THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 67 



wild plum is ! I lately rode through the country in an auto- 

 mobile and the road was lined with wild crab-apple trees. They 

 were in full bloom and very beautiful but no one had sprayed 

 them or trimmed them: they were a free gift of nature. Are 

 the English sparrows, the wild plums and the wild crab- 

 apples so healthy because they have never been reformed? 

 — Ed Howe in The Independent. 



When to Gather Cattails. — The rich brown floral 

 spikes of the stately cattail flag, common everywhere in marshy 

 lands, are a great temptation to bring indoors for home 

 decoration in the autumn, but the fluffing of the heads destroys 

 their beauty, as well as makes trouble for the housewife. This 

 fluffing is due to the cattail being gathered when too mature. 

 If the stalks are cut early in summer, immediately upon the 

 spikes turning brown, it will generally be found that they 

 retain their beauty indoors throughout the winter. — S. 



Snow as a Plant Protection. — Reports from various 

 sources indicate that not for many years have the spring wild- 

 flowers been so abundant or so beautiful as this season. 

 Trailing arbutus has rarely been so perfect in foliage and 

 purity of color. Violets, bloodroot, hepatica, spring beauty 

 and other gems of the woodland seem to have found the 

 peculiar characteristics in the weather of the recent winter and 

 spring greatly to their liking, and in our gardens the same 

 healthy vigor and profuseness of bloom is in evidence among 

 all the low-growing spring flowering border plants. The 

 reason for it all is easily discerned in the deep snow which 

 this year covered so large a section of the country and pro- 

 tected these things against the ferocity of the February and 

 March weather. In many of the spring flowering garden 

 shrubs, it is interesting and instructive to note the well-defined 

 line of the snow blanket, flowers being produced in profusion 

 on the lower branches of forsythia and azaleas of the Daurica 

 type, while above the line every flower is blasted. At this 



