Country Life and Sport
/ONLY IN TREES.
Afforestation, or at any rate planting trees, is becoming one of the favourite pastimes of the county gentleman. It has increased in favour all over the country, though most generally perhaps in Shropshire and Wales, and is practised on a big scale and a small. The result is a rapid increase of knowledge loth of trees—for example of the Sitka spruce—and the method of growing them. Some of the discoveries concern even those who deal not in battalions, but in single sentinels. For example, it is found that in suitable soils slips of the cricket willow, which may be planted by the simple method of ram- ming a crowbar into the soil, will " grow into money," as the Babylonian Willow or Salix Henrii will grow into beauty, within surprisingly few years. An FAsex landowner recently mild £200 worth of cricket willows which had been planted only twelve years earlier ; and the trees, put into ground almost nieless for other purposes, thus produced a harvest many times more precious than the richest agricultural land in the neighbourhood. It is important to grow the species, and indeed the variety, best suited to the soil. In regard to cricket willow the variety Caerula alba has advantages over other sorts and it must be grown at a good speed. The quicker the tree grows the better the bat drives. The touch of our modern cricketers is so delicate that they feel at once the difference in a bat with the long springy fibre of a fourteen- ear-old and the harder, more " wooden " fibre of twenty-five.
A tree that is just coming into fashion owing to new dis-
coveries about its method of propagation is the black poplar, i common and often much despised species. Information, rat published in the Forestry Journal, and since then empha- ized by the County Gentleman's Association, is of much eneral interest. It is found that cuttings as long as seven eet may be inserted with a high expectation of solid and pid growth. Main shoots of two-year-olds are the best. hey are inserted some eighteen inches deep and well rammed. he best planting time is February. The wood has a consider- .de commercial value. Apart from afforestation or any such ' boss word," as Stevenson would have said, almost all ardeners should derive a good deal of amusement and value rom the game of multiplying trees and shrubs by this sort of ethod. The balsamic poplar is a valuable possession any- rhere, for the attractivenss of its scent and its great catkins. t will grow readily and quickly from big slips. Many flowering nishes grow like weeds from cuttings. Best of all is that nvaluable possession of all gardeners, the Buddleia magnifica r l'eitchiana variabilis. The more it is pruned the better., and t is difficult to prevent any pruned bough from striking root, it is inserted deeply in the soil, with the earth well consoli- ated about it. In the case of lavender a good deal of time ay be saved by taking much taller cuttings than is usually one.
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