598 



Garden and Forest. 



[December ii, 1889. 



it would occupy valuable room in return for a comparatively 

 short season of bloom. If the varieties of new winter-bloom- 

 ing hybrids of B. Socotrana continue to improve and increase 

 in variety, the Begonia season for large blooming tuberous 

 kinds will be so extended that there will be little difficulty in 

 securing a continuous display of these showy flowers during 

 the entire year. J . N. Gerard. 



Elizabeth, N. J. 



Forcing Asparagus. — I prefer roots three or four years old for 

 forcing; but the age is immaterial, provided a vigorous growth 

 has been made the previous season. The roots are originally 

 planted out in rows five feet apart and a foot apart in the row, 

 covered with three inches of soil, and cultivated as for an ordinary 

 crop. When wanted for forcing the roots are plowed out, 

 with as little damage to them as possible. In neighborhoods 

 where Asparagus is grown for market, farmers will often plant 

 as above, and then, in the third or fourth year, will plow out 

 every other row to be used for forcing, leaving permanent 

 rows ten feet apart. At this distance the ground can be 

 thoroughly tilled, and abundant light, warmth and air will make 

 strong crowns, so that an early crop of the first quality can be 

 expected. Roots to be forced are placed in a pit under the 

 benches and heated with hot water. They are placed on two 

 inches of soil, and covered with four to five inches to blanch the 

 shoots. Cutdng will be in order about fifteen days after the 

 roots are put in, and the same roots will produce profitable 

 shoots for six weeks. Asparagus can be forced on green- 

 house benches, in frames or in hot-beds, where the manure is 

 not too fresh, so as to generate too much heat and steam. I 

 have seen the best of "grass" grown in a common frame, 

 with eighteen inches of leaves and manure, to ferment and 

 give heat, and a covering thrown over the frame at night. It 

 should be remembered that Asparagus starts with very little 

 heat, forty-five degrees being sufficient to start it in the soil. 



jobstown, N.J. 7. G. Gardner. 



The Forest. 

 Among- the Siskiyou Forests. 



I HAVE just returned to San Francisco from a visit to the 

 Mount Shasta region, which, as I should explain, is north 

 of Shasta County, in Siskiyou. Although it was the middle of 

 November, there was no snow in Strawberry Valley at the foot 

 of Shasta, the air was dry and warm, the roads were excellent, 

 and the Indian summer was in its lovely prime. 



I am told that the sales of timber land made this year are 

 greater than for any previous three years. Three new saw- 

 mills will begin operations next spring. A broad gauge rail- 

 road is being built from Anderson, Shasta County, about 

 twenty miles north, to meet a thirty-mile flume, tapping the 

 heart of the finest forest of Pinus Lambertiana in northern 

 Shasta. It is said that the four or five San Francisco gentle- 

 men who are pushing this enterprise own 30,000 acres of the 

 best Pine-lands of the district lying between Mount Shasta and 

 Mount Lassen. Four or five years ago it was considered per- 

 fectly inaccessible and worthless. Hardly a word of opposi- 

 tion would have been raised if it had then been withdrawn 

 from sale. I was offered five thousand acres of Sugar Pine 

 and Yellow Pine, in 1887, for two dollars an acre in this district. 

 Now it could not be bought for ten times the sum. 



Californians have had dreams of a great Mount Shasta Park, 

 some fifty or sixty miles square, including the head waters of 

 the Sacramento, McCloud, Trinity, Shasta and other great 

 rivers. But it was merely a subject for table discussion, and 

 was never taken up and made a living issue on which men had 

 to take sides. And now, if not already too late, it soon will be. 

 The Southern Pacific Railroad Company, whose Oregon line 

 passes through these forests, has the greatest individual interest 

 in their preservation. There is no forest district in California 

 more interesting to the fisherman, the hunter, the botanist, 

 and the lover of nature ; no district of more importance to the 

 city dwellers; no region more closely connected with the 

 agricultural prosperity of the great central valleys ; but no one 

 in California is " making a fight " for the Shasta Park. Senator 

 Stanford is reported as saying, recently, that he had not known 

 how fine the Pines of Mount Shasta were, and that he had 

 ■thought of buying 1,200 acres, and keeping axe and fire out of 

 it ; but the saw-mills were already in the tract he wanted, and 

 nothing has yet been done in the matter. 



In the forest near Sissons, the leading trees are P. Lamber- 

 tiana, P. ponderosa, Psendotsuga taxifoliaand Libocedrics dectir- 

 rensj of these the P. ponderosa is most numerous. Among the 

 young trees springing up in the forest, the Douglas Spruce 

 seems most abundant, the Libocedrus next, and the P. ponder- 

 osa third, while the P. Lambertiana is hardest to find. The 



trees grow in little groups, no two alike, but all attractive in 

 the highest degree. Where the sheep have been kept out, as 

 in the largest tract I saw, there are millions of seedlings visi- 

 ble to a close observer, and their roots are so fibrous in this 

 rich soil that I should believe in their easy removal. The 

 proportion of Douglas Spruces is even greater among tliese 

 yearlings than among those of five or ten years of age ; when 

 the Pines are destroyed, this will be chiefly a Spruce forest. 



On the edges of the valley and on the lower mountain slopes, 

 where the lumbermen are doing their heaviest work, the for- 

 ests are largely of the Red Fir of California {Abies nobilis), 

 with the A. grandis, and the great Pines before named. Pines, 

 Firs, Spruces and all the magnificent conifers of the district 

 must soon disappear. The groups of small Cupressus McNa- 

 biana, discovered by Jeffreys many years ago, some fifteen 

 thousand feet above the valley ; the alpine Pines, higher up to 

 the snow line, P. nionticola, P. JSalfouriana, and the graceful/'. 

 albicattlis, dwarfed to a mere white-stemmed shrub, will proba- 

 bly escape destruction because of the comparatively small 

 amount of actual timber they can furnish. 



There are thousands of cords of two-foot wood piled up 

 along the railroad track. It sells at two dollars and a quarter 

 a cord, delivered at the siding. It is not from refuse, or 

 stumpage, or Pine-tops ; it is clean, straight pine from the 

 best part of the trunks. The wood-chopper takes every large 

 tree just as surely as the lumberman does. These immense 

 piles of cordwood are all "No. i " white and yellow pine. The 

 stumps stand in the valleys and on the slopes, the trees hav- 

 ing been cut oft' at a height of from five to ten feet above the 

 ground, much valuable wood being wasted ; the whole top of 

 the tree is considered worthless. 



A California saw-mill is always run on a large scale. Labor 

 is high priced, transportation is difficult, owing to the size of the 

 logs, and so the only way to make money is to rush things. 

 Every two or three minutes a log comes in, is squared, sliced 

 into planks, ripped into laths, turned into broom-handles, 

 shaved into shingles or split into scantling. . It is gigantic 

 work from dawn to dark, and sadly, strangely impressive. I 

 have visited many of the most famous saw-mills of the coast, 

 from the Navarro Redwoods — a million-dollar estate in Men- 

 docino, where I have seen logs fifteen feet in diameter turned 

 into railroad ties — to the great mills of the Pine-belt of the 

 Sierras, and I know of nothing more calculated to make an 

 American citizen pause and ask himself where it will end. I 

 asked a mill-owner about it the other day, and his answer 

 was : " When we have cut it all off we will go to Alaska." 



"But the people want these forests left." 



" The people don't care. Every settler within ten miles of 

 my mill wants to sell me trees at a dollar apiece. The state 

 doesn't care or it would have been saved, at least the school 

 sections. The country don't care or we should hear from it. 

 There is money in the lumber business, and every tree has 

 got to go. Sorry for the feelings of the fellows who didn't 

 know enough to get timber-land when it was cheap." 



In the Mount Shasta region there are twenty-two species of 

 conifei's, and an observer from the Smithsonian listed 103 

 species of birds. There are great glaciers, hot, cold and min- 

 eral springs, mountain lakes, extinct craters, and all that goes 

 to make the region "the keystone mountain mass " which up- 

 holds the northern arch of coast range and Sierra. The 

 "Shasta Park" idea was a fine conception, but no one has 

 taken a step towards its fulfillment. Is it indeed true that 

 "nobody cares," and that nothing can be done to save these 

 forests until another generation has been educated by hard 

 necessity to a knowledge of the issues involved ? 

 Niies, Cai. Charles H. Shinn. 



Correspondence. 



Trees in the James River Valley. 

 To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir. — A recent visit to the James River region, in Virginia, 

 afforded me the chance of seeing and measuring some of the 

 most remarkable trees of the valley. 



Dr. Mohr's interesting paper in a late number of Garden 

 AND Forest calls to mind a Pecan-tree I saw at Lower Bran- 

 don, on the south bank of the James. It measured, at four feet 

 above the ground, sixteen feet and four inches in girth. For a 

 station so far north and east this seemed unusual, especially 

 when I remembered that there is a reasonable assurance that 

 the tree grew from a nut planted but a little over a century ago 

 by an ancestor of the present owners of the estate. 



Towering above all its associates, it had ample room for ex- 

 pansion, and the result was a vast spreading mass of limbs and 

 foliage instead of the narrower spire-like top seen in the forest 



