December 9, 1896.] 



Garden and Forest. 



49 [ 



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. V. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 9, 1896. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles: — The Western Larch. (With figure.) 491 



A New Chinese Tree 492 



Climbing Plants in the Pines Mrs. Mary Treat. 492 



A Canon near Ukiah. — II Gtrl Purdy. 493 



Foreign Correspondence: — London Letter IV. Watson. 494 



New or Little-known Plants: — Lonicera semperviiens. (With figure.) 496 



Isoloma Jaliscanum .' Robert Cameron. 496 



Cultural Department: — Greenhouse Plants T. D. Hatfield. 496 



Greenhouse Plants in Flower Ed-ward J. Canning. 4Q7 



The Pear Slug G. Harold Powell. 498 



Correspondence : — Aquatics in California Edmund D. S:urievant. 498 



Chrysanthemums Out of-doors Danske Dandridge. 498 



Variety Tests in the Experiment Stations Professor Samuel B. Green. 498 



Recent Publications 499 



Notes 500 



Iliustrations : — Lonicera sempervirens, Fig. 70 495 



The Western Larch, Larix occidentalis, Fig. 71 497 



The Western Larch. 



LARCH-TREES are widely scattered over elevated and 

 _^ boreal regions in the northern hemisphere. They 

 make a distinct group botanically, with needle-shaped, 

 deciduous leaves borne in dense fascicles on short spur- 

 like, arrested branches, and erect cones formed of thin, 

 obtuse, persistent scales. Seven species are now recog- 

 nized by botanists. The type of the genus, Larix Larix, 

 inhabits high slopes of the Alps of central Europe and of 

 the Carpathian Mountains, often forming extensive forests, 

 either growing with other trees or mixed with mountain 

 Pines or with the Spruce at the upper limits of tree-growth. 

 A great deal of attention has been given to this tree by 

 silviculturists, and during the last century it has been very 

 extensively cultivated in most of the countries of Europe, 

 especially in Scotland, where large plantations have been 

 made by the Duke of Argyle and other landowners. The 

 European Larch was introduced into the United States 

 early in the present century, and it is one of the few 

 European trees which have flourished in the northern states, 

 where several plantations of this tree have been made, and 

 where it promises to produce valuable timber. 



The Siberian Larch, Larix Dahurica, forms great forests 

 in some parts of northern Russia and Siberia, and is com- 

 mon in the forests which cover the Ural and Altai moun- 

 tains, and in northern China, Manchuria, Kamschatka and 

 Saghalin. Larix GrifSthii occurs on the interior ranges of 

 the Himalayas at elevations of from S,ooo to 12,000 feet 

 above the sea, in Boutan, Sikkim and east Nepaul. In 

 Japan Larix leptolepis is a common tree at high elevations 

 on the island of Hondo, where, however, it does not form 

 continuous forests, but is scattered in small groves mixed 

 with other deciduous-leaved trees ; and northern Yezo and 

 some of the Kurile Islands are inhabited by a form of the 

 Siberian Larch which appears in our illustration on page 

 525 of vol. vi. 



Three species of Larch are embraced in thesilvaof North 

 America; the most important of them is Larix occidentalis, 

 the noblest of all Larch-trees, and one of the important 

 timber-trees of this continent. Discovered by David Douglas 



near one. of the Hudson Bay posts on the upper Columbia 

 River in 1827, it was mistaken by him for the Old World 

 species, and no attention was paid to this tree until many 

 years later, when Mr. Nuttall found it on the Blue Moun- 

 tains of Oregon and described it in 1849111 the third volume 

 of his North American Sylva, and it was not until thirty years 

 later that it was introduced into cultivation through the 

 agency of the Arnold Arboretum. 



The Western Larch, under favorable conditions, when 

 growing in low, moist soil, attains the height of two hun- 

 dred and fifty feet and forms a trunk five or six feet in 

 diameter ; in dry soil and on exposed mountain slopes it 

 has an average height, perhaps, of eighty or one hundred 

 feet and a trunk two or three feet in diameter. It is pecu- 

 liar in its long, tapering trunk and in the shortness and 

 smalhiess of its branches, which form a short and remark- 

 ably narrow and rather open spire-like head, which is 

 always a striking object in the forest. Mixed with Spruces, 

 Hemlocks, Firs and Cottonwoods on bottom-lands, and 

 with the Douglas Spruce and different Fir-trees on elevated 

 slopes, the Western Larch never forms pure forests — at 

 least to any extent. Its home is the mountain forests of 

 the basin of the upper Columbia River, through which it is 

 scattered at elevations between 2,500 and 5,000 feet, about 

 latitude fifty-three degrees north to the western slopes 

 of the Blue Mountains of north-eastern Oregon and the west- 

 ern slopes of Mount Jefferson one of the high peaks of the 

 Cascade Range in the same state ; on the east it does not 

 cross the continental divide, and the western limit of its 

 range is bounded by the summits of the Cascade Moun- 

 tains. In British America and on the Cascade and Blue 

 mountains — that is, in the north and in the south — the 

 Western Larch is comparatively rare and usually of small 

 size, and it attains its greatest perfection on the streams 

 which flow into Flathead Lake, in northern Montana, and 

 in the heavily forested region of northern Idaho and north- 

 eastern Washington. In this part of the United States it is 

 one of the largest and the most valuable inhabitant of the 

 forest. 



The Western Larch is chiefly valuable for three reasons : 

 The wood which it produces surpasses that of all other 

 American conifers in hardness and strength ; it is very 

 durable, beautifully colored and free of knots ; it is 

 adapted to all sorts of construction, and beautiful furniture 

 and the interior finish of buildings can be made from it. 

 No other American wood, however, is so little known, and 

 in the sparsely settled and remote region which is the home 

 of this tree it performs only an unimportant service to the 

 community. The Western Larch is also valuable in the 

 power of its seedlings to germinate freely and in the power 

 of the young plants .to grow in the shade of other trees, 

 which they finally overtop and subdue. Even a tree of 

 such vital force as the Lodge Pole Pine, which in all the 

 northern Rocky Mountain region speedily covers the ground 

 from which fire has swept the original forest-growth, is 

 mastered by this Larch. But the chief value, perhaps, of the 

 Western Larch is due to the thickness of its bark which 

 enables half-grown trees to bear without permanent injury 

 the heat of the fires which are fast destroying many of the 

 trees in the forests of the Columbia Basin. On the young 

 tree the bark is thin, dark-colored and scaly, but at the end 

 of about a century it thickens near the ground, becomes 

 bright cinnamon-red in color and breaks up into great 

 plates, the trunk of an old Larch-tree becoming magnificent 

 in color and markings. Something of the character of the 

 trunk of this tree may be seen in our illustration on page 

 497 of this issue, which is made from a photograph ta 

 last summer in north-western .Montana by Mr. Gifford 

 Pinchot, to whose courtesy we are indebted for the oppor- 

 tunity of reproducing it. 



Larix occidentalis has proved hardy in the Arnold Arbo- 

 retum where, however, plants on their own roots have 

 grown slowly and unsatisfactorily up to this time, while 

 grafts on the rootsof the Japanese Larch have made a rapid 

 and vigorous growth and have already produced cones. 



