228 



THE GARDENER'S MONTHLY 



[August, 



color. In fact, tliis vine blooms all the time, 

 for in winter this bit of scenery is covered with 

 glass and remains intact. 



On the north side of the park is a low range 

 of glass where the bedding plants are raised 

 through the winter. From thirty to forty thou- 

 sand plants are used, roses in this respect being 

 classed as bedding plants. Experience teaches 

 that roses raised annually give more bloom and 

 better satisfaction, with less attendant expense, 

 than roses preserved from year to year. Re- 

 montants, as a class, are not grown at all. Six 

 thousand roses are now being pushed vigorously 

 forward for the coming season. 



" Why do you plant so many flowers ?" was 

 a question put to the gardener in charge of the 

 park. The answer was pregnant with meaning : 

 "The people demand it," and the day will come 

 when no park will be tolerated without its flower 

 garden. 



EDITORIAL NOTES. 



Cats in Gardens. — A friend of mine once bad 

 his flower garden literally torn to pieces by cats. 

 He got a piece of straight deal and cut it into 

 thin strips. Into one end of each strip he in- 

 serted, with a pair of bell pliers, a common pin 

 cut ofi" slantingly close to the head, the cut end 

 of the pin being the part inserted. He could 

 make a quantity of these in a short time. He 

 placed them among his flowers in a slanting di- 

 rection, and he never had his flowers injured 

 afterwards. — L. C. K. in Gardening Illustrated. 



An Arch from a Pine Tree. — A correspon- 

 dent of the Garden contributed a highly interest- 

 ing article about gardening in Japan, and 

 notes that the Pine tree is used to form arches 

 over garden walks. Of course the plant is 

 trained up to one stem, or rather the side 

 branches are cut in and shoots are trimmed 

 every year, while the main stem forms the arch. 



Japan Maples.— A correspondent of the G*ar- 

 den says at Yokohama there were Maples in al- 

 most endless varieties, all in small unburnt pots. 

 Large specimens of these had as many as sixteen 

 varieties inarched on one thick stem of Poly- 

 morphum, and the beautiful combination of 

 color and form of leaf had a pretty effect. 



Golden Arbor Vit^ Grafted on Retinos- 

 PORA. — A correspondent of the Garden says at 



Yokohama he saw large specimens of Thuja 

 aurea, sugar-loaf shaped, as if made to order. A 

 large tree of R pisifera or obtusa is chosen, and 

 in the spring thousands of small grafts are put on 

 all over the branches quite thickly. The original 

 tree is allowed to grow until the grafts have 

 taken, and when the latter begin to grow the old 

 branches are cut away, leaving nothing but the 

 grafts ; in two years a specimen is thus formed, 

 some of them twenty feet high. 



DecadeIv'ce of Gardening in Japan. — A cor- 

 respondent of the Garden says: "The summer- 

 houses, rustic bridges and gates were falling to 

 pieces. As I sat waiting for Mr. Yatabi I 

 thought what fine taste and pleasures these old 

 daimios must have had in such quiet retreats as 

 these away from the city. Scarcely one of these 

 fine old gardens, however, now exists as of old, 

 and it is seldom one meets with the beautiful 

 gardens spoken of by Fortune. The fjresent at- 

 tempt of the poorer classes at gardening near 

 Yeddo is not worth mention. Like many other 

 old good things, gardening is fast dying out in 

 Japan, and can only be spoken of as a thing of 

 the past." 



An Enormous Variety of Wistaria. — A cor- 

 respondent of the Garden, writing of Japan, says : 



" A fine Pinus koraiensis, trained into the 

 shape of a Japanese junk in full sail, is at one 

 end of the garden, and the priest who was in at- 

 tendance told us that it had taken 500 years to 

 train it. It was about 25 feet long and 10 feet 

 wide, a perfect mass of foliage. I visited many 

 other pagodas and temple.*, some wilh gardens 

 celebrated for Paeonies, some Cherries, and some 

 for the Wistaria. One variety I saw had racemes 

 four feet long." 



A raceme "four feet" long, and a Pine tree 

 ''five hundred years old," might lead one to in- 

 quire whether our figures have the same mean- 

 ing in that singular land. 



A New Columbine. — If last autumn I sent to 

 any of our correspondents in Europe a Colum- 

 bine marked " Aquilegia sp., from Mexico (Dr. 

 Palmer), flowers white and yellow," it is a new 

 species, named by Sereno Watson, A. longissima. 

 Dr. Palmer discovered it in 1880 on the moun- 

 tains of Northern Mexico, and secured dried 

 specimens for the herbarium and a few seeds for 

 the garden. I raised a nice lot of plants from 

 these seeds, and wintered them in a cold frame 

 where they were bound in a cake of ice from 

 last December till March 1st. Apparently they 

 are as hardy as our other Columbines, and 



