THE MODERN CEMETERY. 
17 
Injury to Trees. 
In the minds of many, a tree seems to have no 
rights they are bound to respect. It stands with 
them in the same category among useful things as 
stones, anvils, stumps, old barrels, snubbing-posts, 
and like insensible objects, to be kicked, pounded 
on, hacked, hitched to, stood on, cracked, bumped 
against, ox set fire to, as the moment’s need or a 
thoughtless fancy demands. But the careful guar- 
dian of a park regards the tree as exceedingly sen- 
sitive and liable to injury, and he holds himself as 
much in hand while dealing with one of his tower- 
ing pets as when handling a tulip bulb. Trees go 
down to their death from seemingly insignificant 
hurts. A mere lad climbed up and stood in the 
fork of our fine thirty-foot Balm of Gilead while 
trying to recover his kite string. The bark was 
bruised where he stood, decay set in, limbs began 
to come down the next season, and the entire tree 
lay on the ground inside of three years. 
I found in a neighboring thicket a neatly poised 
sumach and removed it to my yard, where for three 
years its symmetry and neat canopy of leaves made 
it an object of frequent admiring remark. A three 
year old child was playfully lifted up to stand a- 
mong the branches of the “umbrella tree.” The a- 
braded bark where the little shoe had rested soon 
showed decay beneath it. The proper bacillus for 
the purpose made for it a case of “quick consump- 
tion,” and my favorite was gone. 
A black ash five inches through which stands 
near the street fence, carries a long, unsightly scar 
caused by a lad’s beating a tattoo on the pretty bark 
with his stick while he sat on the fence idly hum- 
ming in the sunshine. On a boulevard down the 
street a half-dozen young ash-leaved maples are 
trying hard to grow. A curious appearance of 
their having been girdled about three inches from 
the ground attracted my attention as I frequently 
passed. It was not a blazing by an axe, but a rum- 
pled appearance of the bark. I speculated on ice 
damage, or hurts by mice or moles, or this and that, 
all to no purpose until I happened to come along 
when the young man was running his lawn mower 
and saw him vigorously bumping it against the 
trees to reach the grass about their trunks. It was 
all plain then. Bare patches of weather beaten, 
worm eaten wood now nearly encircle their trunks, 
and within a few months his fine trees will, more 
than likely, get antic some breezy evening and 
waltz away with the wanton winds. 
Damage by fire is a ruthless and serious hurt to 
a tree. In “years agone” fire generally managed 
in our cemetery to do about all the raking of leaves 
that was undertaken. Indolence was uniformly 
sorry that the fire got the start of him, but “after 
all, it did a heap of good in clearing off the dead 
leaves.” The falling and drifting leaves are apt to 
pocket deeply about the tree roots, making the 
burning especially hot just there, and it is no wonder 
that there is not now in all the cemetery a native 
forest tree that is not harboring a decay caused by 
fire singing, — away high in their tops amidst the 
green of summer there come dead branches, — look 
for an old scorch at the base of the trunk as the 
most probable cause of it. 
But nature herself occasionally takes a hand in 
with unthinking men in wounding trees. You no- 
tice a young maple or basswood after a time of pro- 
longed drought, with its leaves drooping and curl- 
ing. You may save the tree’s life by promptly and 
thoroughly saturating the earth about it with scores 
of pails of water; yet for all that, you will soon b<; 
grieved to see that a strip of its thin bark, from two 
to four inches wide, running up and down the trunk 
and on the side towards the 2 to 3 o’clock sun, is 
beginning to wrinkle. The sun has “scalded” it, — 
overdried it, — and you may as well, if you care to 
have nice trees, begin at once to look for one to 
replace it. 
And I query if the sun does not sometimes get 
too attentive even in the winter. When a tree is 
frozen through, the expanding ice crystals cause a 
strain throughout the trunk. If now after severe 
cold the bright sun rapidly thaws a side of the 
trunk, it creates an area or line, up and down, of 
less resistance, and where there would occur a scald 
in the summer time there comes a crack in the win- 
ter. But the crack often runs high up among the 
branches, whereas the scald stops when it reaches 
the shadow of the leaves. Other forces may cause 
trees thus to burst open, but in my observation of 
such injury I have as yet found no crack not on the 
southerly side of the tree, and mostly they are to- 
ward the south-west. The suggestion is to provide 
trees with parasols of whatever sort. In nature, 
steep northern slopes are thus effective. 
Yet of all the methods of inflicting injury upon 
a tree most imbued with the pure essence of wick- 
edness, if you value the good will of the board of 
trustees you will not, in the cemetery, even p.re- 
sume to think of hitching your horse to a tree. 
This calls for the rarest exhibition of self-re.straint, 
as the board well knows, and yet they hope it. 
Red Wing, Minn. D. D. 
Burglars tried their hand on the safe of Mt. 
Hope Cemetery, Rochester, N. Y., recently, and 
played havoc with the large office safe but failed on 
the money chest within. The records and books 
were uninjured. As the superintendent remarked 
this is a new departure in cemetery work. 
