296 PRACTICAL ARBORICULTURE 
WHAT TREES SHALL WE GROW? 
Americans of the present generation will not plant acorns which require 
a century or more to mature, and while red oak may grow in somewhat less 
time, there will be no oak forests of large area planted during the first half 
of the twentieth century. 
Beech will be grown in a few botanical gardens and private grounds, as 
an ornament, but not one acre of beech will be planted as a forest. Hickory 
should be grown, but it is scarcely probable that it will be looked upon as a 
desirable investment during the fifty years before us. The same may be said 
of ash. There is not a sufficient interest in forestry to impel land owners to 
plant slow-growing trees and wait for the timber to produce an income. 
The yellow pine of the South is not being preserved, nor will it we planted, 
while few timber owners are taking any steps to perpetuate this tree. Some 
white pine is being planted in New York, New England, and a little in Michi- 
gan. It should be extensively grown, but probably will not be during the 
next five decades. 
Red wood of California, fir of Oregon, yellow pine (p. ponderosa) of the 
West, are being worked up rapidly by the lumbermen, but who will extend 
these forests? 
Black walnut so abundant in former years, is now practically out of the 
market. 
Now what is to take the place of these fast disappearing wood lands? It 
is replied by some that the metals, brick, stone and concrete will be more 
largely used, and wood will not be required. What folly! A thousand articles 
may be mentioned for which nothing can furnish a substitute equal to wood. 
The answer can only be that immense forests must be planted of some 
rapidly maturing timber, trees which will be the most useful to man. 
There is not a week passes but that some expert forester, usually with two 
or more letters appended to his name, writes a lengthy article for some newspaper 
or talks to some audience in opposition to the catalpa tree. 
Very often these letters or talks are in the guise of a civil engineer whose 
knowledge of this tree and the characteristics of its wood are obtained from 
his observation of another tree as distinct from the Catalpa speciosa as from 
an oak tree, but they all have the effect of retarding the work of forest 
planting. 
What tree, pray, do these authorities wish the American public to plant? 
Certainly not the oak, which requires two or three generations to become 
merchantable. 
