June 17, 1896.] 



Garden and Forest. 



249 



Notes from Southern California. 

 To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir,— The beautiful "Mariposa Lilies" seem more delight- 

 ful and satisfying each year. In a former letter I mentioned 

 Calochortus Catalinse as being in bloom. Following this came 

 C. luteus and its varieties. I have recently seen a bed of these 

 in cultivation here ; the flowers were larger and more abun- 

 dant than on plants in a wild state, and suggested choice 

 yellow garden Tulips on a branched stalk. Some of the 

 blooms when opened flat measured four inches across. They 

 were of a rich yellow color, with yellow hairs and brown mark- 

 ings in the centre. One particular plant bore flowers of an 

 old-gold shade. The plants were from fifteen to twenty-four 

 inches high and sent out scattering branches from the ground 

 upward, with one to two flowers open at a time on each 

 branch. If this family of bulbous plants could be successfully 

 grown in the eastern states it would certainly be a great gain 

 there. 



Romneya Coulteri is now in bloom in my garden. The first 

 flowers are generally the largest of the season. I have just 

 measured one which is six and three-fourths inches across; 

 its snow-white petals are beautifully crisped throughout their 

 entire surface. The stalks are seven feet high and of this 

 season's growth. 



Inga pulcherrima was often found in mixed collections of 

 greenhouse plants in the Atlantic states twenty years ago. 

 Eight years ago I planted it in my garden here, and it is 

 now a fine specimen some seven feet high. During April it 

 made a gorgeous show, being clothed from top to bottom 

 with its brilliant scarlet flowers, in form resembling an upright 

 tassel of silken threads. It also flowers somewhat sparingly 

 during the summer and autumn. 



Los Angeles, Calif. 



E. D. Sturtevant. 



Recent Publications. 



The White Pine : a Study, with Tables of Volume and Yield. 

 By Gifford Pinchot and Henry S. Graves. New York : The 

 Century Co., 1896. 



We welcome the appearance of this little book as a sign 

 that, beyond the general interest of laymen in forestry mat- 

 ters, there is supposed to exist now sufficient interest in the 

 technical side of forestry to warrant such entirely technical 

 discussion as the one before us. The lumber business has 

 relied hitherto, and, no doubt, will continue for some time 

 to rely, upon the crudest exploitation or cutting over of the 

 virgin woodlands, without any idea of devoting time or 

 money or thought to their treatment as continuous crop 

 producers. As long as virgin supplies exist that may 

 readily be made accessible, the incentive to a change of 

 this method will be small. We believe, however, that with 

 the exhaustion of the bulk of the White Pine — the great staple 

 of our lumber market — which is threatened in the near fu- 

 tue, an awakening to the needs and the possibilities of forest 

 production as a business may be looked for, when informa- 

 tion of this nature will be sought after more eagerly ; and 

 the booklet may serve to stimulate inquiry in that direction. 



Hitherto efforts to gather such knowledge have been 

 confined to official agencies, and it is, therefore, a further 

 ground for gratification that private interest could be induced 

 to furnish the funds for such an investigation. Although 

 the little duodecimo contains not more than 102 pages, 

 widely printed and margined, the construction of the tables 

 it contains represents an amount of labor which no one who 

 has not had to do with similar work can fully realize. We 

 cannot, however, admit that this is the "first systematic 

 description of the growth of a North American tree" in 

 view of the published reports by the New York. New 

 Hampshire and Maine Forest Commissions, which treat 

 more or less exhaustively of the growth of the Spruce, 

 albeit in a different manner and in some respects' less, yet 

 in other respects much more satisfactorily. Nevertheless, 

 this is a commendable effort of two young American forest- 

 ers to apply their knowledge of European forestry methods 

 to the study of one of our most important timber trees. 

 And even if nothing more is gained than to make clear the 

 point of view from which the questions of technical forest 

 management and forest finance must be approached and 



the manner of obtaining the basis for it, the authors and 

 publishers will have done good service to the cause of 

 forestry. 



In silvicultural direction the contents are rather scanty, 

 the main importance evidently having been laid on the 

 question of the rate of growth and yield of the White Pine. 

 This is a complicated and difficult problem in the evenly 

 grown European forests under management, much more 

 so in the very uneven conditions of our virgin woods, and 

 much more so than the authors have realized. Although 

 they repeatedly acknowledge the limitations of their oppor- 

 tunities and defects of their methods, they have failed to 

 fully appreciate the extent to which these defects influence 

 their results. They have, indeed, failed to realize the 

 extremely varying character of tree-growth, which makes 

 such wholesale averaging as they have employed entirely 

 unreliable, except with a very large number of data. Hence 

 they are oversanguine when " they confidently believe 

 that they (the results) will be found reliable, not only for 

 the region where they were obtained, but also for other 

 portions of the habitat of the White Pine." In this expec- 

 tation they will certainly be disappointed, fortunately for 

 the prospects of profitable forestry and of our best crop 

 producer, the White Pine, as we will be able to demonstrate 

 when the much more extensive measurements from many 

 localities collected by the Division of Forestry are pub- 

 lished, which will show their results regarding rate of 

 growth twenty-five and even fifty per cent, out of the way. 



The data, therefore, may, at best, only be used as ap- 

 proximation to conditions in the region of Pennsylvania, 

 where they were gathered, and for this purpose it would 

 have been desirable if more of the detail of the measure- 

 ments had been given, from which the reader or the prac- 

 titioner could have made his own deductions, avoiding the 

 many suppositions which have figured in the construction 

 of the tables, and which, in the absence of the possibility 

 of verification, to some extent shake confidence in their 

 value. In several directions it is impossible to make out 

 exactly what their method has been ; it would appear, for 

 instance, that while 160 trees were analyzed, no use was 

 made of these analyses in constructing the curves of rate of 

 growth ; these seem to be based on what is called the 

 average tree of the group, which in our uneven stands is a 

 most unreliable basis for standard values. 



It would lead us too far to point out in detail the flaws in 

 the procedure, especially as this would require explanations 

 of a technical nature, which our space does not permit at 

 this time. Suffice it to say in general that, while the meth- 

 ods employed may be adequate enough for rapid approxi- 

 mate determination of the contents of a given area, they 

 certainly are not admissible for the establishment of stand- 

 ard tables. The construction of yield tables of normal 

 growth can, indeed, not be done by simply dividing the 

 contents of an imperfect stand by its density, for the trees 

 in a normal stand develop entirely differently, and hence 

 are not, either in the number or diameters, height or 

 volume, proportionate to those of an imperfect stand. The 

 authors owe us, and would find it difficult to furnish, proof, 

 that for any practical or financial purposes, such as the 

 book claims to have been written for, " this method is suf- 

 ficiently correct." 



Nevertheless, while these flaws render the work of less 

 directly applicable value, and do not, as the authors sup- 

 pose, settle in the main the absolute amounts of the rates 

 of growth and production, the tables illustrate very well 

 the nature of the problem and give an idea of the relative 

 values. They also contain much of interest to the forester 

 and lumberman. The latter will especially welcome those 

 tables which exhibit the percentages of merchantable timber 

 at various ages, the length of lumber, the proportion of 

 sapwood and the contents of standing trees of different 

 diameters. 



We are glad that the era of technical forestry literature 

 under private editorship seems to be fairly started by this 

 publication, and hope that our criticisms will only serve to 



