January i, 1896. | 



Garden and Forest. 



1 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office: Tribune Building, New York. 



Conduct by Professor C. S. Sargent. 



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



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 1, 1896. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Editorial Article : — White's Selborne 



Village Streets and Country Roads Professor W. J. Beat. 



Opuntia arborescens in the South-west. (With figure-) 



Professor J. IV. Tourney. 



Foreign Correspondence: — London Letter IV. Watson. 



Plant Notes 



Cultural Department: — The Garden in Winter J. N. Gerard. 



Plants for Winter-blooming T. D. Hatfield. 



Palm Notes N. J. Rose. 



Asparagus Culture for City and Village Lots Will W. Trary. 



Correspondence :— Class Work in Horticulture at Cornell Student. 



Notes from Southern California Edmund D. Sturtevant. 



Poisoning Plants Professor P. W. Card. 



Meetings of Societies : — Meeting of the Iowa State Horticultural Society 



Recent Publications ; 



Notes 



Illustration : — Opuntia arborescens on the Tucson Desert, Fig. i ... 



White's Selborne. 



WHAT are known in a general way as Books about 

 Nature have appeared in such abundance during 

 recent years, that one is rather surprised in taking- up the 

 announcement of any publisher if he does not find one or 

 two new ones, and, perhaps, a new writer in the list. This 

 may be considered a wholesome tendency in literature, 

 although the man who invades the privacy of nature for 

 the distinct purpose of writing a book will write like a spy 

 or an eavesdropper and try to tell what will please his 

 readers. The man who flees to nature as he plunges into 

 some other form of dissipation simply to escape the weari- 

 ness of spirit which comes from artificial life, will also cer- 

 tainly fail to find anything in what he sees, and still less in 

 what he feels, that is worthy of description. The man with 

 no faculty for clear-seeing, no imagination, no insight and 

 no sense of humor who writes about nature (and there 

 have been more than one such in our unhappy country) 

 cannot make an entertaining or a useful book, even on such 

 an inspiring theme. From books of this class it is a delight 

 to turn to an inspired book, one which throbs with the 

 pulse of a self-sustaining vitality. The Natural History of 

 Selborne was written before the love of Nature had become 

 a fashion, and Gilbert White did not write it as a matter of 

 conscience or of duty. No book was ever more spontaneous, 

 and it is, therefore, one of the few books which the world 

 will not willingly let die. It has delighted clean-minded 

 men and women for more than a hundred years, and the 

 beautiful new edition of it just issued by Messrs. Appleton 

 & Co. of this city is in no way a doubtful venture. Every 

 new generation will find for it a widening circle of readers, 

 and although the scene is laid beneath the soft skies of 

 southern England, it will delight the dweller in the prairie 

 states who has never crossed the sea as thoroughly as it 

 delights one who knows the Hampshire heaths and Sussex 

 downs by heart. 



It seems almost as much of an impertinence to attempt 

 any analysis of the charms of this delightful old book as it 

 is to offer explanations for our enjoyment of a woodland 

 walk. Indeed, the sources of our pleasure in the two cases 

 are identical, for in this book, more than in any other of its 



class that was ever written, the author entirely forgets him- 

 self, and very rarely even records an impression, but sim- 

 ply holds before the reader the exact pictures which present 

 themselves to his eye. We do not mean by this that the 

 Natural History gives no idea of the personality of its 

 author. There is the constant evidence of that sympathetic 

 kinship with every living thing which discovers love and 

 order and intelligence everywhere, and there is the faint sug- 

 gestion ofa pleasant humor. But whatwe really know of the 

 man — his sincerity and kindliness, his broad charity and his 

 reverent love of nature — is found in an atmosphere that 

 hangs over every page rather than in any distinct expres- 

 sion. Thoreau was primarily a poet, and he held that 

 "the poet writes his own biography." To him human life 

 was everything; nature at its best did nothing but reflect 

 the man, and, therefore, this recluse, who seemed to live 

 quite apart from his fellow-men, is now (he most distinct 

 figure in American literature. White was not a poet, 

 though he constantly trod on the borderland of poetry. 

 He chronicles phenomena for their own sake, and not at 

 all for their relation to him, and yet we cannot help feeling, 

 by some subtle sympathy, the impressions they left on 

 him, so that the man himself in his essence is set before us 

 in his pages almost as distinctly as if he, too, were con- 

 sciously writing his biography. Thoreau declared of him- 

 self that he was a mystic as well as a natural philosopher, 

 but there was nothing transcendental about Gilbert White. 

 He was no seer of visions and no dreamer of dreams. He 

 simply went about contentedly scrutinizing with the in- 

 quisitive eye of a child everything that came within the 

 range of his vision, and he wrote down these impressions 

 which came to him with all the freshness of new discov- 

 eries in language as simple and direct as a child's. He did 

 not attempt to lift his subjects into the higher realms of 

 imagination ; he never told the world what manner of food 

 they furnished for his spiritual nature. We cannot think 

 of him pronouncing a Fern as Thoreau did, "another 

 sacred scripture helping to redeem life," but he painted the 

 Fern itself so clearly that the reader can apprehend for him- 

 self its message of law and love. 



This brief contrast between the two men who, standing 

 a century apart, represent, perhaps, what is best in the 

 literature of nature, is made not to set one Jiefore the other, 

 but simply to give a hint of the range of their diversity. 

 Our literature would be distinctly poorer if deprived of 

 some of the eagle flights of Thoreau's imagination, and 

 certainly nothing was ever written to fill exactly the place 

 of the Natural History 0/ Selborne. No more sane and 

 wholesome book was ever penned. Jefferies was as keen- 

 sighted a naturalist as White, and much more of a poet, 

 but he had none of the serenity ofa strong nature, and his 

 work is feverish. He asked the reader into the fields to see 

 him worship nature, and then begged for commiseration 

 because his Deity would not satisfy all the cravings of his 

 morbid desires. Wi.ite does not say, as Thoreau does, that 

 his profession is to find God in nature, but no one can 

 accompany him in these rambles through Selborne with- 

 out feeling 



That he, and we, and all men move 



Under a canopy of love 



Uroad as the blue sky above. 



But it is impossible to say anything new of a book that 

 has delighted the world for so many years. There is no 

 need to speak of the singular clearness and beauty of the 

 style which is the very perfection of descriptive English, 

 nor to repeat that by his acuteness of observation White 

 anticipated one, at least, of the discoveries of Darwin. It 

 may be interesting to Americans, however, to know that he 

 realized that the waste from forest-fires was not so much 

 the wood that was burned as the destruction of future pos- 

 sibilities of the soil, on which point ho says : 



About March or April such vast heath-fires arc here lighted 

 up that they often get to a masterless head and, catching the 

 hedges, have sometimes been communicated to the under- 

 woods, the woods and coppices where great danger has ensued. 

 The plea for these burnings is that when the old coat of heath 



