September 30, 1896.] 



Garden and Forest. 



399 



Dipladenias. 



To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir, — In the account of the Boston flower show in Garden 

 and Forest for September i6th, the Dipladenias exhibited by 

 me were spoken of as stove climbers, but the fact is that the 

 two plants shown had been grown in a greenhouse for five 

 years, where the temperature was not kept above fifty degrees, 

 Fahrenheit, with fire-heat, while it often went down to forty 

 degrees at night. Over a dozen of these plants have been 

 grown out-of-doors in the garden here all summer, and I 

 have never seen foliage on any Dipladenias under glass 

 to compare with that of these plants to-day, September 20th, 

 for size, substance or brilliancy of color. They are so glossy 

 that one would think the leaves had been oiled. 



George Mc William. 



Whilinsville, Mass. 



The Forest. 

 The Burma Teak Forests. — IX. 



EXPERIMENTS IN PLANTING TEAK. 



"FHERE was, however, no doubt in my mind from the outset 

 *• that something more was wanted, and that it was not suffi- 

 cient to protect and aid the Teak which had sprung upnaturally, 

 but that it would be necessary to increase the proportion of Teak 

 in the forests by sowing and planting. Tectona grandis be- 

 longs to the family of Verbenaceas ; the ovary is four-celled, 

 with one ovule in each cell, generally one or two only of these 

 ovules develop into perfect seeds. The seeds are oily ; they 

 are enclosed in a nut with thick, extremely hard walls, and 

 this nut is surrounded by a dense spongy mass consisting of 

 innumerable forked hairs, and this mass again is enclosed in 

 the enlarged and inflated bladder-like calyx. This remarkable 

 structure of the Teak-seed had long attracted the attention of 

 Burman foresters. The seed ripens early in the dry season, 

 before the season of the annual fires sets in. My Burman 

 friends declared that this was a wise adaptation of nature, that 

 the seed must be roasted in the jungle fires in order to burst 

 open its hard bony shell and to enable it to germinate. Others 

 declared that it was quite impossible to raise Teak in planta- 

 tions. Fortunately, however, Teak plantations had been 

 established elsewhere — in Tava, at Nilambur, in Malabar, on 

 the western coast of the peninsula, and in 1856 in Tenasserim 

 before the forests of that province were added to my charge. 

 The difficulties, therefore, which the foresters of Pegu had 

 raised I put aside as imaginary, and when in June, 1857, I 

 established my first experimental Teak plantation at Prome, 

 on the banks of the Iraauddi River, I did not use fire to make 

 the seeds germinate, but plenty of water, and in the exceed- 

 ingly high temperature of May, up to 100 degrees, Fahrenheit, 

 in the shade, this answered the purpose. At the time of ger- 

 mination the expanding embryo bursts open the hard shell, 

 and a piece of the outer wall comes off bodily like a round 

 concave cap. Teak seed, however, has this peculiarity, in 

 common with the European Ash, Fraxinus excelsior, that the 

 seed does not germinate evenly. The seedlings continue 

 corning up successively for a considerable period, numerous 

 seedlings not appearing until the second or third year, and a 

 portion not germinating at all. This irregularity had possibly 

 given rise to the opinion that Teak could not be raised artifi- 

 cially. Teak, like Oak, has a long tap-root when young; the 

 root is soft, and seedlings are most sensitive to any injury to 

 their roots. The best plan, therefore, is to raise seedlings in 

 nurseries before the commencement of the rains, and early in 

 the rains to plant them out when they are four to six weeks old. 



PLANTATIONS MADE IN THE OPEN COUNTRY. 



The Teak plantations succeeded well ; the difficulty was the 

 expense. The greatest outlay was the clearing of the dense 

 tropical forest ; another was to weed the ground after planting, 

 so as to prevent the small Teak-plants being smothered by the 

 luxuriant growth of weeds and coppice-shoots which, during 

 the rains in this forcing tropical climate, spring up in profu- 

 sion and smother the young Teak. Attempts were made to 

 establish plantations on a large scale in the open country out- 

 side the forests, a plan at first sight excellent, because the 

 open country is less feverish than the forests, labor conse- 

 quently procurable at all seasons and much less expensive ; 

 because thinnings will sell and the mature timber raised in 

 these plantations may be brought to market at less expense. 

 The results, however, of these operations in the open country 

 have not proved satisfactory. The growth of trees is the result 

 of numerous factors, some of which are not yet fully under_ 



stood. The market value of a Teak-tree, to a great extent, 

 consists in the regular cylindrical shape of the log, which 

 ought to be without knots and other irregularities. Teak-trees 

 grown in gardens near Calcutta and in the open country of 

 Burma invariably have fluted and irregularly shaped stems, 

 and show a much greater tendency to crooked and irregular 

 growth than trees grown up in the heart of the forests. Hence, 

 plantations in the open country outside the forests have not 

 been extended largely. Their area is sufficient to ascertain l>v 

 actual experience whether by allowing the tree to grow up in 

 dense compact masses and by cartful thinnings, removing all 

 spreading and otherwise badly shaped trees, Teak can be nude 

 to produce first-class timber in the comparatively dry airof the 

 open country. 



KAREN HILL CLEARINGS. 



Hence, the question to be solved was to arrange planting 

 work in the forests here, always to command the necessary 

 labor and to reduce expense. This question was solved by 

 raising Teak with the aid of field crops. The inhabitants of 

 these forests mostly belong to different tribes of the Karen 

 nation, mentioned in the first of these papers. In places they 

 have in the valleys of these hills permanent gardens of 

 Oranges, Mangoes and other fruit-trees, groves of the Betel 

 Palm, Areca Catechu, and plantations of the Betel Vine, Piper 

 Betle, all carefully watered by channels taken off from the 

 mountain streams. The grain which they cultivate is Rice, 

 and this, together with Pumpkins and other vegetables, as well 

 as Cotton, they raise by a rude system of shifting cultivation. 

 These Karens live under a patriarchal government in small 

 villages, each village under a head man called Tookay. On 

 the area fixed upon by the Tookay for this year's clearance the 

 forest is cut down early in the dry season, in January or Feb- 

 ruary. By that time the dew has ceased, every day the airgets 

 drier and the sun more fierce. The tangled mass of Bamboos 

 and branches gradually becomes dry like tinder ; toward the 

 end of the hot season, in April, it is fired, and the results are 

 heaps of white ashes among the black-charred trunks and 

 -stumps of the larger trees which the fire has not consumed. 

 After the first showers in May the paddy is sown in shallow 

 holes made with a narrow spade. The heat is great, the rain 

 copious and the Rice germinates rapidly. But weeds and the 

 coppice-shoots of stumps not killed by the fire also profit by 

 heat and moisture ; they grow up with alarming luxuriance, 

 and threaten to kill the young crop of Rice. Hence, all the 

 women and children of the village in long rows are hard at 

 work weeding the toungya, or hill-field, for thus it is called in 

 Burma. Thus the bright emerald-green Rice-fields on the 

 slopes of these hills, cleaned and kept clean by dint of enor- 

 mous labor continued throughout the season, iorm a pleasing 

 contrast to the varied, but darker, foliage of the surrounding 

 forest. In October, and sometimes in September, breaks 

 occur in the rains, the ears are formed, and the crop is har- 

 vested in December. 



TOUNGYA TEAK PLANTATIONS. 



As soon as I had seen the first Karen toungya in 1856, I 

 determined to devise some method by which this mode of 

 shifting cultivation might be utilized for planting Teak on a 

 large scale in those regions where this species attains its most 

 perfect development. A Burman forester, Moung Tsaudoon, 

 who was in charge of the Raboung forest district, to whom I 

 had explained my wishes, was the first to carry out the plan. On 

 a subsequent visit, in 1S68, I had the satisfaction to examine 

 six small plantations made by him on toungyas in successive 

 years, the oldest in 1856. On this small plantation, then twelve 

 years old, the trees were from fifty-five to sixty feet high. 

 Upon a really large scale toungya Teak plantations, however, 

 were not established until many years later. It was Major 

 (now Major General) Seaton, an officer in one of the Madras 

 regiments, at that time stationed at Rangoon, whom I had, 

 together with other military officers, engaged for service in 

 the forests. In 1868, when he had gradually risen to be Con- 

 servator of Forests, and had succeeded in gaining the confi- 

 dence of the Karens in several forest districts, he induced 

 them to plant Teak with paddv on their hill clearings, certain 

 rates being paid for each acre with a stipulated number of 

 plants a year old. In 1880 an aggregate area of 2,515 acres 

 had thus been planted up at a total cost of 24,932 rupees, or 

 less than ten rupees an acre. Under these arrangements the 

 clearing of the forest and the weeding of the plantation during 

 the first year was accomplished at exceedingly moderate rate's. 

 The principle of planting Teak on the same area with field 

 crops was adopted in the case of plantations made by means 

 of hired labor, called regular plantations, in order to reduce 

 the cost of these undertakings ; nevertheless, the expense per 



