Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1886 [PAGE 280]

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274 growths occur in the later years. This shows good results and indicates that more attention ought to be paid to the Hard Maple in artificial timber growing. The wood is in demand at good prices for the finer uses, such as furniture, building, implements, etc. Too much consideration has evidently been given to its slow growth at the beginning. Its unrivalled beauty as an ornamental tree is commonly appreciated and acknowledged.

SOFT MAPLE (Acer dasycarpum).

One-eighth of an acre, in a strip twenty-five rods long, was planted with three-year-old trees of this variety, two by four feet apart. They are by the side of the Willows and upon the same kind of soil. Nearly all the trees lived and made an average growth the first year of about one foot in height. They have grown very rapidly each season since. .Being larger when transplanted, and almost at once furnishing considerable shade, the ground was easier kept in order than for most others. Cultivation was, however, kept up three years, and there was performed some needless pruning the second year. The only thing done with this block since 1874 has been the thinning to four feet in the rows and the removal of alternate rows, the latter in the fall of 1876. From the low stumps some straggling shoots have arisen; otherwise the shade keeps down every vestige of undergrowth. The trees prune themselves and the dead branches soon fall and decay. The trunks are very tall and straight, of pretty uniform height, but varying a good deal in diameter. The difference in the size (diameter) of the outside trees and those surrounded on every side by others is very striking. These trees cast the densest shade of any of the deciduous trees, with the possible exception of the Box Elder, so that not only are the' various shrubs and weeds excluded, but the trees crowd inexorably upon one another. Usually each manages to get a share of the sunlight at the top, but the foliage-bearing branches are mostly confined to an upper stratum of comparatively little depth. The average height is now (1886) forty-three feet eight inches; circumference of trunk, twentythree inches. When grown as street trees, subject to bruises and wounds, or on account of any serious check in their progress, wood and bark borers are very common in the trunks, where they do much damage* But in the forest plantation not a sign of these depredators exists. The bark is smooth and the wood straight grained and even in quality. BURR OAK (Quercus Macrocarpa). In the fall of 1879 acorns of White and Burr Oak were planted as soon as gathered but failed to grow. Two years afterward a quantity of Bur Oak acorns were gathered and at once planted in nursery rows. These grew well the following season. In the spring of 1884 the tap roots were cut with a sharp spade, the earth having first been plowed away on one side of the row. The next spring the young oaks, two to three feet high, were successfully transferred to the forest, where they are again making satisfactory though not very rapid progress.