78 TREES AND TREE-PLANTING. 
walnut in ten. The seeds ripen in June and should be 
sown in mellow ground as soon as they fall. Plant one 
and a half inches deep with drills in rows twenty inches 
apart. They will come up in six days. Keep the weeds 
out until the plants get a good start. The first year 
they will grow eighteen or twenty inches. They should 
be transplanted the next spring, and set out twenty- 
seven hundred to the acre. They will grow four to five 
feet the second year. A soft maple planted in 1861 is 
now forty-nine inches in circumference four feet from 
the ground. 
The red or soft maple has a wider range of growth 
than the sugar maple, being found farther north, and 
grows in the South quite down to the Gulf of Mexico. 
Its native home is in the low, rich soil in the swamps 
and along the borders of streams, yet it is frequently 
met on high lands, but growing less vigorously. In any 
location it makes a more rapid growth than the sugar 
maple. The wood is fine-grained and compact, more 
frequently curly than the sugar maple, but very seldom 
growing in birds’-eyes. The timber, for solidity and 
strength, is much inferior to that of the sugar maple, 
and is of much less value for fuel. It is, however, more 
valuable as a shade-tree and for planting for forest 
growth. Its habits being as desirable as the sugar ma- 
ple and its growth being much more rapid, and an ad- 
ditional beauty found in its foliage, makes it very desir- 
able for transplanting. The additional beauty is the 
deep scarlet-red color of the twigs and flowers very 
early in the spring, long before any other flowers ap- 
pear. The wood of the red maple is suitable for turning 
and carving, and it is much used for the stocks of shot- 
guns, rifles, etc. It is sometimes confounded with the 
silver maple, but its wood is harder and finer grained. 
It grows to the height of sixty or seventy feet, and from 
two to three feet in diameter. It is hardly proba- 
ble that it will ever be cultivated for anything but its 
