52 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 468. 



cites examples where foreigners, every member of whose 

 families — men, women and children — are productive work- 

 ers, have taken possession of lands once abandoned. 

 They do not need periodicals or books, because, they 

 do not read ; they do not care for the conveniences 

 that drove their predecessors into towns to get the 

 advantages of schools and churches and libraries and 

 social intercourse. But what do these peasant-farm- 

 ers bring to the commonwealth? By cheap living and 

 hard work they manage to undersell their neighbors. 

 Perhaps this is an advantage to the community at large 

 who buy farm products, but it makes harder lines for 

 the average Connecticut farmer. Whether it pays to 

 encourage the immigration of this class of agriculturists 

 is certainly an open .question. But Mr. Hinman finds 

 that many abandoned farms are passing into the hands 

 of well-to-do people who do not need to enter into the 

 struggle as competitors of the hard-working farmer of 

 to-day. Some of these men belong to the original stock 

 who left the barren uplands of the state to accumulate 

 fortunes elsewhere, and now they are attracted to the 

 place of their birth by ties of sentiment. They relish 

 their native air, and the old farms make summer homes 

 for their families. And, besides this, there are many places 

 in the state which have a quiet pastoral beauty, many 

 others with strikingly picturesque features, and these are 

 sought and bought for what they are, and not for the 

 memories which cling to them. There is a tendency, too, 

 among men of means, to get together landed estates of 

 considerable size, not to speak of larger tracts for game 

 preserves and experiments in forestry. Buyers of this sort 

 will, no doubt, be welcomed, and, perhaps, they will feel 

 that money invested in Connecticut real estate is better 

 spent than in yacht-building or horse-racing. Even if 

 they practice agriculture as an amusement simply, they 

 are likely to benefit the laboring people in the neighbor- 

 hood, and they are sure to make experiments with 

 improved breeds of domestic animals and new methods 

 of cultivation, from which observing neighbors will derive 

 benefit. They may live on their newly bought acres only 

 a portion of the year, but they can hardly fail to bring 

 material aid and social improvement to the communities 

 with which they come into contact. 



No doubt, the reasons for abandoned farm lands pre- 

 sented by Mr. Hinman are every one of them genuine, 

 and they account to a certain extent for the' present con- 

 dition of things. But, beyond and outside of them, every 

 one must see that there is a continued and remorseless 

 pressure upon agriculture which every eastern farmer feels. 

 Whatever the reason may be, it is certain that the farming 

 population throughout the middle and eastern states is 

 stationary or actually decreasing in number, while the 

 urban population is multiplying at a marvelous rate. The 

 farmer, too, seems to be losing his relative rank as a social 

 and civil factor in the commonwealth. How to prevent 

 all this, and whether it ought to be prevented, are ques- 

 tions which do not come within our province. But it is in 

 the line of our teachings to suggest that the sooner forests 

 can be made to cover the bleak and barren hills of 

 New England the better it will be for everybody. 

 Few people realize how much the wood lot did to 

 support the farrrfer in the old days. Years ago it was 

 stated by a shrewd Maine man, Mr. Tom Ford, in the 

 Country Gentleman, that although the New England farmer 

 worked all summer to raise hay, oats, potatoes, corn, beef 

 and pork he really received no fair wages for his work and 

 laid up nothing from this source. It was the logs and bark 

 from his wood lot, the staves and shingle stuff, the hoop- 

 poles and cordwood that brought him all his ready money, 

 and when his woods were cut away half his income was 

 gone. No doubt, the best treatment of these abandoned 

 hills, too steep and stony to till, is to help them to grow up 

 again with Oak and Pine, for the protection and enrich- 

 ment of the lands that are still worth plowing, and for 

 furnishing a crop which the world will always need. 



THE New York Commissioners of Fisheries, Game and 

 Forests have made a preliminary report in which they 

 urge with great reason that something be done to relieve the 

 state from the anomalous condition in which its forestry 

 work has been placed. New York owns a great forest 

 preserve which it is little less than criminal to allow to go 

 to waste. As a source of public revenue, and still more as 

 an instructive example of what can be done under scien- 

 tific management, this reservation should be put under the 

 charge of skilled professional foresters to make it a model 

 for our New World conditions, and be an object-lesson in 

 forest economy for the whole country. Unfortunately, the' 

 state constitution actually forbids the use of the axe in any 

 of " the lands of the state now owned or hereafter acquired, 

 constituting the forest preserve." And this means that the 

 men who made the constitution did not know that there 

 was any such thing as rational or conservative forestry, or 

 if they did know it, they felt that the people of this state 

 were too ignorant to organize and develop any system of 

 forest practice in an intelligent and scientific way, or that 

 they were too corrupt to administer such a trust without 

 official knavery. It is suggested in this report that inas- 

 much as it is proposed to purchase large additional 

 areas of woodlands, a special appropriation might be 

 made for acquiring some tract of virgin forest in the 

 Adirondacks, to be set apart as an experiment sta- 

 tion, where the practicability of carrying on scientific 

 forestry work with profit might be demonstrated. We 

 hardly see how this can be accomplished under the consti- 

 tution, in which it is stated that this forest preserve shall 

 be forever kept as wild forest land. Perhaps forest land 

 purchased outside the limits of the so-called preserve 

 might be exempted from the constitutional prohibition, 

 and, if so, it is to be hoped that the legislature will take 

 steps toward acquiring some woodland which can be 

 made directly useful as a source of forest supplies, and still 

 more valuable from an educational point of view. The 

 Commissioners believe that with such an enterprise fully 

 inaugurated, a forest academy, well endowed from private 

 resources, would soon follow. If such a school could be 

 located on the experimental grounds, where students could 

 have an opportunity to see and practice systematic forestry, 

 we should have the beginning of that trained corps of 

 foresters which will be needed in the twentieth century, if 

 we are to make the most of the forests of our state and of 

 the forests of our rational domain, and of those owned 

 by private individuals and corporations throughout the 

 country. 



The Visalia Oaks. 



ONE of the finest groves of Quercus lobata, near Visalia, 

 is known as the Mooney Ranch Grove, on the motor 

 line to Tulare City, and about five miles distant. It is said 

 to cover nearly 150 acres, and the illustration on page 55 

 gives a very good view of it. While most of the trees 

 are about a foot or eighteen inches in diameter, there are 

 enough of the old giants of five and six feet in diameter to 

 give character to the woods, for one is never out of sight 

 of several such trees, and often finds a group of a dozen or 

 more which seem to occupy nearly the whole field of 

 vision. 



The plant in the foreground, which seems to be a tall 

 white flowering shrub, is really a Milkweed, as it appeared 

 in November, when the photograph was taken. It is one 

 of the taller species, often four or five feet high, and grows 

 abundantly in the foot-hills and the adjacent plain, having 

 worked down from the Sierras. It is also found along the 

 watercourses spreading through the Oak forests. I saw 

 it from the car-window in several places as we crossed 

 the Visalia country, November 18th of last year, but 

 secured no specimens. These Asclepiads and a tall, 

 spreading, very brilliant Sunflower, under the influence of 

 October showers, had put forth immense numbers of small, 

 late blossoms among the dry seed-heads and along the 

 main stalk. 



