Suggestions Concerning Reforestation. 



VERY valuable paper was read by Mrs. J. G. Rams- 

 dell before the Woman's Club of Traverse City 

 upon "Protection of Forests," in which occurs the 

 following suggestions, which should have a wide 

 publicity in our State : 

 "The State owns large tracts of pine-stump land, from which 

 the timber has been removed and which have reverted to the 

 State for taxes. Annual fires, sweeping over them, have 

 destroyed the forest growth remaining after the pine had been 

 removed. It also owns a considerable amount of school, 

 University, Agricultural College, and swamp lands, over which 

 the State has power to do what it will. It may, and I believe 

 ought, to insert in every deed of sale of these lands the 

 clause providing for preservation and maintenance in forest 

 of a considerable percentage of the land conveyed, and make 

 neglect to do so a forfeiture of the title. Adequate laws 

 should be enacted to protect from fires. Animals and birds, 

 which are the natural distributors of forest seeds, such as 

 squirrels, bluejays and the like, should be protected. We have 

 a grove of chestnuts, and each year the bluejays carry away 

 a large number of the nuts, allowing many to fall on the 

 ground and take root, and we find young chestnut trees at 

 considerable distance from the parent grove. In similar way, 

 acorns, butternuts, and even walnuts are distributed by the 



squirrels. These species are springing up all over our farm. 

 If the State will take this and other reasonable precautions, 

 the denuded forest lands will soon be clothed with a natural 

 growth of trees. About an acre of our apple orchard was on 

 the north side of a hill too steep to cultivate, and was prac- 

 tically abandoned eighteen years ago. The seeds of maple, ash, 

 elm, basswood and pine fell upon this soil and took root, and 

 the growth is now so dense that even dogs are unable to 

 drive rabbits through it. Many of these deciduous trees are 

 four to six inches in diameter. A pine is twelve inches in 

 diameter and forty feet high." 



Mrs. Ramsdell gives the following samples of rapidity of 

 growth upon their farm at Traverse City : 



"A butternut was planted on our land in 1864; the tree is 

 now eighteen inches in diameter and spreads over a diameter 

 of seventy-four feet. A cottonwood grown from a cutting 

 stuck in the ground in 1872 is now three and one-half feet in 

 diameter and has a top spreading over one hundred and twenty 

 feet. Black walnut trees planted centennial year will cut from 

 seventy-five to one hundred feet of lumber each. Chestnuts 

 planted the same year in grove are, some of them, eighteen 

 inches in diameter. We have pecan trees planted twenty years 

 ago that are six inches in diameter and twenty feet high." 



Mrs. Ramsdell makes the following suggestions concerning 

 experimental forestry : 



"The State should set apart a tract of land, no less than a 

 township of land, and devote it to experimental forestry, 



