CHAPTER XIX 

 THE NEGLECTED AMERICAN PLANTS* 



IT is an old and familiar saying that a prophet is not 

 without honor except in his own country, and as we 

 were making our way this spring through a dense 

 forest in the State of New Jersey, we were tempted to 

 apply this saying to things as well as people. How many 

 grand and stately trees there are in our woodlands that 

 are never heeded by the arboriculturist in planting his lawns 

 and pleasure grounds; how many rich and beautiful shrubs 

 that might embellish our walks and add variety to our 

 shrubberies that are left to wave on the mountain crag or 

 overhang the steep side of some forest valley; how many 

 rare and curious flowers that bloom unseen amid the depths 

 of silent woods or along the margin of wild water-courses! 

 Yes, our hothouses are full of the heaths of New Holland 

 and the Cape, our parterres are gay with the verbenas and 

 fuchsias of South America, our pleasure grounds are studded 

 with the trees of Europe and Northern Asia, while the 

 rarest spectacle in an American country place is to see 

 above three or four native trees, rarer still to find any but 

 foreign shrubs, and rarest of all to find any of our native 

 wild flowers. 



Nothing strikes foreign horticulturists and amateurs so 

 much, as this apathy and indifference of Americans to 

 the beautiful sylvan and floral products of their own country. 

 An enthusiastic collector in Belgium first made us keenly 

 sensible of this condition of our countrymen, last summer, 

 in describing the difficulty he had in procuring from any 

 of his correspondents here American seeds or plants, even of 

 well known and tolerably abundant species, by telling us 

 that amateurs and nurserymen who annually import from 

 him every new and rare exotic that the richest collections 



* Original date of May, 1851. 

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