-nut tree is said to offer an excellent protection to the sands on 

 the shore. It was introduced about 1840, by the wrecking of a vessel 

 that threw a quantity of the nuts upon the beach, where they sprouted 

 and grew. Some of these trees bear fruit and are forty 'feet high. 



As already remarked, the eastern shore of Lake Michigan is bor- 

 dered by sand dunes, a considerable part of which have been covered 

 with forest vegetation by a natural process of seeding, while in other 

 places they are drifting sands. At Michigan City they are 165 feet 

 high, and near Grand Haven still higher. At the latter place a rail- 

 road station on the north side of the harbor has been abandoned by 

 reason of these sands, and buildings have been buried. 



Serious inconvenience has also been experienced on the south side of 

 the river, where mounds of drifting sands have entered the border of 

 the town. A feeble attempt was made to arrest this damage by plac- 

 ing a board fence on the inland slope, which, of course, afforded but 

 slight temporary protection. A thorough remedy would doubtless be 

 found by planting the outside sand-flat which has formed by the piers at 

 the mouth of the harbor, with willows or other trees, and by sowing and 

 covering with brush, beginning on the lake side where the drift begins, 

 and extending up the hill and thence down over the slope. 



The wooded sand hills adjacent abundantly indicate the species that 

 would thrive in this soil, and would furnish the seed by which the 

 planting could be executed. i But there is especially needed a State law 

 in Michigan strictly forbidding the clearing of timber on these sand 

 hills adjoining the shore, without regard to owners, and as a measure of 

 public protection. Discretion might be given to Boards of Supervisors 

 for regulating the application of such a law, but not for suspending its 

 effect. 



Much of this shore has, on the land side of the dunes, a series of 

 ponds and marshes, occasioned by obstructions to the mouths of rivers 

 and streams. The region adjacent to the lake has been found extremely 

 well adapted to the cultivation of fruits from the equalization of tem- 

 perature which this body of water secures, and the check which it holds 

 upon the premature opening of buds in the early spring. 



The Chiuqnupm {Castanea puniila) and the chinquapin-oak {Quercus 

 prinoides) are well known to be adapted to sterile lands, and are found 

 to succeed on arid plains in France and Germany. M. Bouch6, inspector 

 of the botanical gardens at Berlin, in a paper read before the Society of 

 Acclimatation in that city, specifies these as possessing the additional 

 merit, besides growing where many other trees and shrubs would 

 perish, that they afford an abundance of fruit for feeding swine. 



At Monticello, near Charlottesville, Va., and its vicinity, the furze 

 (Vlex JEuropea) is now growing abundantly, having been introduced by 



' The wild grape appears to thrive very well in these sands, and might doubtless he 

 planted with great advantage. The Calamagrostia arcnaria and C. JongifoUa tlirive in 

 the sands of Lake Michigan shore, affording an excellent means for giving them stabil- 

 ity where there is occasion. 



