SIEUR DE MONTS PUBLICATIONS VIII The Acadian Forest a ■^ot^o €- iCf' y^. ISSUED BY THE WILD GARDENS OF ACADIA BAR HARBOR, MAINE J ^.i D. of D. NOV 30 f9i7 SIEUR DE MONTS PUBLICATIONS VIII TPIE ACADIAN FOREST George B. Dorr The Acadian forest, using the word Acadian in its early French sense, stretched dense and unbroken in de Monts' and Champlain's time over the wide coastal territory now occupied by eastern Maine, by Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Plundered of its wealth and existing- but in fragments now, no forest of a temperate zone clothes with more vigorous growth the land it occu- pies, none has greater charm or shelters a wild life more interesting. This forest is typically represented, with singular com- pleteness, upon Mount Desert Island, where land and sea conditions meet and where a unique topography creates a correspondingly exceptional range of woodland opportunity. To establish on the Island, in connection with its now realized national park, a permanent ex- hibit of this forest growing under original conditions, lias been from the first a constant aim with those who sought the park's creation. Such an exhibit has extraordinary value. A forest is far more than the mere assemblage of its trees; asso- ciated with them it contains, in regions of abundant moisture such as the Acadiau, a related life, both plant and animal, of infinite variety and richness, whose home and sheltering habitat it makes. If it perish, the plants that dwell beneath its shade and draw their sustenance in part from its clecaj^, together with the multitudinous other life that haunts it, largely perish with it. Such a forest is a wonderful complex of mutually dependent forms, a complex anciently established which once oblit- erated in a region can never be restored. It passes quickly, too, destroyed by axe and fire. No forest now exists in Europe, botanists say, that shows the early, natural condition of the European woodland; its very type is matter for conjecture. The typical trees of the Acadian forest, those that give it its peculiar character, are the northern evergreens, the cone-bearing pines and firs and spruces, the hem- locks and the arbor vitae. It is of these one thinks in picturing to oneself the region. Maine itself is called the Pine Tree State; its eastern coast, ''The Land of Pointed Firs." Longfellow sets the Acadian scene for us in Evangeline with "This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks," and far out to sea in early, long-voyaged days the approaching sailor welcomed with delight the pungent forest fragrance. But mingled with these evergreens which give the for- est its ]n'evailing character there are abundant other trees that lend their beauty to the scene. Champlain describes the oaks growing as in a park upon one side of the Penobscot River, when he ascended it in 1604, with pine foi-cst ou the other. Deer and bears grow fat in autumn on the beechnuts in the wilder woods. The two lujblest birch trees in Ihe world, the (Ainoe Birch, with its pure white ti'uuk, and the Yellow Birch, which in the North outstrips the oak itself in size, hud here their native home. Ash and niai)le are abundant. Poplars, mingled with Taper irirches, turn into rivers of gold amongst ihe somber evergreens in fall, and nowhere is the autuinn coloi'ing more brilliant or of richer contrast. Underneath tlie taller trees, wherever an even partial l)reak occurs, siuubs and lesser trees spring up in wide variety; thorns and wild plum trees, beautiful in flower 4 'it'^'i "^-C'^ -^' ■■ ■ ■ -^ ': ,^'^' ■ V* '^%« ,^1 lit '♦^1t^^ » ' • ■-•-■ • " ;