FORESTRY MANUAL. 17 



you in Iowa. The bluffs along your rivers were bare of trees, or nearly so, 

 on the settlement of the country, and yet behold the result! 



Mr. Johnson, of Burlington, finds that the natural timber growth of forty 

 years, commands as much money to-day as the combined produce of tillage 

 lands adjoining has produced in all those years. These tree germs were in 

 the soil when the bluffs were bare, or only presented here and there a for- 

 lorn, crooked, and low-branched tree, that had escaped the prairie fires. - I 



So all through the State, on the highest ridges of the glacial drift.forma- 

 tion, myriads of young oaks and hickories are springing up thickly, now 

 that the fires have been suppressed. No man has sown the seeds for their 

 production. Whence come they, if not from the germs implanted by the 

 provident squirrel and other rodents in the time long past ? These germs 

 have shown their vitality and their great power of endurance (perhaps for 

 centuries) for many generations, and their ability, when favoring circum- 

 stances occur, to spring up and occupy the land. 



No more interesting circumstance connected with the future f orestal pros- 

 pects of your State could be presented to the student of sylvaculture. 



If you insist on planting the box-elder at all, let it be the belt or the rows, 

 in which to plant the nuts and acorns, as its premature destruction for fuel 

 will not be regretted. 



In building up a grove of Black walnut, a similar plan may be adopted, 

 with this modification: Plant the nuts at the same time as the "cheap 

 trees," and let them occupy the middle row of the three rows, before planted 

 with box-elder or Cottonwood. In this case it will be necessary to be watch- 

 ful lest the nurses overpower them, and you may be obliged to hack down 

 the nurses, Or most of them, before they have obtained useful sizes. For 

 want of this watchfulness, some walnuts have suffered in mixed plantations 

 in Nebraska ; where, however, many more set in a single row on the lines 

 between fields, and exposed on both sides, have been rendered almost use- 

 less as timber trees, though large and thrifty, as they grew wide and low- 

 branched. Nature's trimming is the best and cheapest, and it gets done. 

 Man's work is expensive, and is often neglected. 



In a few instances only the contrary can be shown, where some devotee 

 to his trees has even succeeded in keeping them sufficiently pruned to pro- 

 duce fair logs of walnuts, standing in single row. The natural habit of the 

 tree is to send out lateral branches, and to make a huge, round-headed, 

 spreading top, beautiful in the landscape but unprofitable for the lumber- 

 man. 



The White oak, Bur oak, and our native oak of the prairie groves, which 

 seems to be a variety of Black oak, are the most valuable, perhaps, for grove 

 culture. Our native Black oak of our timber borders grows very rapidly, 

 when it begins to run up, and will attain size for poles, and even posts, 

 grown very thickly. If dry when placed in the ground, it proves fully as 

 durable as the two first named. 



Gather the acorns in fall and keep in sand during the winter, where they 



