.FORESTRY MANUAL. 23 



NOTES OF EXPERIENCE AND OBSERVATION ON PRAIRIE 

 TREE-PLANTING. 



BY H. O. RAYMOND, COUNCIL BLUFFS. 



It is every man's duty to devote a part of his time for the welfare of his 

 country and the community in which he lives. 



It is an undeniable fact that the native forests, containing trees valuable 

 for lumber, are being annihilated at an alarming rate. The fact cannot be 

 fully realized, even when we read the figures, said never to lie. 



Again, plant timber for your own profit. This selfish principle, of course, 

 is the first and strongest inducement to plant timber, but yet the fact re- 

 mains that future generations will reap the greater part of the reward of 

 your labors; for I notice that people do not cut and slash down young and 

 thrifty timber that they have planted with their own hands, as they do that 

 of nature's own planting. I am so filled with the idea of the necessity for 

 timber-planting in the greater portion of our State that I cannot excuse any 

 man who owns forty acres of prairie land from planting a part of it to tim- 

 ber. No man is too poor financially to do it. No man is so rich that he has 

 any moral right to neglect so evident a duty. It is not necessary, I will here 

 note, to wait year after year for the purpose of finding out the best kind of 

 timber to plant. Rather than wait let the settler plant what he can get hold 

 of the easiest and at least cost. While this first planting is growing into 

 value for shelter, fuel, etc., he will have time to study up the relative value 

 of species for future planting. In the end he will very likely find that his 

 early planted cottonwoods and Soft maples have proved, to him at least, as 

 great blessings as catalpa or larch. 



While speaking of cottonwood I will say that Prof. Aughey, of Nebraska, 

 seems to have arrived at the conclusion that groves made up of cottonwood 

 trees will usually die out in from four to twenty years, and he thinks it best 

 to plant them intermingled with other trees. I have' grown them both ways 

 and the/aete are that this tree will not grow to any considerable size when 

 crowded together; the smaller trees will succumb invariably. When other 

 species .are crowded the growth of the weaker trees becomes stationary, but 

 they still for years cling to life. The cottonwood considers itself monarch 

 of the forest and is bound to rule or ruin ; yet I can say of the cottonwood 

 that I have seen more timber on an acre of ground of it than I ever saw of 

 any other kind, or in any case of mixed timber. This was in Fremont county, 

 Iowa, on the Missouri bottom. The trees were mostly from two to four feet 

 in diameter, and so tall that you had to look twice to see their terminal 

 branches. I did not estimate the average distance of the trees apart, but I 

 think it was more than twenty feet, perhaps thirty. It is very probable that 

 nature planted one hundred trees on the space now occupied by one, but the 

 ninety-nine had ultimately to give away to the one that was strongest. So 

 when we plant trees four feet apart we must not expect them all to grow to 

 be four feet in diameter. The greatest number of trees I ever saw attaining 

 size to be valuable on an acre, I saw in northern Michigan in a larch swamp. 



