TREES OF THE FOREST: Their Beauty and Use

It will not take long to realize or remember that of all America's riches, the inherited and acquired, the natural and manmade, trees are among our most cherished.

It would be a poorer nation indeed without them, if a nation at all. As living creatures they delight the eye and inspire belief as you walk among them. As wood, logged and hewn, they serve civilization in myriad ways.

When the Founding Fathers arrived, the native American forest stretched almost unbroken from the Atlantic to the Great Plains and beyond the Plains to the Pacific. Trees were the source of their first crude forts, of their furniture, firewood, fruit, and even of their medicines. Game and fish for the table of pioneers were harvested in cool woodland shadows.

The Nation's forests have shrunk appreciably through the years, yet today almost 800 different species of native trees and hundreds of others introduced from foreign lands grow and thrive in the United States. They fulfill many purposes. Peach, apple, and cherry are trees of the orchard. Sheltering your home, shading your street, or lending dignity to your city park may be the elm, oak, maple, weeping willow, or handsome, slow-growing English yew. You may be on speaking terms with a nearby Lombardy poplar, a slender, stately tree which President Thomas Jefferson once planted in rows along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Or perhaps the wide-spreading ornamental hackberry, which like all trees serves more than a single use: robins and mockingbirds thrive on its purple-blackberries.

Other types of trees, including more than 175 species of commercial value, grace our contemporary forest. They add to the grandeur and glory of our land, immeasurable in their fullest meaning, though in a tangible sense furnishing food and protective cover to wildlife, shade and firewood to campers, and timber to us all.

The future of the forest? One day walk in the managed stands of our 154 National Forests. Observe how these lands are managed for many uses, how their trees benefit from man's touch and influence, and how logging with a purpose enhances the health of the forest and its value to your children's children. Meanwhile, follow through these pages the story of growing trees and timber on the National Forests.

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