A Stanford Garden and Some of Its Tenants 



David Starr Jordan 

 Ex-President of Stanford University. 



Our house on the Stanford Campus stands apart from the other 

 homes and encircled by a dozen superb white and Hve oaks. 

 These trees, among the finest in the state, were preserved by a 

 former occupant whose abode had stood nearby. One of them, 

 a Hve oak, is of remarkable interest, being perhaps the largest and 

 most perfect "woodpecker tree" now in existence, and bored full 

 of acorn holes by the red-headed wood pecker, Melanerpes formici- 

 vorus. This bird, otherwise much like its eastern cousin, has the 

 unique habit of thus storing in the fall the long slender live-oak 

 nuts against the days of need during the dry season of Cali- 

 fornia. 



About the house we planted a great variety of trees and shrubs 

 which ultimately grew into a crowded, incongruous, but delightful 

 jungle. I resist my botanical impulse to name them all, notwith- 

 standing the fact that their appellations are as honey on my lips 

 and that nearly every quarter of the globe, equator and poles 

 excepted, has its representative. Among them the Australian 

 Callistemon ("Bottle-bush Tree"), the Minnesota crabapple, and 

 the Japanese cherry stand first in my affections. From Christmas, 

 at which time our spring begins, until June, when the fields grow 

 yellow, the thicket is joyous with bloom. In the fall the flame- 

 thorn with its orange berries tempts the white-crowned sparrows 

 to earlier and earlier visits so that of late they leave not a bite for 

 the robins who come in January, and who formerly regarded the 

 thorns as their sole preserve. 



Roses, of course, we have in abundance, with two beautiful 

 climbers which cover the whole front of the house and around the 

 garden extends a little orchard with a variety of fruit trees, set 

 off here and there by several sturdy plants of the "Barbary Fig",* 

 some of which were brought directly from Morocco, others from 

 Luther Burbank's wonderful nurseries at Santa Rosa. 



*A cactus with agreeable fruit which although like every other species of 

 cactus a native of arid America, has long been cultivated about the Mediter- 

 ranean. The Barbary Fig forms the parent stock from which Burbank has 

 developed numbers of interesting and valuable variants with red, white, green 

 and yellow fruit. 



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