October 25, 1893.] 



Garden and Forest. 



441 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office : Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducted by Professor C. S. Sargent. 



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



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 1893. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Editorial Article : — Farms and Forests of the Carolina Foot-hills 441 



Notes on the Forest Flora of Japan.— XXIII. (With figure.) C. S. S. 442 



The Pines in October Mrs. Mary Treat. 443 



Foreign Correspondence : — Notes from Cornwall ]V. IVatson. 444 



Cultural Department : — Dahlias y, N. Gerard. 445 



New and Rare Plants at Baden-Baden Max Leichilin. 446 



Late Flowers on Woody Plants y. O, Jacli. 446 



Notes from the Home Vineyard T. Creiner. 447 



Correspondence : — The Common Names of Wild Plants H. T. F. 448 



Canada Thistles Robert Douglas. 448 



Why Dahlias Fail to Bloom Charles Strachan. 448 



The Columbian Exposition : — The Greenhouse Exhibits, Brevities, 



Professor L. H. Bailey. 448 



Recent Publications 449 



Notes 449 



Illustration : — The Avenue of Cryptomerias at Nikko, Japan, Fig. 66 446 



Farms and Forests on the Carolina Foot-hills. 



A GREAT deal has been written about the changes 

 which have taken place in southern farms and in the 

 condition and prospects of southern farmers since the war, 

 but we have seen no more graphic picture of the foot-hill 

 country of the Carolinas and the new life on the old plan- 

 tations than that presented in a recent letter to The Nation, 

 by Mr. C. Meriwether. With the social changes there 

 depicted we have little to do, but discussion of the physical 

 conditions upon which the new society is based is alto- 

 gether within the field occupied by this journal. The 

 locality from which this letter was written, and which it de- 

 scribes, is the broad strip of hilly country which slopes grad- 

 ually toward the Atlantic and connects the low sandy coast 

 levels with the Appalachian chain. The plantations in the 

 neighborhood from wiiich Mr. Meriwether writes averaged 

 a thousand acres each before the war, and the same shift- 

 less agriculture which was practiced by the old planters 

 has been continued ever since. It is not a land of grass 

 like New England or Kentucky, although there is no doubt 

 that there are grasses and clovers which would turn the 

 uplands into good pastures for grazing, and the brook-bot- 

 toms into meadows for hay. Cotton is the chief crop here, 

 and when anything else is raised it is another hoed crop 

 like corn, or potatoes, and there is never any sod to bind 

 the soil to the ground. Nothing, therefore, prevents the 

 rain from washing the light top-soil, with all its fertility, 

 down the slopes. Every furrow between the rows of cotton 

 or of corn, which were rarely planted across the line of the 

 slope, invite fresh seams in the fields every year, and every 

 rill which hurried to the rivers was laden with booty from 

 the hills. No attempt was ever made to check the gullying 

 force of the water which was forever robbing the land, and 

 as soon as the field was impoverished beyond redemption 

 it was abandoned, and a part of the forest was cut and 

 burned over for another one, when the same old process of 

 facilitating the transportation of its fertility to the bottom- 



lands began at once. In some of these old plantations of 

 a thousand acres there are five hundred acres of gullies, 

 and few more depressing spectacles can be imagined than 

 these broad slopes which fifteen years ago produced a 

 bale of cotton to the acre, now absolutely sterile and " a 

 mesh of leaping torrents after every rain.'' Not only are 

 the declivities barren and bare, but the valleys which they 

 have enriched are becoming useless for agriculture, for the 

 channels of the streams are filling up, and as there is no re- 

 straint upon the gathering waters from the slopes above, the 

 crops on the bottoms are always threatened with a flood. In 

 many of these abandoned hill-side fields the Old-Field Pine 

 is springing up to restore the balance of natural forces which 

 man has rashly destroyed, but a thousand years of rest will 

 be needed before this denuded hard-pan will be covered 

 with a soil that will be profitable to cultivate. 



Plainly, there is no reason to hope that land which can 

 be profitably tilled will ever be left forest-clad so long as the 

 forest brings no money ; but it is equally plain that the 

 reckless destruction of forests and improvident tillage will 

 soon turn this country into a desolation. While no accurate 

 figures can be given, it is true even now, according to Mr. 

 Meriwether, who writes with the caution of a skilled ob- 

 server, that the land maintains to-day fewer people than it 

 did in the times of slavery, and the best judges estimate 

 that only about three-fifths as many people live on this foot- 

 hill belt as once lived there. If as much effort had been 

 intelligently given to protect a portion of the cleared land 

 from washing as has been spent in cutting down the trees 

 and burning over new land to take its place, a considerable 

 part of what is now cleared would have been left as wood- 

 land, vi'hile the plow-land by judicious fertilizing, a careful 

 rotation of crops and seeding to grass might have steadily 

 increased in value, so that a quarter of the present cleared 

 area would have been worth much more than the whole of 

 it now is. And no man can estimate what the value of 

 these forests would now be if they had been left standing 

 and properly cared for. A North Carolina farmer who lived 

 on a similar slope once said in our hearing that forty years 

 before he had come into possession of, and moved upon, a 

 tract of 1,300 acres of forest so dense, that, in his own pic- 

 turesque language, "you could not shoot a rifle-ball a hun- 

 dred yards in any direction without striking a tree." He 

 had worked all these forty years in destroying this timber, 

 and was almost as poor as when he began, and he added : 

 "If I had left the wood all standing the Black Walnut and 

 Yellow Poplar timber now on the tract would be worth 

 alone as much as all the crops it has ever produced." 



There is much other timber in that coimtry besides Black 

 Walnut and Poplar. As has been often explained in these 

 columns, this southern Alleghany deciduous forest is not 

 only the most beautiful in this country, and the richest in 

 species, but it is one of the most valuable in the world, and 

 much of it is certainly worth caring for with a view to an 

 endless succession of timber crops. The land is rich not 

 only on the foot-hills, but up to the very crests of the ridges 

 in many places, and when the timber is stripjied from these 

 steeper slopes the soil will wash away with much greater 

 rapidity than it has done on the foot-hills, and a few years 

 will unfit them for plow-land or productive woodland. It 

 is clearly the dictate of ordinary prudence that these high 

 mountain crests should never be stripped of their forest-cov- 

 ering. The destruction of the forest here is destruction to 

 the land below. It is clear, too, that wherever the land is 

 so steep that it is impracticable by ordinary methods to 

 protect it from gullying, the forest should be left there as 

 well. It should be remembered that the chief reason for 

 the luxuriance of this Appalachian forest is that the soil is 

 good, and, therefore, there is greater temptation to improvi- 

 dent cutting. The people of that region are poor. They 

 need all the money they can get. The temptation to sac- 

 rifice the future value of their land for ready cash is strong, 

 so that just here is one of the fields where the foundation 

 principles of good forestry practice, and the truth that ir- 

 reparable loss and disaster must come from careless cut- 



