58 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 311. 



obtained from seeds or layers. When the latter plan is adopted, 

 care must be taken to let the end of the shoot remain out of 

 the ground to continue growing ; young plants will then start 

 from each of the branches along the stem. 



South Lancaster, Mass. -£■ U. Urpet. 



Correspondence. 



Misconception as to Forest-growth. 



To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir, — The last thing I should attempt to do would be to say 

 a word in discouragement of honest efforts to arouse our peo- 

 ple, and especially our farmers, to the importance of the art 

 and science of forestry. It has been a subject of interest to 

 me from boyhood, and all my life I have been planting trees. 

 Nevertheless, I have thought that some writers upon forestry 

 have a tendency toward extreme statement, which really may 

 injure the cause they are trying to advance. One would think, 

 from their statements, that a tree once cut down could never 

 be replaced ; or, at least, not for centuries. The impression is 

 given that our forest-trees grow much more slowly than they 

 really do, and also that second-growth trees are of very 

 small account as timber. 



Yet, while I am sure that the study of scientific forestry 

 should be made an important part of the curriculum of every 

 agricultural school, and should also have a conspicuous place 

 in agricultural literature and journalism, I can but deprecate 

 the impressions which are produced, to the effect that we are. 

 losing forever all our best timber, and that it cannot be re- 

 produced at any moderate cost. The impression is often given 

 that centuries are required to produce timber of any real 

 value. Such a belief is far from true. Here, in the latest set- 

 tled portions of Vermont, we can show, upon what were wheat- 

 fields sixty years ago, as handsome Sugar-maples, trees as 

 large and sound as those still standing in the untouched forest. 

 And this is not alone true of the Sugar-maples. Good timber 

 of other native varieties is being reproduced with noticeable 

 rapidity. I have on my own farm Canoe Birches, sixty to seventy 

 feet high, and a foot to eighteen inches diameter, straight and 

 handsome, which cannot be more than forty to fifty years old. 



My father, were he now alive, would be about ninety years 

 old ; and last year I was examining a considerable number of 

 trees planted by him between 1828 and 1840. Among them 

 are Horse-chestnuts sixty feet high, and from twenty to twenty- 

 four inches in diameter six feet from the ground, together, 

 with Maples and Elms, but slightly less in their dimensions. 

 Trees set by myself, since the close of the war, are, in numer- 

 ous instances, over a foot in diameter ; and I have Butternuts, 

 orown from seed, planted much later, which have been fruit- 

 ing abundantly for six orseven years. 



I was led to take up the subject just at this time by reading, 

 in a bound volume of The Vermont Farmer for 1S71, a report 

 of a meeting of a farmers' club in Caledonia County, in this 

 state, from which I make the following extracts to show the 

 views held by practical tillers of the soil more than^twenty 

 years ago : 



J. P. Foster said : " I would have all rocky places reset with 

 trees. I planted Maples in Waterford twenty-five years ago 

 that have been used for sugar-making for several years. Cedar 

 (Arbor-vitae) can be grown on rough upland that is dry and 

 hard, with very little expense ; it is becoming valuable." 



John Bacon said : " What better legacy to leave to our chil- 

 dren than fruit trees planted with our own hands ? And what of 

 forest-trees ? One of my neighbors has now a good Sugar- 

 bush on land once cleared, and the men are yet living who 

 harvested from it a good crop of wheat. In New Hampshire 

 I knew a piece of land when it grew a good crop of corn, which 

 now carries forty cords of wood to the acre." 



B. P. Brown said : "I came to what is now Passumpsic fifty- 

 five years ago. I then planted two Maple-trees that are now 

 nearly two feet in diameter. I would say, encourage your 

 boys and girls to plant trees. I feel better for planting those 

 trees." 



O. G. Harvey : "I believe that forest-trees can be grown at 

 a profit. White Pine on light soil, worth next to nothing for 

 cultivation, could be planted at little expense, and in thirty 

 years would be more valuable than the average tillage-land of 

 our farms. Some fifty years ago my father sowed land to 

 wheat which afterward grew to wood. Twenty years after we 

 cut ten cords to the acre, leaving the best. It has been thinned 

 twice since, and there are now twenty cords per acre upon it 

 of good growing wood." 



Andrew Warden : " Some two years ago, while passing over 

 the road near the mouth of Ives' Brook, in Barnet, in company 



with Mr. James Ferguson, who is now over one hundred years 

 old, he said : ' Andrew, I helped to reap wheat where those 

 Pines stand, seventy-five years ago.' Now those Pines are two 

 to three feet in diameter, and would cut from 40,000 to 50,000 

 feet of lumber to the acre." 



I send you these notes to show that our New England 

 farmers are not, and for many years have not been, indifferent 

 to forestry matters. They need instruction in forestry, with- 

 out doubt ; but it is plain that they are by no means totally 

 ignorant or indifferent as regards the great questions involved 

 in the care of our forests. It may be said with truth that nearly 

 all our best farmers are intelligently interested in a proper care 

 and preservation and increase of our woodlands. 

 Newport, vt. T. H. Hoskins. 



Protecting Orange-groves from Frost. 

 To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir, — On page 30 of issue of Garden and Forest for January 

 17th an account is given of the means employed to counteract 

 the effect of the late "freeze" in southern California. Another 

 method was used by my son on his ranches at Riverside. On 

 Saturday night the thermometer fell to twenty-six degrees, and 

 on Sunday night to twenty-eight degrees. He kept the water 

 running through his groves throughout these nights. The 

 temperature of the water when drawn from the flume was 

 fifty-six degrees ; when drawn off after flooding the ranches it 

 was thirty-six degrees. Out of twenty oranges removed from 

 the trees and tested, but two showed signs of having been 

 touched by the frost. ■ . 



Boston. Mass. James C. White. 



Meetings of Societies. 



The Western New York Horticultural Society. — II. 



preservation of fruit. 



PROFESSOR CALDWELL, of Cornell University, began 

 an address on this subject with a concise account of the 

 chemical changes which go on in fruit to ripen it. These 

 same agencies keep at work in the ripe fruit, and when it is 

 already at its best the only change they can bring about is 

 to make it poorer. Besides this, there are armies of living 

 organisms which are ready to start decay wherever there 

 is a weak or broken skin. These organisms, friends of 

 the farmer or gardener in a great many instances, are 

 enemies which he must fight all the time if he keeps his 

 milk or fruit from spoiling. Concerning these bacteria, 

 Dr. Caldwell went on to say : 



Nothing is safe from them, for the dust of the air is charged 

 with them ; and they are always ready to begin work afresh 

 whenever, as they are borne hither and thither by currents of 

 air, they settle down on any dead vegetable or animal matter. 

 Fruit, when separated from its vine or shrub or tree, becomes 

 dead vegetable matter, and therefore is open to the attacks of 

 these unfriendly bacteria. 



In a museum, on a holiday, when a large number of people 

 were moving about, the number of bacteria falling on a square 

 foot in a minute was found by an English chemist to be 1,750. 

 To satisfy my curiosity as to the number of these little people 

 likely to be found on fruit as usually exposed, I asked one of 

 my students to find out for me how many bacteria there were 

 on an apple, about as big as my fist, which I took from a bas- 

 ket of the fruit that had recently been left in my cellar by the 

 grocer. He reported 115,000 ; quite a good-sized city on a very 

 small piece of land, one would say, and yet not much more 

 thickly settled than a western prairie, since it would take 

 403,000,000 of these beings to cover one square inch of surface. 



But they were there, nevertheless, ready for work whenever 

 a place should be opened or weakened in the skin, where they 

 might begin. Beset, then, as ripe fruit is from within so that 

 it cannot grow better, but must grow poorer, if it changes at 

 all, and beset with worse enemies from without, is it any won- 

 der that the soft, ripe strawberry or blackberry or peach, or 

 the mellow apple or pear, is hard to keep ? There is but one 

 really effectual and practicable way to meet this double evil 

 tendency, and that is to heat the fruit to the temperature of 

 boiling water ; thus all power for evil of the ferments working 

 within and of the bacteria without is permanently taken from 

 them, and we have only to prevent exposure to air completely, 

 so that no fresh bacteria-dust can come in contact with the 

 fruit. This is the familiar process of canning fruit. Com- 

 plete drying also stops the action of the ferments and bacteria 



