I30 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 265. 



necessary part in the scene. It was needed in such a park 

 to accommodate great concourses of pedestrians ; and what 

 is needed in a park must, if skillfully treated, increase its 

 beauty by increasinjj the force and truth of its expressive- 

 ness. The Mall gives just the one strong touch of con- 

 fessed art which was required, in the centre of this wide, 

 naturalistic pleasure-ground, to prove that it is a public 

 pleasure-ground and not a stretch of pastoral country with 

 an excessive number of roads and paths, and not a private 

 domain. It was needed to show the exact artistic char- 

 acter of the general scheme, and to prepare the mind for 

 such other formalities and artificialities as are required 

 in a much-frequented public park. It says, in unmistak- 

 able accents, that the whole scheme is not natural ; that the 

 purpose of the neighboring landscape-pictures is not to 

 make people believe they are in the country, but merely to 

 suggest the country ; not to assume rusticity to but to 

 typify it ; not to affect naturalness, but to be poetically nat- 

 uralistic. 



In truth, while naturalistic methods of treatment are most 

 appropriate in the large urban pleasure-grounds of to-day, 

 there must be a difference between their treatment and 

 that of those beautiful natural sites, more remote from 

 the centres of population, which are now being reserved 

 in many places for public pleasure-grounds of another 

 sort. No really urban pleasure-ground, like the Thier- 

 garten or the Central Park, or Franklin Park at Boston, 

 could be a satisfactory work of art without some conspic- 

 uous formal features. For in all gardening schemes, as 

 well as in all architectural schemes, utility must be joined 

 with beauty in the artist's ideal ; and the franker the ex- 

 pression of a feature's utility, the better, as a rule, the artis- 

 tic result. With regard to such parks, at least, there can 

 be no doubt that the words which we quoted last week 

 from Andre are true : "To the composite style, which re- 

 sults from a mingling of the other two, under favorable 

 conditions, belongs the future of gardening art." And what 

 is evidently true in certain cases can hardly be assumed 

 as always false with regard to allied cases. What 

 must be done in an urban park may be done in a vast 

 variety of other works. Surely there is no essential oppo- 

 sition between the formal and the landscape styles of gar- 

 dening, although, of course, it takes an artist's hand to 

 marry them with any promise of a peaceful union. 



of the south, the inaccessibility of the swamps in which it 

 grows, and the difficulty of cutting the timber and floating 

 it to market, except when they are inundated by spring 

 freshets, having thus far protected it. With the disappear- 

 ance and increasing cost of white pine, cypress, which is 

 the best substitute for it the eastern states afford, will be 

 more used and more fully appreciated at the north. 



Cypress, as a building material, is discussed in a re- 

 cent issue of the S/. Loin's Lumberman. This wood, the 

 product of Taxodium distichum, is, according to our con- 

 temporary, one of the most satisfactory that can be used 

 in every part of a building. The price at which it is sold 

 makes it too expensive for framing, but for siding nothing 

 is better, its enduring quality making it for this purpose 

 cheaper than wood of less first cost. A roof made of 

 cypress is said to last a hundred years and to require little 

 repairing. It can be used for all sorts of inside finish, as it 

 combines the qualities of the best hard wood and is as 

 cheap and as easily worked as pine. It is not surpassed 

 by any other American wood for sashes, doors, window 

 and door frames, partitions, ceilings or mouldings. The 

 variety of its grain and color makes it suitable for furniture, 

 and gives to this wood a special value in the construction 

 and finish of moderate-cost houses where it is desirable 

 that the use of paint should be avoided. 



Cypress, although it has a tendency to "shrink end- 

 wise," as carpenters say, is one of the most valuable of the 

 North American soft woods and is not now as well known 

 at the north as it should be. In some parts of the south, 

 especially in Louisiana, it has for a century been the prin- 

 cipal wood used in the construction of buildings ; indeed, 

 the wooden houses of New Orleans are about all built of 

 cypress, which is also almost exclusively used for the large 

 cisterns with which nearly every New Orleans house is 

 supplied for catching rain-water. 



The supply of Cypress-timber is still large in some parts 



Notes on North American Tree.s. — XXX. 



Anamomis. — In the F/ora 0/ the British West Indies, 

 Grisebach established the genus Anamomis to receive a 

 small group of trees of the Myrtle family previously re- 

 ferred to Eugenia. It differs from that genus in the inflor- 

 escence, which is an axillary, dichotomously branched 

 cyme, and by the radicle of the embryo, which is much 

 longer than in Eugenia, which is best distinguished by its 

 very short contracted radicle. From Myrtus it differs in its 

 membranaceous seed-coat, large cotyledons, and shorter 

 radicle, and in the inflorescence, although Bentham, mis- 

 led, perhaps, by Grisebach's description of the embryo of 

 Anamomis, in which the radicle is said to be " basilar, in- 

 curved, approaching the top of the cotyledons," referred 

 Anamomis in the Genera Plantarum to the South American 

 Luma of Gray, a genus distinguished by its very long 

 curved radicle, although in other respects much like Ana- 

 momis, of which he made a section of Myrtus. 



In the silva of North America Anamomis is represented 

 by the West Indian tree which has usually been called 

 Eugenia dichotoma, and which inhabits the southern ex- 

 tremity of the Florida peninsula. In this plant the seed is 

 reniform, with a thin membranaceous coat, large fleshy 

 cotyledons, and a slender basilar, terete, accumbent radi- 

 cle a third as long as the cotyledons ; these are distinct, 

 large, thick and fleshy, obovate, flat and rounded at the 

 apex, or often contracted at the apex into broad points in- 

 curved and variously folded one over the other. The 

 cymose inflorescence is composed in its simplest form of 

 an axillary peduncle with a single sessile flower ; usually 

 a secondary peduncle (generally described as a pedicel) is 

 developed from the axil of each of two linear-acute bracts 

 placed on the primary peduncle immediately below the 

 flower ; these secondary peduncles are also one-flowered, 

 so that the inflorescence in its usual form is three-flowered, 

 the middle flower appearing sessile in the forks of the long 

 stalks of the two lateral flowers. The secondary peduncles 

 are also bi-bracteolate at the apex, and from their bracts a 

 second series of peduncles are sometimes produced, in 

 which case the cyme is seven-flowered. 



If the arrangement of Bentham and Hooker is followed, 

 this tree must be referred to Myrtus, but in Myrtus the in- 

 florescence is mostly one-flowered, and the seed, which is 

 enclosed in a thick hard coat, contains an embryo with 

 small cotyledons much shorter than the slender curved 

 radicle, and as in Myrtaceas the length and character of the 

 radicle is an impoftant character in limiting genera, it will 

 be convenient perhaps for this, as well as for geographical 

 reasons, to retain Grisebach's genus. 



Unfortunately, in removing this plant from Eugenia to 

 Anamomis, Grisebach did not retain the specific name, but 

 coined an entirely new one, which, according to modern 

 rules, cannot be maintained; and for his Anamomis punc- 

 tata Anamomis dichotoma should be adopted if the genus 

 is retained. The synonymy of our Florida tree, as it will 

 appear in The Silva of North America, is : 



Anamomis dichotoma. 



Myrtus fragrans, Sims, Bat. Mag., t. 1241 (not Willdenow, 

 teste Grisebach). 



Myrtus dichotoma, Poiret, Lam. Did. Suppl. iv., 53. 



Myrcia Balbisiana, De CandoUe. Prodr. iii., 243 (teste 

 Grisebach). 



Eugenia dichotoma, De CandoUe, Prodr. iii., 278. 



Anamomis punctata, Grisebach, Ft. Brit. W. Ind., 240. 



a s. s. 



