39S 



Garden and Forest. 



[August 13, 1890. 



institutions and corporations and private forests necessary for 

 protection, to inspection by the forest-officers of the Canton and 

 the Confederation. Its chief, Forstmeister Ulrich Meister, 

 who holds his office directly from the city, is at the head of a 

 staff which comprises, besides a first assistant with the rank of 

 Oberforster and a variable number of young men who are 

 completing, under his orders, their year of practical work, 

 four trained foresters and a permanent force large enough to 

 carry on the whole lumbering, manufacturing and administra- 

 tive work of the Sihlwald. And herein lies the chief reason 

 why such an amount of delicate work in the way of silvicul- 

 tural operations is so cheaply and excellently done. Every 

 wood-chopper in the forest is familiar with the methods of 

 planting and thinning as well as the manner of felling required 

 to ensure the best results, and work which is thought in 

 France to demand the presence of a forest-inspector is here 

 successfully executed by common laborers under the some- 

 what loose supervision of a forester of the lowest grade. 



The financial management, on the other hand, whose 

 avowed object, unlike that of the Forest Administration of the 

 French Government, is to produce the greatest net return in 

 money and not in material, is rigorously centralized and exact. 

 Monthly balances and reports of stock, submitted to Herr 

 Meister and the central office at Zurich and compiled into an 

 annual document at the end of each year, make it easy for the 

 Forstmeister to control the affairs of his forest. Economy as 

 strict and watchful as that of any private enterprise prevails 

 wherever it is consistent with the best interests of the forest; 

 but when its welfare and completeness or the attainment of a 

 scientific silvicultural result is at stake, a wise and open-handed 

 liberality appears. Under this management the Sihlwald gave 

 last year a net return of something over $8 per acre, or a total 

 contribution to the treasury of the city of about $20,000. This 

 sum, large as it is in relation to the area of forest which pro- 

 duced it, promises to be materially increased by the Sihl Val- 

 ley Railroad, whose construction in the near future will un- 

 questionably enrich the whole valley through which it is to 

 pass. It is not known to me what proportion of this amount, 

 resulting as it does from the sale of fuel and manufactured 

 wood, is derived from the mills as distinct from the forest; but 

 undoubtedly their contribution is of importance. The centre 

 of their activity is, of course, the saw-mill, where ten of the 

 sixty horse-powers, which a turbine takes from the Sihl, go to 

 drive a hand-saw, whose cut, of perfect smoothness and accu- 

 racy, is adjustable to the twenty-fifth of an inch and lies in a 

 horizontal plane. The remainder of the power is consumed 

 in the handle factory, whose principal machinery is American, 

 a series of Excelsior machines, circular saws for various pur- 

 poses, and four extremely simple contrivances for splitting 

 the smaller kinds of firewood. Blacksmiths' and wagon shops 

 — the Sihlwald manufactures nearly everything it uses — and a 

 Boucherie apparatus, for the injection of wood with a solution 

 of copper sulphate by hydrostatic pressure, complete the list. 

 So successful has the injection plant been that telegraph poles, 

 given by its means twice or three times the life they would 

 have had without it, have been exported as far as Rome, and 

 railroad ties, wood pavement, shingles, vine props and a va- 

 riety of other articles prepared in the same way, have made a 

 very handsome return to the management that was bold 

 enough to undertake their manufacture. 



The annual yield of wood, almost half of which is from 

 thinnings alone, reached last year 377,023 cubic feet, an 

 amount which may be taken as slightly above the average. 

 The proportion of fire-wood is generally seventy-four percent., 

 yielding, however, but sixty-four per cent, of the total revenue. 

 Wages, according to Herr Meister's admirable treatise on the 

 Sihlwald, published in 1883, were at that time at the rate of a 

 little more than half a cent per cubic foot for felling logs, and 

 one dollar and nine cents per cord felled, split and stacked. 

 This represents only from fifty to seventy cents a day; yet the 

 workmen are happy and prosperous, as the statistics of the 

 savings bank and mutual relief fund established among them 

 by Herr Meister go far to show. 



With an average stock per acre of 2,860 cubic feet, and the 

 land estimated at $140, the capital value of the Sihlwald is 

 variously stated and decidedly hard to get at. Herr Meister's 

 estimate, given to me last spring, was $500,000. A calculation 

 based on an assumed rate of interest of four per cent, makes it 

 $320,000, whereas three or even two and a half per cent, on 

 investments is here often regarded as sufficient. Exact figures 

 are not obtainable, from the nature of the case. 



But the interest of the citizens of Zurich in the Sihlwald is 

 far from being wholly centred in the substantial return which 

 it makes to the city treasury. Their second interest lies in the 

 qualities of a great city park, which it unquestionably pre- 



sents. It has been the wise policy of Herr Meister to maintain 

 throughout the forest a net-work of well-kept roads and paths, 

 to place occasional benches along them, to keep the beauty of 

 the landscape unharmed, and in general to make the Sihlwald 

 thoroughly and pleasantly accessible. In so doing he has se- 

 cured its future by demonstrating to the people the reality and 

 value of their ownership. 



The question naturally arises whether the multiform advan- 

 tages to be derived from such a city forest in Switzerland 

 might not be enjoyed in America. The factors which it in- 

 volves cover too much ground to admit of discussion here, 

 but this much maybe briefly said : Were such a forest once in 

 the possession of one of our cities it would not only afford a 

 place of resort whose peaceful freedom would exceed in 

 restful quality all that our present parks can give, but it would 

 combine, under proper management, a steadily increasing 

 revenue to the city, with an educational force and value such 

 as, in the present state of forestry in America, would be amply 

 sufficient to justify its existence. The value of the Sihl- 

 wald to the City of Zurich is great and unquestioned, but 

 whether the system might be advantageously transplanted to 

 America, local circumstances must go far to decide. 



Nancy, France. Gifford Pinchot. 



Correspondence. 



The Evils of Grafting-. 

 To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir. — Your correspondent, Mr. S. B. Parsons (see page 350), is 

 not quite so logical as usual in his replies to Mr. William Robin- 

 son's questions on the above subject. For example, Mr. Par- 

 sons tells us that " no intelligent or conscientious nurseryman 

 will think, under ordinary conditions, of grafting a cion upon 

 stock which suckers, or upon stock which is not closely related 

 to it," and yet he fully bears out in his replies to the questions 

 asked the statements that such errors are committed by- 

 nurserymen time after time. Mr. Robinson's American 

 Weeping Willows and his dwarf Pyracanthas had both been 

 grafted by nurserymen on coarse-growing stocks, both of 

 which suckered badly, and the Quince stock used in the case 

 of the Pyracantha could scarcely be said to be closely related 

 to the cion. Again, we find even Mr. Parsons himself record- 

 ing his testimony against grafting or budding, not only in the 

 above two cases, but against the working or budding of Roses, 

 which he does in these pregnant words : " I can see no reason 

 why plants which take root readily from cuttings should be in- 

 creased by grafting, and I yesterday found myself very impa- 

 tiently rooting out some Tea Roses which I had imported 

 from England, and which were budded and overgrown by the 

 stock." The fact is that three-fourths of the direct evidence 

 given by Mr. Parsons on page 350 is in perfect agreement with 

 the opinions expressed by Mr. Robinson and held by myself. 



Mr. Parsons says that my strictures upon and against graft- 

 ing may be taken as "a reflection upon a large body of re- 

 spectable men." I, in writing, like to state a case as definitely 

 as possible, and the aphorism that "grafting is always a make- 

 shift, and very often a fraud," is fully corroborated by Mr. 

 Parsons having to root out his Tea Roses, and also by Mr. 

 Robinson's difficulty with two hardy shrubs, Willow and Fire- 

 thorn, respecting both of which Mr. Parsons thinks as we do, 

 that they should not be grafted at all ! 



The fact is there has arisen a tendency to graft everything, 

 as if there were some occult advantage in the mereoperation of 

 effecting a more or less perfect union. The old notion that a 

 strong-growing or a vigorous-rooted stock would add strength 

 and vigor to a weakly cion is utterly exploded by modern 

 physiology. The converse of this — namely, the grafting of a 

 vigorous cion upon a more slow-growing, weakly or restrictive 

 stock— may in certain cases conduce to precociousfruiting, but 

 certainly the same result could be more readily obtained by 

 other and more simple cultural methods. An English gar- 

 dener who visited Florida lately tells us that the grafted 

 Orange-trees there fruit earlier than the seedling-trees, but 

 that the latter are immeasurably superior in health, fertility 

 and longevity. Dr. Wallace, in his chapter on " Acclimatiza- 

 tion," in his latest work, "Darwinism," says that the eastern 

 Orange-trees as introduced to Italy and increased by grafting, 

 continued tender and unsatisfactory until the practice of rear- 

 ing seedlings began. Again, even our greatest English ex- 

 perimenter and cultivator of fruit-trees, Thomas Andrew 

 Knight, began to doubt the efficacy of grafting toward the 

 end of his career. 



I still believe that a vast amount of harm has been done to 

 gardening by the fatal facility of grafting plants which, as Mr. 

 Parsons himself shows, could be better and often cheaper 



