Tree planting in semi-arid America

Abstract

Introduction: To see the prairie and the plains is to know their needs. To travel over them for a day will make one know their greatest want, the want of trees. Windswept every day, every hour, the comparative calm which even a row of trees creates, affords relief from the constant activity of the air beyond the influence of the wind break. Evaporation can hardly keep the rapid, every moving atmosphere supplied with moisture; and many a rain has fallen to be at once evaporated and returned to the clouds. The treelessness of the plains has been explained by the deficient rainfall and consequent arid condition of those localities, and until lately it has been doubted, and even now there are people who doubt the possibility of growing trees and forests in these localities, without irrigation. These doubts are not now shared by the larger number of authorities; nor do they believe the original aridity alone accounts for the condition in which we find this large region at present.