i6o 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 425. 



deluge from the naked hills, destroying life and property in 

 its course. Instructive, too, were the contrasting illustrations 

 of what a street-tree ought to be, and of an actual scene in one 

 of the Philadelphia squares, in which trees unsuitable for a 

 city planting had been selected and then butchered by an 

 ignorant pruner. 



All the addresses were wise and temperate, and the exer- 

 cises throughout were instructive and stimulating, just such 

 exercises, indeed, as are needed for popular education in all 

 parts of the country. 



Notes. 



Plums proved the least satisfactory of all fruit crops in west- 

 ern New York last year, and the reason assigned was that the 

 crop of 1894, the largest ever known, proved such a drain on 

 the vitality of the trees that they did not have strength enough 

 for a crop the succeeding year. A marked exception to this 

 rule was found in trees of the old variety Reine Claude, which 

 gave a full yield of as large and fair fruit as ever. 



Of the vegetables imported into New York during last week, 

 Bermuda sent 14 068 crates of onions and 1,346 crates of other 

 vegetables ; Cuba, 2,366 crates of onions and 440 crates of 

 other products ; the Bahamas, 871 crates of tomatoes. Other 

 receipts from the south were 4,600 barrels of kale, 12,700 bar- 

 rels of spinach, 7,750 crates of cabbage and 5,100 crates of 

 other vegetables, while 8,500 packages came over the Penn- 

 sylvania Railroad. Of course, this is only a partial record of 

 the supply. 



Strawberries from Florida have been quite abundant, but 

 the fruit is of irregular size and quality, though in fair condi- 

 tion. Some Hoffman seedlings of extra grade have come 

 packed in ice boxes and sold at fifty to sixty cents a box, at 

 retail. In other grades those carried in refrigerator cars have 

 shown the best average quality, and prices have been thirty- 

 five to forty-five cents a box at retail. Other methods of trans- 

 porting this perishable fruit are in freight lots in small ice 

 boxes and by express in open crates. 



Bananas are in plentiful supply in this city and sell rather 

 slowly. During last week 49,900 bunches were imported here, 

 against 63,500 bunches during the corresponding week a year 

 ago. They sell for eighty-five cents to $1.35 a bunch on the 

 docks in truck-loads. Cocoanuts, also, are plentiful — a cargo 

 of 398,000 from St. Andreas having arrived a few days ago, 

 besides the large stock on hand. San Bias, St. Andreas, Bar- 

 acoa and Kingston are the forwarding ports, and prices here 

 range from $24.00 to $30,00 a thousand. 



A very complete handbook on Indian Corn is contained in 

 the report of the Kansas State Board of Agriculture for the 

 quarter ending March 31st of this year. It fills more than one 

 hundred pages, and has been written by experls in the various 

 fields, and contains a surprising amount of information upon 

 such, points as cultivating and handling the crop, harvesting 

 and storing the fodder, the merits of different varieties, the 

 feeding value of the meal, diseases of the plant, etc. This is 

 followed by a briefer treatise on the Sorghums and their use 

 both for grain and for forage as estimated by Kansas growers. 

 It is a useful little pamphlet, and yet the Secretary of the Board 

 of Agriculture has not found it worth indexing. 



Some time ago we gave a brief description of Physalis Fran- 

 chetti, a near relative of P. Alkekengi, often seen in old gar- 

 dens, where it is called the Winter Cherry or the Strawberry 

 Tomato, on account of its well-flavored fruit enclosed in the 

 swollen calyx. The new species was brought recently from 

 Japan by Mr. Veitch, and from a colored plate of it in the last 

 number of The Garden it must be a striking plant. The 

 calyx is about seven or eight inches in circumterence and of 

 singularly glowing colors — a mingled orange and scarlet of 

 varying tints. A group of these plants grown in deep soil 

 would give a rich and bold effect, and when cut the inflated 

 envelope of the fruit lasts for a longtime. A correspondent 

 of The Garden says that some of these fairy-like balloons are 

 still bright, although they have been cut more than a year. 



Along some of the more public business streets of Philadel- 

 phia, on market day mornings especially, interesting little 

 collections of woodsy herbs are offered for sale by colored 

 folks from out of town. One such little sidewalk-stand last 

 Saturday offered bunches of the spicy leaves of the Creeping 

 Wintergreen, or Checkerberry, which lacked the gloss, but 

 were almost as varied and brilliantly colored as Galax leaves. 

 Calamus, slender Sarsaparilla roots and the thicker Dandelion 

 roots, with the bark of Wild Cherry, Sassafras and Prickly Ash, 



all sold for some asserted medicinal value. Then there were 

 fresh Catnip, clumps of the grassy young foliage and roots of 

 Star of Bethlehem, leaves of Dandelion for salad, little nose- 

 gays of Trailing Arbutus, and plants of the same well rooted in 

 the glistening sand of The Pines of New Jersey, and patches of 

 moss. There were plants of Peppermint, too, the straggling, 

 nearly bare, stems showing little green and purple leaves on 

 the ends. 



We have alluded to the danger which threatens Niagara 

 Falls since several great corporations, eager to secure power 

 for nothing, are struggling for the privilege of taking water for 

 their private use from what is now a public stream. Attention 

 has also been called to the fact that surveys by the Govern- 

 ment Engineer seem to show that the level of the Great Lakes 

 has fallen within the past twenty years, and is still falling, and 

 it is interesting to inquire, therefore, what will be the effect of 

 the great Chicago drainage canal in the same direction. The 

 Niagara is the outlet of the lakes, and any lowering of their 

 level will, of course, be felt at the Falls. The American Archi- 

 tect doubts the propriety of draining a navigable lake for the 

 purpose of floating the sewage of a city down upon the people 

 of southern Illinois and the states below. But, besides this, 

 the whole country has an interest in the Falls of Niagara, 

 which will be affected, no one seems to know how much, by 

 the Chicago canal. 



According to a recent publication of the Department of Agri- 

 culture on Nut Culture in the United States there are about 

 250,000 Cocoanut Palms of all ages on the eastern coast of 

 Florida, some 25.000 of which are bearing. On the shores of Lake 

 Worth some 50,000 trees, old and young, are now growing, and 

 nothing can be more picturesque or graceful than the soft, yel- 

 lowish green leaves of these groves. Many of the leaves are 

 as much as twenty feet long and as perfect throughout as' an 

 ostrich plume. Florida growers bury the nuts until they sprout, 

 and then plant them in holes some two feet deep and twenty 

 feet apart. The sprouted nuts are covered with good 

 earth, and as the plant grows the earth is filled about it until 

 it is level with the surface. The tree is fruitful near the salt 

 water in Florida south of Lake Worth on the east, and Char- 

 lotte harbor on the west, including the keys. It begins to 

 fruit in from five to seven years from the planting of the 

 nut, but when removed inland it is not fruitful and does not 

 thrive. On Key West there are some trees over fifty years old. 



In Bulletin No. 40 from the Oregon Experiment Station, we 

 learn that for commercial purposes there are practically only 

 seven varieties of Apples grown in that state. Of these the 

 Spitzenberg is the most generally planted and the best liked, 

 and this is followed in the order of their acreage and reputa- 

 tion by the Ben Davis, the Newtown Pippin, the Baldwin, the 

 Red-cheeked Pippin and the Northern Spy. The first orchards 

 which were planted as minor appendages to farms where the 

 fruit was only grown for home use have been allowed to be 

 preyed upon by various pests until they are nearly valueless, 

 so that the orchard area has actually decreased in recent years. 

 New orchards are now being planted on a considerable scale, 

 and organized efforts have been undertaken to combat the 

 insects, of which the San Jos£ scale, the green aphis and the 

 woolly aphis are the most serious pests, and the latter can 

 hardly be annihilated since it lives both at the root and the top 

 of the trees. On the branches the woolly aphis can be con- 

 trolled by caustic washes, and it is to be hoped that some 

 variety of Apple will be found with roots that can resist its 

 attacks. 



It has long been a common opinion among farmers in this 

 country and in Europe, that where seeds are produced in pairs 

 one ot these will germinate the first year after ripening, and 

 the other will not germinate until the second year. Experi- 

 ments with the seed on a spikelet of Wild Oats, Avena fatua, 

 and the Sandbar, Cenchrus tribuloides, have shown that there 

 was no foundation for this belief, but with the Cocklebur, 

 Xanthium Canadense, it has been discovered that the germi- 

 nation of both seeds in a pair in one season is exceptional. 

 Very interesting are the details of some studies by Professor 

 J. C. Arthur as given in a paper read at Springfield, Massachu- 

 setts, at the last annual meeting of the Society for the Promo- 

 tion of Agricultural Science. He proved that neither of the 

 two seeds had the advantage over the other in any physical 

 protection, but he discovered at last that there was a constitu- 

 tional difference in the character of the protoplasm of the 

 embryos, so that one seed has a short resting period and the 

 other a very long one — that is, the seeds are distributed in 

 time, one of them germinating a year, at least, later than the 

 other, instead of being scattered in space. 



