February 5, 1896.J 



Garden and Forest. 



5i 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office: Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducted by Professor C. S. Sargent. 



ENTERED AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER AT THE POST-OFFICE AT NEW YORK, N. Y. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 1896. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Article: — PlaneTrees. (With figure.) 51 



Forest Lands in Massachusetts Professor C. S. Plumb. 52 



Foreign Correspondence : — London Letter IV. Watson. 



Cultural Department: — Hybridizing Nymphaeas G. IV. Oliver. 



Orchid Notes R. Cameron. 



Forcing Hybrid Perpetual Roses William Scott. 



Carnation Notes IV. N. Craig. 



Correspondence : — California Oranges and the Frost Wm. M. Tisdale. 



Notes from Southern California Edmund D. Sturtevant. 



Irrigation in Horticulture H. M. Eagle. 



Meetings of Societies : — Nebraska State Horticultural Society. — H 



The Western New York Horticultural Society. — II 



American Forestry Association 



Notes 



Illustration : — The Western Plane, Platanus occidentalis, Fig. 6 55 



5= 



53 

 54 

 55 

 5i 

 56 

 57 

 57 

 5S 

 58 

 59 



Plane Trees. 



10NG before Xerxes encircled the Plane-tree of Lycia 

 __j with a band of gold to mark his admiration for its 

 beauty the peoples of the east venerated these trees for 

 their massive trunks and wide umbrageous crowns of beau- 

 tiful and cheerful foliage. The Persians, and after them the 

 Greeks, formed their groves and shaded their dwellings 

 with Plane-trees, which were the first shade-trees planted 

 by the inhabitants of the valleys of north-western India. 

 The Romans, who shared with the Greeks their admiration 

 for the Plane-tree, carried it to Europe and planted it in all 

 the southern countries which they overran. This Plane- 

 tree of the east is Platanus orientalis, and its native land 

 extends from the Grecian islands and peninsula to Afghan- 

 istan and Cashmere. The Oriental Plane is one of the 

 noblest of trees, and fabulous stories are told of the great 

 age, the enormous trunks and the far-spreading branches of 

 some old specimens. Such stories are, perhaps, somewhat 

 exaggerated, although large Plane-trees still exist in eastern 

 Europe. A portrait of one of these old trees, now standing 

 in the court of the Janissaries in the old Seraglio, in Con- 

 stantinople, was published in our third volume, and gives 

 an idea of the size this tree attains and the massiveness it 

 preserves, even in very old age. The Oriental Plane is still 

 the favorite shade-tree of southern Europe, where for two 

 centuries, at least, it has been planted in the streets and 

 squares of modern cities. It was brought to this country 

 not very long ago, probably, and thrives in all the middle 

 states, where it has proved itself an excellent street-tree ; 

 and it supports even the climate of New England. 



In the flora of the Old World there is a single member 

 of the genus Platanus, or Plane-tree, and North America 

 now contains the others, only four or five in number, 

 although the genus was once more widely distributed and 

 richer in species, and during the tertiary period of the 

 world's existence grew in Greenland and Arctic America, 

 and then spreading southward inhabited central Europe 

 and midcontinental North America, regions where no Plane- 

 trees now occur. The entire absence of these trees from 

 the flora of.eastern Asia is an anomaly in plant geography 



which is not easy to explain, for tertiary plants of circum- 

 polar distribution which have survived to the present time, 

 like Platanus, are generally found in the existing floras of 

 eastern America and eastern Asia, and it is exceptional to 

 find one of these genera represented only in North America 

 and Europe. 



There are strong points of resemblance in all the trees of 

 this genus ; the structure of their flowers and fruits is prac- 

 tically identical ; they all grow to a very large size, with 

 enormous stems covered below with dark scaly bark, and 

 above and on the branches with smooth, thin, light gray 

 or greenish bark separating easily in great thin scales, 

 which, in falling, expose large irregular surfaces of the pale 

 yellow, whitish or greenish inner bark ; they all produce the 

 same peculiar leaf-buds enclosed in summer in cavities of 

 the enlarged bases of the leaf-stalks, and their lobed leaves 

 are all of ample size and of the same color and texture ; the 

 wood of all the Plane-trees is hard, heavy, light red-brown, 

 and contains broad and very conspicuous medullary rays, 

 which make it attractive as a furniture wood and. for the 

 interior finish of houses ; and it is only by the shape of the 

 leaves and by the amount and character of the pubescence 

 which clothes their lower surface that the different species 

 can be distinguished. 



Of the Plane-trees of the New World three species grow 

 within the territory of the United States and two exclu- 

 sively in Mexico. Of the Mexican species one is a little- 

 known and rather problematical tree of the south ; the 

 other, Populus Mexicana, inhabits Nuovo Leon and the 

 states to the south of it. This tree is frequently planted in 

 the plazas of the cities of north-eastern Mexico, and is 

 perhaps the handsomest of all Plane-trees, the under sur- 

 face of the mature leaves being clothed with a thick coat 

 of snowy-white tomentum which, as they flutter in the 

 wind, makes a beautiful contrast with the dark, rich green 

 of their upper surface. This tree, although it has been long 

 known to botanists, seems to have escaped the attention of 

 the horticulturists of southern Europe, where it may be 

 expected to flourish and become an ornamental tree of the 

 first class. 



Of the species of the United States the most widely dis- 

 tributed, the largest and the best-known is Platanus occi- 

 dentalis of the east. Although not the tallest deciduous- 

 leaved tree of the United States, perhaps, it is the most 

 massive of them all, and the largest tree which grows on 

 the continent east of the California Sierra Nevada. On the 

 rich bottom-lands of the basin of the lower Ohio River the 

 Plane-tree sometimes attains the height of one hundred 

 and seventy feet, and forms a trunk ten or eleven feet in 

 diameter above its much-swollen base. Trunks of this 

 size are usually hollow from old age, and such great trees, 

 which were common when the Mississippi Valley was first 

 settled by white men, are now rare ; and each year sees 

 their numbers decrease. In the second volume of this 

 journal the portraits of two of these trees growing on the 

 bottoms near the junction of the White River with the 

 Wabash were published, and on page 55 of the present 

 issue will be found that of another tree in the same region 

 made from a photograph for which we are indebted to 

 Dr. Jacob Schneck, of Mount Carmel, Illinois, the centre 

 of the richest and one of the most interesting tree regions 

 of this country. 



Platanus occidentalis is one of the common inhabitants 

 of the borders of streams and lakes and of rich bottom- 

 lands, and is distributed from southern Maine to the north- 

 ern shores of Lake Ontario and to eastern Nebraska, and 

 southward to Florida and western Texas. It is occasion- 

 ally cultivated in the eastern states and in Europe, although 

 as a planted tree it is much less common than the ; 

 World Plane, which is a more desirable street and park 

 tree here, as our native species suffers more seriously from 

 a fungus which every spring destroys the young loaves in 

 the seaboard states, causing them to turn brown and 

 wither, as if the trees had been by lire. This 



is so serious that the trees are often stunted and deformed 



