EUCALYPTUS PLANTATIONS The "blue gum" is but one of forty species of the Australian genus, Eucalyptus, which have been naturalised in this country. In the tree-planting experiments of California and the semi-arid Southwestern States these immigrant trees are comparable to the catalpa in Kansas. They are propagated from seeds, which are light and abundant. They grow with astonishing vigour and rapidity, sprouting from the stump indefinitely. Most of them have very hard wood, and its durability under water and in the soil justifies the growing of it for paving blocks, railroad ties, posts, telegraph poles and piles for wharves. Some species have wood like hickory, used for tool handles, implements of agriculture and vehicles. Much is consumed as fuel.
Added to the wood value of these trees are such products as gums and resins useful in medicine and in the arts. The oil expressed from the leaves is exceptionally valuable in the drug trade. The flowers of many species furnish copious bee pastur age. The trees have beautiful evergreen leaves, graceful habit, handsome bark, and finally, curious, nut-like fruits—all char acters that give the trees popularity among available ornamental kinds. As a forest cover and a windbreak the eucalypts have a serious work to do. Denuded slopes that threatened the exhaus of water supply have been planted with these trees with most gratifying results. They have drained swamps, thus removing miasma and, as many believe, improving the climate in other tangible ways.
Waste land planted to blue gum (Eucalyptus globosus) is transformed in five years into a beautiful grove from which fuel may be cut. Successive clean cuttings, six to eight years apart. are followed by sprouting from the stumps. An average yield of an acre in this wood harvest is sixty cords of four-foot wood.
One seventeen-acre grove near Los Angeles, set in 1880 and cut for the third time in June, 19oo, produced 1,360 cords, an average of eighty cords per acre. On poor land the yield is only a third to a half the above amount. In a grove near Pasadena set in 1885 and cut for fuel in 1893, there were in July, 1900, some trees two feet in diameter and many over one hundred feet in height."—Bulletin No. 35, Bureau of Forestry.
Hon. Elwood Cooper has Zoo acres of broken land planted to several species of gums. He estimates that he can cut cords a year indefinitely without detracting from the appearance of his groves' or from their usefulness in other ways. Fuel brings $3 to $5 per cord in the local markets. The depletion of the natural forests in many sections of the Southwest has made a fuel famine, which the Eucalyptus has averted. In some places the oily leaves, pressed into bricks with crude oil, have proved an acceptable fuel for cooking. It is as timber that these trees bring the highest prices. Masts, piles, bridge timbers and tele graph poles, tall, straight, hard and durable—these are in demand at good prices. The best Eucalyptus produces in but twenty years a log equal to an oak that takes Zoo years to grow. Blue gum lasts twice as long as redwood and Douglas spruce in the piers of Santa Barbara and other coast cities.
Eucalyptus oil and eucalyptol, distilled from the fresh leaves, form important by-products when trees are cut down. One ton of leaves yield 500 ounces of oil. This is extensively used in lung and throat troubles, and is proving beneficial in the treat ment of many other disorders.