424 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



THE MYRTLE WARBLER 



Fig. 3 The female of this species is not as brightly colored as 

 the male bird here shown ; that is to say, the yellows and blacks 

 in the plumage are markedly duller. 



than half a century, having published a number of books 

 and more than a thousand memoirs and papers devoted 

 to such topics, illustrated by many thousand figures 

 yet all this would not begin to describe the animal and 

 ])lant life that we would meet wath in our half-acre 

 garden ; indeed, it would not even adequately describe 

 one thousandth part of it. Huxley devotes an entire 

 volume to the Crayfish ; Mivart gave us a still bigger one 

 on the Cat ; and my own work on the muscles of a single 

 bird the Raven was equally extensive, carrying nearly 

 a hundred figures. So, it would require fully five hun- 

 dred big volumes to thoroughly describe the material 

 referred to in the last paragraph. 



In this country there are thousands of gardens of the 

 kind I have in mind, as there are thousands of others of 

 a different sort among the latter a class of garden so 

 trimmed up, so to speak, that all animal life and all 

 wild plant life has been completely eliminated from 

 them. Personally I prefer the wild variety, with just 

 a dash of modern cultivation in evidence ; one in which 

 it is no rare thing to see a chipmunk running across one of 

 the paths, or a red-headed woodpecker hammering away 

 on the side of the trunk of a tree with all else in keep- 

 ing. For the nonce we will call this garden our garden, 

 and in it we may indeed, we c3n often compare the 

 highly cultivated flowers with the wild varieties from 

 which they were, in time and through careful selection, 

 derived. Much of this floral breeding or artificial se- 

 lection was, long ago, done in the Old World ; but later 

 on American horticulturists have paid not a little atten- 

 tion to it. In this connection it is interesting to compare 

 the elegant cultivated strawberries at hand with their 

 wild relatives the latter being seen yonder in the un- 



touched corner of our garden (Figure 2), where, too, 

 some lovely wild violets grow (Figure 12), the latter, in 

 the estimation of many, quite outclass in beauty not a 

 few of their cultivated descendants. 



As we know, a large number of these cultivated plants 

 found in our gardens throughout the country manage, 

 through various kinds of seed-dispersion or otherwise, 

 to find their way back to nature. They are then gen- 

 erally called "escapes ;" and it is not long, a few genera- 

 tions perhaps, before their descendants have reverted 

 to the wild forms. Some, like the blackberry lily, change 

 not at all, its escapes closely resembling the plant as we 

 find it growing in our gardens. Upon the other hand, 

 the highly cultivated blackberry will, in a few genera- 

 tions, revert to the wild type as found growing in un- 

 cultivated fields and along roadsides everywhere (Fig- 

 ure 4). 



Plants of the genus Narcissus, of which there are some 

 twenty species, chiefly European, are also found in na- 

 ture as well as under cultivation. The lovely and highly 

 fragrant paper-white Narcissus is an excellent example, 

 and this kind is especially widely known for the reason 

 that many thousands of its bulbs are sold in flower stores 

 from one end of the country to the other. Most of these 



THE WILD BLACKBERRY 



Fig. 4 A favorite plant whidi with its fruit, its pure, white 

 blossoms, and pretty leaves, is beautiful to behold at all seasons 

 of the year. However, its thorns and its being a harbor for 

 chiggers are two of its drawbacks. 



