We have seen in our country that it is possible to get trees large enough for profitable timber in twenty years, but not by planting them in masses as in a natural forest, but by giving them room to develop; not by taking a piece of ground unfit for vegetation, and making a forest where there was not food for even a mullein to get rich on - but by giving them ground rich in material, and wherein a plant would love to grow. There are plenty of facts that would teach this in the old world, but they do not see them, or if they do, the lessons are lost.

Here is a very interesting fact regarding one of our own trees, native to the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific coast, which we find in the Gardeners'

Chronicle :

"As the result of an accident we were, the other day, compelled to cut down what I believe was the finest specimen of Abies grandis in this country. It was 72 ft. in height, 2 ft. 2 in. in diameter at the butt end, and it contained upwards of 70 cubic ft. of timber, all the result of about thirty-three years' growth. The wood, about which later on I shall have more to say, appears of excellent quality, and has a most agreeable perfume.

That it is a rapid grower will be known when I state that several of the annual rings near the butt end measured an inch in thickness".

Here we have a tree which in a climate not favorable, from its short summer, to a rapid growth, making a tree 72 ft. high and 6 ft. round in 33 years. If it had been set thick with others in a forest, where the "profit" would be supposed to come from annual "thinnings," such a tree would have taken a century to produce. We see that even in that cool country one may, if he choose, get a profitable forest in 20 years, but still we shall read that it takes ages to grow a tree.