February 26, 1896. J 



Garden and Forest. 



81 



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 26, 1896. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGR. 



Editorial Article : — The Mountains of California Si 



The Strawberry in New England G. E. Stone. 82 



Foreign Correspondence: — Orchids at Kew W. Watson. S3 



New or Little-known Plants : — Viburnum erosum. {With figure.) C. S. S. 84 



Cultural Department: — Vegetable Notes William Scott. 84 



Seasonable Notes on Chrysanthemums T. D. Hatfield. 85 



Pentstemons E. O. Orpet. 86 



Warming Tanks for Victoria regia William Tricker. 86 



Correspondence: — Daffodils in California Charles H. Sltinn. 87 



Bulb-farming tor the South-west Lorn S. La Ma nee. 87 



The Forest: — Forest Protection.— I GifforJ Pinchot. 87 



Exhibitions: — Eleventh Annual Exhibition of the Architectural League of New 



York. — I M. G. Van Rensselaer. 88 



American Carnation Society 89 



Recent Plant Portraits 89 



Notes 90 



Illustration : — Viburnum erosum, Fig. g 85 



The Mountains of California. 



THE two great mountain ranges of California, united at 

 the north by a transverse and broken mass of high 

 ridges, but otherwise distinct — the Coast Range rising to 

 elevations of from 2,000 to 8,000 feet and composed of 

 innumerable spurs and rolling hills, enclosing many long 

 valleys opening to the sea, and the Sierras separating the 

 great central valley of California from the deserts which 

 extend from its eastern base to the Rocky Mountains — are 

 the predominant features of the state. The Sierras have a 

 total length of five hundred miles, with a width of some 

 seventy or eighty miles, and several of the highest peaks 

 ascend to over 14,000 feet above the sea-level, Mount Whit- 

 ney, its culminating point, being the highest mountain in 

 the United States, with the exception of some of the Alaska 

 giants. One of the most beautiful of mountain ranges, it 

 possesses extraordinary interest in the history which is 

 printed on its ice-swept pages, and in the forests of coni- 

 fers which now clothe its slopes ; and in the fascinating 

 book whose title appears at the head of this article Mr. 

 John Muir tells this history and describes the forests, their 

 trees, and several of the animals which live among them, 

 speaking out of a full knowledge and with the feeling and 

 affection of a devoted lover of nature. No one has had 

 such opportunities for studying the Sierras, or knows them 

 so well ; and no one, it may be said, has done so much to 

 preserve their beauty by securing the establishment of the 

 Sierra Forest Reservations. Summer after summer, with a 

 blanket twisted over his shoulders and a bag of dried bread 

 crumbs and a pouch of tea at his belt, without a gun or any 

 companion but his own thoughts, he has tramped over the 

 whole range, tracing the lines of extinct glaciers and 

 exploring the highest peaks and the most remote and inac- 

 cessible gorges ; only descending to replenish his scanty 

 stock of food and passing long winters in a hut in the 

 Yosemite Valley in order to become familiar with his 

 beloved mountains and trees in winter as well as in sum- 

 mer. Interesting as is the story which he tells of the 

 gradual modeling of the Sierras into their present form by 

 the action of ice exerted through countless centuries, it is 

 of the Sierra forest and the Sierra trees, of which Mr. Muir 

 has succeeded in drawing pictures of life like accuracy and 



remarkable beauty, that we must speak to-day. A para- 

 graph like the following, describing the forests of the central 

 ^Sierras, which seem to live in the picturesque language 

 of which Mr. Muir is master, is a good example of his 

 method : 



Here, too, in the middle region of deepest cations are the 

 grandest forest-trees, the Sequoia, king of conifers, the noble 

 Sugar and Yellow Pines, Douglas Spruce, Libocedrus, and the 

 Silver Firs, each a giant of its kind, assembled together in one 

 and the same forest, surpassing all other coniferous forests in 

 the world, both in the number of its species and in the size 

 and beauty of its trees. The winds flow in melody through 

 their colossal spires, and they are vocal everywhere with the 

 songs of birds and running water. Miles of fragrant Ceanothus 

 and Manzanita bushes bloom beneath them, and Lily gardens 

 and meadows, and damp, ferny glens in endless variety of fra- 

 grance and color, compelling the admiration of every observer. 

 Sweeping on over ridge and valley, these noble trees extend a 

 continuous belt from end to end of the range, only slightly 

 interrupted by sheer-walled cations at intervals of about fifteen 

 or twenty miles. Here the great burly brown bears delight 

 to roam, harmonizing with the brown boles of the trees be- 

 neath which they feed. Deer, also, dwell here and find food 

 and shelter in the Ceanothus tangles, with a multitude of 

 smaller people. Above this region of giants the trees grow 

 smaller until the utmost limit of the timber line is reached, on 

 the stormy mountain-slopes at a height of from 10,000 to 

 12,000 feet above the sea, where the Dwarf Pine is so lowly 

 and hard beset by storms and heavy snow, it is pressed into 

 flat tangles, over the tops of which we may easily walk. Below 

 the main forest-belt the trees likewise diminish in size, frost 

 and burning drought repressing and blasting alike. 



In the chapter devoted to the forest all the principal Sierra 

 trees are described, not in the dry and often obscure language 

 of the botanist, but in the words of a literary artist who 

 has studied them in all their varied aspects; and of all the 

 descriptions of trees which we have read these are the only 

 ones which enable the untraveled reader to form, without 

 the aid of a photograph, a really correct and accurate idea 

 of the appearance of the tree in question. Take, as exam- 

 ple, Mr. Muir's description of the Juniper of the high Sierras 

 (Juniper occidentalis) : 



The Juniper is preeminently a rock-tree, occupying the 

 baldest domes and pavements, where there is scarcel" a handful 

 of soil, at a height of from 7.000 to 9.500 feet. In sucn situations 

 the trunk is frequently over eight feet in diameter, and not much 

 more in height. The top is almost always dead in old trees, 

 and great stubborn limbs push out horizontally that are mostly 

 broken and bare at the ends, but densely covered and em- 

 bedded here and there with mossy mounds of gray foliage. 

 Some are mere weathered stumps, as broad as long, decorated 

 with a few leafy sprays, reminding one of the crumbling tow- 

 ers of some ancient castle scantily draped with ivy. 



Here, in a few words, is a description which presents 

 the living tree to our eyes as clearly as if it was standing 

 before us as we read, and it is this clearness and simplicity 

 in description which seems to us to be the great charm and 

 merit of the book. 



Of especial interest are Mr. Muir's studies upon the his- 

 tory, distribution and age of the Sequoia gigantea, one of 

 the most interesting as it is the largest of American trees. 

 The Sequoia grows in a widely interrupted belt from the 

 middle fork of the American River to the head of Deer 

 Creek, a distance of about 250 miles, the elevation of the 

 belt above the sea varying from 5,000 to S,ooo feet. At the 

 north the Sequoia occurs only in small isolated groups, 

 which are sometimes from forty to sixty miles apart, but 

 south of King's River it is not restricted in groves, but 

 extends across the broad basins of the Kaweah and Tule 

 rivers in noble forests for a distance of nearly seventy 

 miles. South of the canon of the south fork of King's 

 River there is a forest of Sequoias about six miles long and 

 two miles wide. This is the most northern assemblage of 

 this tree that can be called a forest, the very finest being 

 found, however, on the north fork of Tule River. It 

 has long been known that in the northern groves there are 

 comparatively few young trees or saplings, and this fact 

 led to the belief, before the discovery of the southern 

 forests, that the Sequoia was gradually dying out. But in 



