feet apart and about two or three feet apart in the rows.  He wished me to alternate the planting with deciduous trees.  He recommended that I add a few deciduous trees, green ash and box elder and a few elm, and I set them as far as they would go, but they didn’t go very far in setting the 8,000 evergreens.  Then I thought it would be a good idea to use the wolfberry that grows wild on the prairies.  I set them alternately with some of the evergreens, but as they have a very liberal root system it was hard to get them out.  The finest tree in the plantation is the Austrian pine, and if it continues to do as well as it has the last three or four years I think the Austrian pine is going to be a very valuable pine for shelter-belt.

Mr. Kellogg:  Have you tested the Douglas spruce?

Mr. Moyer:  Not to a great extent.  It does well in some localities.

[Illustration:  Soft, or Silver, Maple windbreak—­to be succeeded by permanent windbreak of Bur Oak—­shown growing between man and boy.]

Mr. Maher:  I think the real test is to get them as near native to your place as you can.  The area over which the white spruce grows is greater than that of any other spruce, possibly greater than any other evergreen, especially through the northern latitudes.  I don’t think there is any question about the Black Hills spruce being the white spruce that was left there growing when the other timber was destroyed, if we can adopt that theory.  The white spruce from seed from the Northwest, from the British Columbia countries especially, is perfectly hardy with you.  It is perfectly hardy with us at Devils Lake, which is a very much more severe test, whereas the white spruce from its southern limits may not be hardy even here.  I think the Black Hills spruce is perfectly hardy.  The distance north and south relatively is not so important with reference to growing trees as to get them from too far in the humid district.  The white spruce that I would be afraid of would be the seed from New England and from the farther east limits of its growth, where the conditions are so much more humid.

Mr. Kellogg:  Do you find any trouble with too much protection for orchards?

Mr. Maher:  Where the protection is too close to the orchards I think it is very bad.  It destroys the air drainage—­

Mr. Kellogg:  That is why they are liable to blight.

Mr. Maher:  And they blight also.  The air drainage is interfered with, and you get blight, and you also smother the orchard.  I don’t know but what the apple and the Americana plum are about as hardy trees as we have anywhere.  I don’t make any attempt to protect them specially except from the south and west.  I don’t put any northern windbreak around any orchards I set out.  Of course, we may lose a crop with a spring frost all right when northern protection might save it, but with us up in our country if we have a good spring frost it is usually heavy enough to catch them anyway.