May io, 1893.) 



Garden and Forest. 



201 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office : Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducted by Profeesor C. S. Sargent. 



ENTERED AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER AT THE POST OFFICE AT NEW YORK, N. Y. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MAY 10, 1893. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles : — Abandoned Farms and Wasted Forests zor 



The Corstorphine Sycamore. (With figure.) 202 



Treatment ot Waste Lands in the Low Countries.— IL 202 



Notes ot Mexican Travel. — III C. G. Pringle. 203 



Plant Notes :— The Table Mountain Pine (Pinus pungens). 



Professor Thomas C. Porter. 204 



Foreign Correspondence: — London Letter W. Watson. 204 



Cultural Department : — New Types of Fruit Professor L. H. Bailey. 206 



Hardy Ferneries E. O. Orpet. 206 



The Narcissus Season J. N. Gerard. 207 



The Water Garden J. N.G. 207 



Pansies T.D.H. 208 



Correspondence: — Spring in Virginia Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer. 208 



Spring Coloring M. A. M. 209 



Exhibitions :— The Flower Show at Madison Square Garden 209 



Notes 210 



Illustration :— Sycamore Maple (Acer Pseudo-platanus), near Edinburgh, 



Scotland, Fig. 32 205 



Abandoned Farms and Wasted Forests. 



THE newspapers and magazines of the country have 

 given space during a year or two past to so much 

 discussion of various questions relating to the abandoned 

 farms of New England and some of the other Atlantic 

 states, that very little which is new can now be said 

 of any phase of the subject. A writer in a late number of 

 the Country Gentleman, however, presents some views 

 which are worth considering. This correspondent, Mr. 

 Tom Ford, of Maine, has been examining the general sub- 

 ject for many years, and four years ago he visited many of 

 the abandoned farms in New Hampshire and familiarized 

 himself with all the circumstances by personal investiga- 

 tion and inquiries of the inhabitants. He was then so 

 thoroughly convinced that these farms could be profitably 

 reclaimed that he published a series of articles and inter- 

 ested real-estate agents in a project to sell them to well- 

 to-do city residents, to be used by them as places of sum- 

 mer resort. He showed that a man could pay for a New 

 Hampshire farm and the repair of its buildings and keep 

 his family there from June to October every year for the 

 same money that it would cost to take his family to Old Or- 

 chard Beach or Bar Harbor for two weeks. Many people 

 were induced to examine the land, but very few bought 

 any, because they considered it too lonesome, too far from 

 routes of transportation, or for other reasons. 



His study of the history of New England agriculture has 

 led Mr. Ford to the conclusion that the New England 

 farmer a hundred years ago was not a farmer after all. It is 

 true that he raised hay, oats, potatoes, corn, beef and pork, 

 but although he worked all summer to produce these, be- 

 cause he could do nothing else, he really received no ade- 

 quate return for his labor and laid up nothing from this 

 source. His wood-lot was his true source of income. To 

 this his thoughts and energies were directed and into it he 

 cut deeper and deeper every year. The logs and bark, the 

 staves and shingle-stuff,, the hoop-poles and the cord-wood 



brought him in all the money he had, and the produce of 

 his farm was sapped to furnish supplies for his oxen and 

 men. When his forest was cut away, half his income was 

 gone. As his land was cleared and he had more to culti- 

 vate, horses were needed to take the place of oxen which 

 could live on hay and grass and would gain $50 in value 

 during the year. With the more expensive animals and 

 machinery there was no corresponding increase in his in- 

 come, and after making a losing tight for half a life-time the 

 owners of the farms abandoned them and went out to work 

 by the day. Old methods of doing farm-work by hand would 

 not pay ; the farms were too small to warrant the use of 

 improved machinery ; market-gardening was not possible 

 where there was no market and the exile was inevitable. 



Mr. Ford's solution of the abandoned-farms question is 

 to let them remain abandoned. This sounds like a cruel 

 decree of fate, but some of the conditions noted are worth 

 considering. It is an expensive and often an impracticable 

 task to bring up to its original productiveness a farm whose 

 fertility has been exhausted. It is cheaper in such cases 

 for the owner of such land to turn his back upon his im- 

 poverished acres and settle on the virgin soil of the west. 

 And then the tillage of these steep and stony hills is labo- 

 rious and expensive. Fifty acres of Corn can be raised and 

 harvested on the smooth prairie as easily as five acres in 

 some of the hill towns of New York and New England. 

 The disadvantages of early and late frosts and bleak winds 

 on these elevated lands, which materially shorten the grow- 

 ing year, are also to be considered. Altogether, one who 

 attempts to support himself and rear a family out of the 

 hungry soil of a rough hill farm in New England is to be 

 commiserated. 



And what is to become of these abandoned lands .' One 

 way is to leave them to nature herself. As the houses and 

 barns tumble down the barren fields will grow up with 

 bushes, and by and by the forests will come in where they 

 flourished a century ago, and the roots of the trees will 

 draw up from the depths of the soil the mineral wealth 

 which will again make the land fertile. A still better way, 

 even with this view of the case, is to assist nature and 

 hasten the time when the land will be occupied by profita- 

 ble timber. In many cases the scrubby growth when left 

 to itself will require generations before a paying crop of 

 wood is produced ; but a practical forester would soon have 

 the hills covered with wood which would be constantly 

 growing into money. 



It may be questioned whether this is the wisest treatment 

 of most of the abandoned farm-lands in the older states, 

 but certain it is that it was a mistake originally to cut away 

 the timber from many of the rugged hills which have been 

 cleared for plow-land. The crops that are wrung from such 

 soils usually cost as much as they come to, and if the labor 

 and expense which their cultivation demanded had been 

 put upon smoother and more fertile land, the net profit 

 from agriculture proper in the course of years would have 

 been greater, while the forests, if properly managed, would 

 have yielded regular crops and would have continued in 

 full productiveness, so that both wood-land and plow-land 

 would have increased in value. 



In the complex relations which exist between the forest 

 and the farm there are many points upon which, with our 

 present state of knowledge, we cannot speak with confi- 

 dence. We are not able to measure accurately the effect of 

 forest-areas upon adjacent cleared land in modifying the 

 winds of summer or of winter, in mitigating extremes of 

 heat and cold, in distributing the annual supply of water. 

 We can only make rough estimates of the effects of forests 

 upon birds, insects, fungi and other animal and vegetable 

 growths which may be helpful or harmful to agriculture. 

 But it certainly is wasteful practice to destroy the forests 

 on lands which can produce nothing else with profit, and 

 yet this squandering of our inheritance is going on to-day in 

 much of the Appalachian region as rapidly as if there was 

 not an abandoned farm in all the country to sound a warn- 

 ing against such improvidence. 



