October 19, 1871. ] 



JOUEl^Ali OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GABDENEB. 



297 



and when I saw them two months afterwards were in a dilapi- 

 dated condition. It may be a satisfaction to "Au betoik " to 

 find others agree with him. — C. P. Peach. 



HOKTICULTUKAL PARIS IN ISTl.— No. 3. 



BOUKG-LA-KEIKE. 



I HiTE ever made it a point in visiting Paris to pay a visit to 

 this little suburb. I do not know anyone that I enjoy a Eose 

 chat more with than my good old friend Slargottin. Eongh 

 diamond though he be, he knows, I fancy, as much (or more) 

 of the Eose as anyone of my acquaintance ; and although I 

 would not take him exactly as a judge, yet he has such an 

 amount of Eose lore that he can always bring together informa- 

 tion such as a lover of the flower desires. Eat my visit this 

 year was not for this purpose. I knew Bonrg-la-E3in6 had 

 suffered much from the war, Soeaus and Yitry more so ; and 

 •although I was prevented from visiting the latter places, I was 

 np with the lark to get to the former, and reached my old friend's 

 quarters at a little after seven in the morning. 



Since my last visit great changes had taken place. He had 

 intended to have retired and to have put his amiable son Jules 

 into his place, had built in his garden a neat house whence 

 be could issue forth to superintend and advise ; but the war 

 -came, that hateful, horrid war, which has brought such misery 

 on many a French home, and many a German one too, and I 

 had to hear a mournful tale of suffering. 



Bourg-la-Eeine was occupied by the Prussians early in the 

 ■aiege, and many of the inhabitants left, amongst them the Mar- 

 gottins, and their home was taken possession of by the Bavarians, 

 and a mournful tale he had to tell of their doings. They had 

 battered down his walls, had made a place for the passage of 

 artillery and cavalry through his E^se quarters ; and where one 

 was in the habit formerly of seeing quantities of lovely Roses 

 or beds of seedlings, there were now only Cabbages and Kidney 

 Beans. These things were, perhaps, matters of military neees- 

 -essity, but their conduct in the house was unpardonable. Every 

 piece of woodwork was torn to pieces and burnt ; wooden chim- 

 aey-pieces, frames of looking-glasses, chairs, even staircases 

 were torn up and destroyed ; filth of all kinds was allowed to 

 accumulate, and this although there were heaps of faggots in 

 'the garden. It is such things as these that have exasperated 

 ■the French ; that have made such men as Margottin declare 

 that they must dream of nothing but vengeance ; that if it were 

 aeedful he would be quite ready to shoulder his musket and 

 march against the Germans. While talking over these things 

 they said " That, bad as our treatment was, it was nothing to 

 that which Jamain has experienced." Jamainis as well known 

 to all fruit-lovers as Margottin is to Eose-growers, and I know 

 iew men in his line of life for whom I have a more thorough 

 -respect ; and much as I thought of him before, the quiet and 

 dignified way in which he spoke of his terrible losses, and the 

 firm resolve which he evinced to make the best of things, greatly 

 advanced him in my estimation. It was only last year that he 

 took me all over his model garden, showed me his beautifully 

 trained Pear trees, pointed out with pride the success of his 

 treatment, and expatiated on the comfort he hoped to have in 

 his new house. And now Marina sitting in the ruins of Carthage 

 formed no inapt idea of our poor friend sitting in his desolate 

 and half-destroyed house. The Prussians had occupied his 

 place too, had destroyed all his beautiful Pear trees, had used 

 the iron trellises on which they were trained for gabions, had 

 ■cut up the trees for the same purpose, run trenches through 

 his fruit quarters, made embrasures in his walls, and hacked 

 his standard trees to pieces. But this did not fill up the mea- 

 sure of his sufferings. When the Commune took possession of 

 Paris the Government troops occupied the Prussian positions 

 at Bourg-la-Eeine, and poor Jamain's house stood directly in 

 front of the insurgent position of La Haute Brujere, the shells 

 iiom which pounded his house, and had it not been that a good 

 portion of it was made of iron it would have been completely 

 destroyed. 



The men of whom I have thus written are men of somewhat 

 extensive commerce and considerable means ; they have not 

 probably felt the pressure of their untoward oircnmatancea as 

 some might have done, but the smaU growers of Villejuif, 

 Titry, and other places have been utterly ruined, unless they 

 can obtain some compensation from the Government, which 

 seems more and more unlikely. The French themselves have 

 done much to destroy the sympathy that was being excited for 

 them, and the immense subscriptions to the new loans have 

 made it questionable whether a great deal of our charity was 



not misapplied ; but it is a good side on which to err, and I am 

 sure it has excited in the minds of French horticulturists a 

 deep feeling of gratitude towards their brethren in this country, 

 who were so ready to help them in the hour of need. — D., Deal. 



WELLINGTONIA GIGANTEA. 



The account of the big tree, which we copy from .7. Oiis 

 Williams's compilation of " Mammoth trees," first made its 

 appearance in the Sonora Herald, and thence spread with 

 wondrous rapidity, like our snow storms, from south-west 

 to north-east, till it flooded the Atlantic seaboard. Crossing 

 thence to England, in July, 1853, it appeared in the London 

 Atliencmm and the Gardeners' Chronicle ; and in December of 

 that year Dr. Lindley contributed to the last-named paper a 

 scientific description of what he assumed to be a new genus, 

 and proceeded to christen it the Wellingtonia, with the specific 

 name of gigantea. The California Academy had already noticed 

 it in their proceedings, and in America it had already been 

 called the Washingtonia gigantea. Thus there was every pro- 

 spect of a free fight between England and America in behalf of 

 their respective heroes. At any rate, it was a very pretty 

 quarrel as it stood. A compromise was effected through 

 French mediation. 



Endlicher had, in 1S47, described the enormous Eedwood, 

 and had given it the name of Sequoia sempervirens, in honour 

 of the distinguished Cherokee Sequoyah (better known as George 

 Guess), the inventor of an alphabet of his native tongue, con- 

 sisting of eighty-six characters, each representing a syllable, 

 which still exists, not only as a curiosity of literature, but as a 

 text-book for those who wish to make use of the Cherokee as a 

 written language. 



At a meeting of the Society Botanique de France held on 

 June 28th, 1854, M. Deeaisne demonstrated that the big tree 

 of Cahfornia and the Eedwood belonged to the same genus, and 

 proceeded to christen the former Sequoia gigantea, with the 

 approbation of the Society ; and the same year Dr. Torrey, of 

 New York, and Professor Gray, of Cambridge, endorsed this 

 nomenclature. Thus this aboriginal tree will be handed down 

 to posterity with a purely American cognomen, and science 

 exhibits herself as overriding all national pride and personal 

 jealousy, as the tree in question overtops the Oaks and Sugar 

 Pines that dwindle around its base. The interest excited by 

 this discovery elicited scores of scientific notices in different 

 languages. Seeds were sent to the Atlantic States and Europe, 

 and found to germinate readily, and there are probably hun- 

 dreds of thousands of these seedlings now in existence. Some 

 are in the market, entitled " gardeners' varieties." They 

 flourish with pecuUar luxuriance in Great Britain, and grow 

 with extraordinary rapidity. Numerous examples are cited 

 where they have grown over 2 feet per year, and have produced 

 cones when four or five years old. 



Bat while the Sequoia gigantea has obtained a world-wide 

 reputation, its near relative, the Redwood (Sequoia semper- 

 virens) appears to Professor J. D. Whitney, the learned and 

 indefatigable State geologist of California, to be even more 

 attractive ; and his description of it in his delightful " Guide- 

 Book to the To-Semite Valley," is so charming that I cannot 

 resist the temptation of making a pretty liberal quotation from 

 it. After speaking of the Sequoia gigantea, and mentioning 

 that its range is limited to the sierras, he proceeds : — 



" Closely allied to it is the Sequoia sempervirens, or Eed- 

 wood, which seems to be strictly a coast-range or seaboard 

 tree, something resembling one class of our northern Cedars. 

 Some of them are enormous, 50 feet in circumference, and 

 275 feet high. Mr. Asbumer heard of a Eedwood stump, seven 

 miles from Eureka, 38 feet in diameter, in which thirty-three 

 pack mules were coralled at one time ; and various others are 

 mentioned equally miraculous in their proportions." During 

 the stormy winter of 1861-2, immense numbers of Eedwood 

 logs were carried out to sea along the northern coast of Cali- 

 fornia. They were so abundant as to be dangerous to ships 

 150 miles from the coast. Numbers of them were piled up 

 near Crescent City. ProfSssor Brewer measured ten varying 

 from 120 to 210 feet long. One of 200 feet was 10 feet in 

 diameter at the base, and one of 210 feet was 3 feet in diameter 

 at its little end. Accurate measurements are wanting, but 

 there are many from 250 to 300 feet high. 



" Thus we see," continues Professor Whitney, " that the 

 Eedwood falls in size but very little below the big tree, and it 

 is not impossible that some of the former may yet be found as 

 large as any of the latter. In general effect, the forests of 



