1 886. 



POPULAR GARDENING. 



31 



TREECLIMBER'S TALKS. 



ABOUT THE BANANA OR MUSA. 



Last month an inquiry from a correspondent 

 brought out some remarks about the Mangoes, 

 a tropioal fruit not much known by us ; in this 

 article I want to speak of the well known trop- 

 ical fruit, the Banana. I easily remember when 

 the Banana was but rarely seen in this coim try; 



Fit/. 1. .4 Bttna ltd Plant hefoi-etfu' Fruiting Stage. 



now it is one of the most common and cheap- 

 est of fruits everywhere with us, and this, 

 too, notwithstanding the great distance it has 

 to be brought. Most of our 



BANANAS COMK FROM THE WEST INDIES, 

 the Island of Jamaica being especially product- 

 ive of them; but they grow freely in all trop- 

 ical lands. The fact of their cheapness here 

 shows that they must be verj- easily raised, and 

 this is true, for even the wildest tribes in South 

 America and elsewhere succeed well in raising 

 them. All the labor needed in cultivating the 

 fruit consists in setting out the suckers that 

 form the trees. Nature being then left to do the 

 rest until the time to cut the fruit arrives. 

 I'his occurs within a year from planting, the 

 plant, or perhaps I should say the tree, bj' this 

 time having reached a height of about ten feet. 

 Where considerable intelligence is brought to 

 apply the suckers are set out regularly to make 

 plantations, with the trees about 15 feet apart, 

 something like our orchards, lu case iiriga- 

 tion is practicable (for the plants do the best in a 

 damp, cloggy soil) trenches are dug between 

 the rows, for the water. The planting of the 

 suckei-s is done with a primitive and ponderous 

 hoe. The yield per acre, even with the most 

 simple culture, is between .50 and liO tons of 

 ripe fruit. No wonder the natives can almost 

 live on this fruit and then spare us large quan- 

 tities for, to them, almost nothing. 



But no doubt my young readers have noticed 

 that there are 



RED AND YELLOW VARIETIES 



of the Banana in the markets. About this 

 there is nothing more strange than is the find- 

 ing of both red and }-ellow Apples, Cherries 

 and other fruits in the markets. Botanically 

 the species of Banana which gives us thi most 

 fruit is known as Miisn sapii'iiliini, and of 

 this there are now, as a result of long cultiva- 

 tion, really many varieties. These, by close 

 looking, may be detected not only by the differ- 

 ence in color, but by variation in size, and in 

 the quality of the fruit. 



But the Banana is of consideralile interest 

 to the people of the North in another direction 

 also. In the various species of the genus Muxa 

 we find some of our most 



ORNAMENT.\L-LEAVED PLANTS 



for cultivation in greenhouses, and also for 

 planting in the garden for tropical effects. 

 Some of the kinds grown in hot-houses also 

 proiluce fruit that is most delicious. The dwarf 

 one shown in figure 2, known as M. ('((vendixhii, 

 is one of the best of these, as it is of low stature ; 

 hence easily accommodated. Should any of 

 my young friends visit some large and complete 

 greenhouse, or, in the summer,a fine ornamental 

 garden, they would, no doubt, see some plants 

 like the ones shown in the engravings, and 

 then perhaps they will remember that they ai'e 

 Bananas of some sort. 



THE TABOOED BANANA PEEL. 



A singular fact connected with the free use 

 of Bananas is the number of accidents occur- 

 ring from people slipping and falling by step- 

 ping on the peels, that are slung thoughtlessly 

 about. This of course happens more often in 

 the large towns than anywhere else. Indeed it 

 has grown to be such a real evil in some places 

 that it would seem from a quotation I will 

 make from a New York letter that in that 

 city ordinances have been passed against throw- 

 ing these on the walks. Here is what the 

 writer says : 



A few years ago Banana peels were slung 

 around New York about as recklessly as they 

 are now everywhere else in the countr}', but 

 one day a newspaper man in search of some- 

 thing or other to make a midsummer sensation 

 took up the Banana peel. The hoiTors con- 

 sequent upon the unrestricted throwing about of 



THE SLIPPERY SHREDS 



were glowingly depicted whenever there was 

 nothing more important to fill up jawning 

 columns; then some alderman, anxious to 

 curry favor with the newspaper, introduced an 

 ordinance making it a misdemeanor, punish- 

 able by a heavy fine, to throw a Banana peel 

 on the sidewalk. The la w was passed ; people 

 laughed and said it wasn't a bad idea at all. 



One or two people were arrested and fined, 

 because they thought the new law was only a 

 joke, and then the deed was done, and the nasty 

 yellow bit of slipperyness was forever a thing 

 of ill-repute on the streets of New York. 



Every street fruit-stand has to have conspic- 

 uously posted on it a printed copy of the ordi- 

 nance which taboos the offending peel, and the 

 police keep as sharp a lookout for 



VIOLATORS OF THE BANANA LAW 



! as for pickpockets and fast drivers. AH of 

 which adds to pedestrianism in New York, 

 one element of safety which probably is pos- 

 sessed by no other city in the countrj'. 



Timothy Treeclimber. 



spiders' threads cannot equal in substance the size 

 of a single hair. 



And if we further consider of how many fila- 

 ments or narts each of these threads consists, to 

 compose tile size we liave been computing, we are 

 compelled to cry out. <) what incredilile minuteness 

 is here; how little we kuow of the works of Nature! 



PET BIRDS, ANIMALS, ETC. 



Large kinds "f birds need lar^e cat^es. 



A shred of crisp CubtxiKe is enjoyed by Dick. 



Dogs olijt'ct to a real liath, l>ut it is needed occas- 

 ionally. 



Pets belong to civilization, in barbarism they are 

 unknown. 



Jacobin doves arc named after an order of 

 iKxided friars. 



In th© care of dogs a conmiou troulde is the giv- 

 ing of tf>o nUK'll meal. 



" Ma, ma, kitty's eat so much she tan't shut her 

 tail down"' cried one Georgia 6-year old miss in 

 alarm after teediug her young pussy to its full sat- 

 isfaction. 



In selecting rabbits look to the eye. It should 

 be clear. I'ound and full and large as posslf>le. .V 

 small pl^'-eye ^ives the rabbit a sluggish and sleepy 

 appearance, and is always to be avoided. H. A. P. 



Do Gold-fish Sleep! From experiments made 

 at the Stiuth Kensington (London) Aquarium it ap- 

 pears that while nutny fish sleep, just as land ani- 

 mals do. the gold-fish and some others never sleep, 

 but rest i)eriodically. 



Is the dove-cote comfortable for winter? We 

 often meet them otherwise than this. It is the 

 keepei-s' duty to lot)k to the general comfort in these. 

 .\11 the openings or places that can aid to produce 

 draughts should be closed up tight. 



Water for Canaries- Last month we touched 

 upon giving plenty of fresh water to all pets: but, as 

 Canary birds are so commonly kept, perhaps we 

 should have said a little more about these as to this. 

 One thing is certain, they too often are made to 

 suffer for want of water. You will see bits of sugar 

 and sponge cake and cracker and apple tucked all 

 about the wires, while the drinking cup will be 

 empty or filled with green water and "trash " which 

 no bu-d can touch. If the abused pet could speak, 

 he would say that he would like a little less grocery- 

 store aljout liim. and a good, square drink of clean 

 water now and then. 



Birds that Sing Tunes. It is very hard to make 

 a C'anary bird sing a tune, says a fancier. It takes 

 a year 4>f work to bring one to this state of musical 

 perfection. In Germany there are families that do 

 nothing else except train birds in this accomplish- 

 ment. It is done in this way: They always have 

 one bird that can sing a tune, and he is shut up in a 



"Will You Walk into My Garden?" 



This line we have been told in fable a spider 

 said to a fly. Spiders are counted among the 

 gardener's friends, because they are destroyers 

 of insects. But who has not been unpleasantly 

 reminded of their presence in the garden by 

 coming in contact, face, hands and clothing, 

 with their webs and threads, perhaps loaded 

 with drops of dew ; About these threads there 

 have been some interesting things discovered 

 that are worth noticing. Even as far back as 

 dOU years ago Leuwenhoek had the following 

 to say of them : 



I have often compared the size of a spider's 

 thread with a hair. For this purpose I placed the 

 tliickest part of the hair before the nucroscope, and 

 from the most accurate judgment I could form, 

 more than a hundred such threads placed side by 

 side coulil not equal the diameter of one such hair. 



If. then, we suppose svich a hair to be of a round 

 form, it follows that ten thousand of the threads 

 spun Ijy the full-grown spider, when taken together, 

 will not be equal in substance to the size of oue hair. 



To this if we add that four hundred young 

 spiders, at the time when they begin to spin their 

 webs, are not larger than a full-grown one, and 

 tiiat each of these minutes spiders possesses the 

 same organs as the larger ones, it follows that the 

 exceedingly small threads spun by these little 

 creatures must he st ill four hundred times slenderer, 

 and conse(iuently that four ndllious of these nnnute 



Fig. 2 



'rf /I'oiiaiiii (.Vii 

 in Fruit. 



tiark room with a young bir<i that has already shown 

 .some ability as a singer. After a while the young 

 bird begins to Imitate the other, and in the coui*se 

 of a couple of months he can sing the time very 

 well. Tlu'n he is taken away from his teacher anil 

 a nnisic box that jtlays the same tune is i>ut into the 

 room. Very often the young bird is unable to learn 

 a tune at all. Of course this makes the birds very- 

 expensive, and S(une bring readilly S.'iO Ut $.500. ac- 

 cta'ding to the extent and merit tif its acconq)lish- 

 inents. I have known of a Canary that could sing 

 three tunes, hut such birds are very rare indeed. 



