December 16, 1896.] 



Garden and Forest. 



501 



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 16, 1896. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



New 



Editorial Articles: — Municipal Playgrounds 



Chinese Soap- trees 



Forest Conditions in the Southern Sierras Frank M. Gallaher. 



Shall We have a Bureau of Plant Registration? Professor L. C. Corbett. 



OR Little-known Plants: — Dog-tooth Violets on Mount Ranier. (With 

 figure.) 



Aster longifolius, Lam (With figure.) Merritt L. Fernald. 



Cultural Department: — Mexican Laelias K. O. Orpet. 



Care of Frames in Winter W. N. Craig. 



Sternbergia macrantha J. N. Gerard. 



Correspondence : — Early California Oranges William M. Tisdale. 



Meetings of Societies : — Vermont Horticultural Meeting 



Recent Publications 



Notes.. 



Ili ustrations : — Dog-tooth Violets on Mount Ranier, Fig. 72 , 



Aster longifolius, Lam., Fig. 73 



\CE. 



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Municipal Playgrounds. 



DURING the last twenty-five years the movement of 

 population has been from the country to the city, 

 and the rapidity with which American and European cities 

 have increased in size during this period is marvelous. 

 This movement has been even greater in Europe than it is 

 in America, although we are apt to regard the growth of 

 some of our western cities as unparalleled ; and in Europe, 

 at least, the effort to improve the condition of urban popu- 

 lations has kept pace with their growth. The last ten or 

 fifteen years have witnessed substantial reforms, too, in the 

 management of American cities, and if these efforts toward 

 reform have not always been successful their failure can 

 be largely traced to political conditions rather than to want 

 of zeal and intelligence in the reformers. 



In modern municipal equipment much provision is made 

 for the instruction and amusement of children, and in most 

 modernized European cities large sums of money have 

 been expended in procuring open spaces for them in dis- 

 tricts of congested population. Mr. Albert Shaw, in his 

 Municipal Gover?imenl in Great Britain, in describing the 

 methods and results of modern London management, 

 points out as remarkable " the manner in which the 

 committee on parks has made provision for the athletic 

 culture of young Londoners of both sexes, and for their 

 natural and healthful devotion to outdoor sports. Cricket- 

 grounds and football-grounds, literally by the thousand, 

 have been laid out, besides many hundreds of tennis- 

 courts, and various golf and hockey grounds. The council 

 committee has not merely provided these opportunities for 

 recreation, but it has gone so far as sedulously to supervise 

 the use of the cricket grounds and other playgrounds, to 

 the end that the largest possible number of young people 

 may get the best attainable results of pleasure and physical 

 development from their use. The council has imitated the 

 Continental cities in making provision for music in the parks 

 and its numerous subsidized bands are giving more than 

 a thousand open-air concerts each season. It has suc- 

 ceeded in making the parks so attractive that several mil- 



lion persons each year are now deriving pleasure either 

 from participation in the games, attendance at the concerts 

 or in other similar ways. The preservation of several very 

 large outlying tracts of wooded park land, together with 

 the opening up of numerous larger and smaller public 

 pleasure-grounds in every district of the huge metropolis, 

 has now made it certain that the growth of London can 

 never shut off the children of future generations from access 

 to the grass and trees and open-air sports" ; and from his 

 work on the Municipal Governments of Continental Europe, 

 it may be learned that in modern Paris and Berlin, Vienna, 

 Hamburg and many other German cities, abundant pro- 

 vision has been made for the recreation and refreshment 

 of all classes of people in numerous and carefully located 

 small parks, squares, playgrounds and other open spaces. 



In this country, where much has been done in the last 

 forty years in providing our cities with large rural parks, 

 the establishment of playgrounds in connection with urban 

 schoolhouses, and small parks or playgrounds in congested 

 districts, has been singularly neglected. In this city, how- 

 ever, two admirable small parks have recently been opened 

 in the most crowded parts of the East Side, the land for 

 others has been taken, and New York has legislative 

 authority to expend a million dollars a year for this pur- 

 pose. Two completed East Side parks at Mulberry Bend 

 and Corlear's Hook are, however, small parks and not true 

 playgrounds — real oases in a veritable desert of squalor, 

 with fresh green grass and trees and flowering shrubs. 

 Green grass is always beautiful, and in the midst of a ten- 

 ement-house district it is doubly refreshing ; but children 

 cannot play on turf without destroying it, and if these parks 

 are to be kept fresh and green the edict to keep off the 

 grass must be sternly enforced ; and it is a question worth 

 the attention, perhaps, of municipal reformers whether open 

 spaces in such districts would not better supply the public 

 needs if a large part of their surface was covered with 

 gravel or asphalt on which children could play freely, the 

 grass and trees being confined to a narrow marginal border. 



What has already been done in this city in providing 

 open spaces is, of course, still very inadequate, but it is 

 more than has been accomplished in any other large 

 American city. Brooklyn has a noble playground of forty 

 acres of beautiful level turf beyond Prospect Park, but it is 

 still remote from the centres of greatest population, and 

 little has been done to secure open spaces in the heart of 

 the city or to provide for them on its rapidly advancing 

 borders. This is true, too, of Philadelphia, Chicago, Balti- 

 more, St. Louis and San Francisco. These cities are now 

 admirably provided with large parks and with grass-cov- 

 ered squares, but no adequate provision has been made in 

 any of them for convenient playgrounds for the children of 

 the poor. Boston and its suburbs, judging by the ratio of 

 park area to population, is the best parked community in 

 the world, but in the great park system of the New England 

 capital little attention has been paid to the question of play- 

 grounds. The city itself has spent in a comparatively short 

 time $12,000,000 on the city parks. It has one admirable 

 large playground in Franklin Field, situated, however, in 

 what is now a remote and comparatively inaccessible dis- 

 trict, beyond walking distance for a majority of the school- 

 children of the city, and between the Common, now too 

 small and too much used to serve as a playground, and 

 Franklin Park, a distance of about seven miles through 

 the parks, no provision whatever has been made for 

 playgrounds. This serious objection to the Boston park 

 system may, however, still l>e remedied, and Mayor 

 Ouincy, who is alive to the importance of this subject, will, 

 it is to be hoped, make his administration memorable by 

 inaugurating a general system of conveniently located 

 playgrounds and open spaces. The little town of Brook- 

 line, which is adjacent to boston on the south-west, has 

 already set a lmiocI example by placing $100,000 in the hands 

 of its Park Commission to secure land in the less thickly 

 populated parts of the (own for the benefit of future gen- 

 erations of children, the more densely populated districts 



