144 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 266. 



inaccessible position and to the fact that the wood of the 

 Horse-chestnut is not particularly valued by the Japanese. 

 In habit and in the form, venation and coloring- of 

 the leaves, the Japanese Horse-chestnut resembles the 

 Horse-chestnut of our gardens, the Grecian yEsculus 

 Hippocastanum, and at first sight might easily be mis- 

 taken for that tree, but the thyrsus of flowers of the 

 Japanese species, which is ten or twelve inches long 

 and only two and a half to three inches broad, is more 

 slender ; the flowers are smaller, pale yellow, with short, 

 nearly equal petals ciliate on the margins ; and the fruit is 

 that of the Pavias, that is, it is smooth and shows no trace 

 of the prickles which distinguish the true Horse-chestnuts. 

 The Japanese Horse-chestnut reaches southern Yezo, find- 

 ing its most northern home near Mororan, on the shores 

 of Volcano Bay, at the level of the ocean ; it is generally 

 distributed through the mountainous parts of the three 

 southern islands, sometimes ascending in the south to an 

 elevation of 4,000 or 5,000 feet. There seems to be no 

 reason why this tree, which has already produced fruit in 

 France, should not flourish in our northern states, where, 

 as well as in Europe, it is still little known. In northern 

 Japan the fruits are exposed for sale in the shops, although 

 they are probably only used as playthings for the chil- 

 dren. 



To the Maples the forests of Japan owe much of their 

 variety, beauty and interest. Not less than twenty species 

 are known in Japan, while in all of North America there 

 are nine, with six only on the eastern side of the continent. 

 None of the Japanese Maples, however, grow to the size 

 of real timber-trees, or can be compared in massiveness 

 and grandeur with several American species, which are un- 

 rivaled in size and beauty by the Maples of any other part 

 of the world. 



Some of the Japanese Maples are exceedingly common 

 and form a conspicuous feature of the forest-vegetation, 

 and others are rare and confined to comparatively small 

 areas of distribution. Several of the species I did not see 

 at all, and others in only one or two isolated individuals. 

 The most common of the Japanese Maples, and the largest, 

 is Acer pictum, a handsome small tree, not unlike our 

 Sugar Maple in general appearance ; it is one of the most 

 abundant trees in the forests of Hokkaido, where it occa- 

 sionally attains the height of fifty feet and forms a trunk 

 eighteen inches in diameter. It is a tree of wide and gen- 

 eral distribution in Japan, Manchuria, China and northern 

 India, and even in Japan varies remarkably in the size and 

 pubescence of the five to seven-lobed leaves truncate at 

 the base, and in the size and shape of the fruit. This tree 

 must be extremely beautiful when the yellow flowers are 

 just opening in May, for the large, lengthened inner scales 

 of the winter buds are then bright orange color and very 

 showy. The autumn coloring of the leaves I did not see ; 

 it is described as yellow and red. 



Of more interest to the lovers of novelties is Acer Miyabei 

 (see Fig. 24 on page 143), the latest addition to the list of 

 Japanese Maples. It is a tree thirty to forty feet in height, 

 with a trunk twelve to eighteen inches in diameter covered 

 with pale deeply furrowed bark, spreading branches which 

 form a round-topped handsome head, and stout branchlets 

 orange-brown in their first, and ashy gray in their second 

 season. The leaves are five-lobed by narrow sinuses, with 

 acute entire, irregularly two to three-lobed divisions, cor- 

 date or almost truncate at the base, five-ribbed, conspicu- 

 ously reticulate-veined, puberulous on the ribs and in their 

 axils on the upper surface, and more or less covered with 

 ferrugineous pubescence on the lower, especially on the 

 ribs and veins ; they are dark green above, pale below, 

 four or five inches long and broad, and are borne on stout 

 petioles enlarged at the base, two to seven inches in length, 

 and thickly coated while young with pale hairs, which also 

 cover the unfolding leaves. The flowers, which are yellow, 

 are produced on slender pedicels in few-flowered, short- 

 stalked corymbs. The sepals and petals are narrow, obo- 

 vate, acute and ciliate on the margins ; in the male flowers 



the stamens, composed of filiform filaments and minute 

 ovate anthers, are inserted between the lobes of a conspicu- 

 ous disk, and are longer than the petals ; the pistil is minute 

 and rudimentary; in the fertile flowers the stamens are ru- 

 dimentary and shorter than the ovary, which is coated with 

 long w^hite hairs. The style, which is described as some- 

 what shorter than the revolute stigmas, is caducous. The 

 fruit is two inches long, with broad puberulous nutlets 

 diverging at right angles to the stem, and thin, slightly fal- 

 cate, conspicuously veined wings. This fine tree, which is 

 closely related to the European Acer platanoides, was dis- 

 covered a few years ago in the province of Hidaka, in Hok- 

 kaido, by Professor Kingo Miyabe, the accomplished pro- 

 fessor of botany in the college at Sapparo and the author of 

 an important work on the flora of the Kurile Islands, in 

 whose honor it was named in 1888 by Maximowicz.* 



On the 1 8th of September we stopped quite by accident 

 to change cars at the little town of Iwanigawa, a railroad 

 junction in Yezo some forty or fifty miles from Sapparo, 

 and having a few minutes on our hands strolled out of the 

 town to a small grove of trees in the hope that they might 

 prove interesting. In this grove, occupying apiece of low 

 ground on the borders of a small stream, and chiefly com- 

 posed of Acer pictum, our Japanese guide recognized at a 

 glance a number of fine trees of Acer Miyabei covered with 

 fruit, and surrounding the house of an officer of the impe- 

 rial Forest Department who had been living for years in 

 entire ignorance of the fact that he was enjoying the shade 

 of one of the rarest trees in Japan. The find was a lucky 

 one, for Iwanigawa is a long way from the station where 

 this species had been discovered, and full-grown fruit had 

 not been seen before ; and from these trees I obtained later 

 from Professor Miyabe a supply of ripe seeds large enough 

 to make this Maple common in the gardens of this country 

 and of Europe, in which there is every reason to believe 

 that it will flourish. C. S. S. 



.Plant Notes. 



Cypripedium Rothschildianura. 



AN illustration of a flowering spike of this distinct and 

 noteworthy plant from the collection of Mr. Hicks 

 Arnold, of this city, is given on page 145. The scape in 

 this specimen is twenty-one inches long, stout as a drawing- 

 pencil, dark and almost black, with a bold, upright position. 

 The petals of the individual flowers extend ten inches from 

 tip to tip and stand out at a right angle from the scape. 

 They are narrow and tapering, of a rich cream or yellow 

 ground and striped and spotted with an Indian-red purple. 

 The dorsal and lower sepals are almost equal in size, each 

 some four and three-quarter inches in length. They are 

 yellow, with dark purple, almost black, stripes, the lower 

 one being somewhat the lighter. The bracts are striped 

 like the dorsal sepal. The lip is striking in form, and its 

 color is a bright Indian-red, beautifully marbled and veined 

 on a lemon ground and shading from light to dark. 



It is several years since this plant was imported by 

 Messrs. Sander & Co., from New Guinea, and although it 

 is known as oiie of the slow-growing varieties, this three- 

 flowered scape shows that the plant is a sturdy one. C. 

 Rothschildianum is one of the thick-leaved varieties, and 

 therefore it needs more warmth than most of the Cypripe- 

 diums, and Mr. Arnold is to be congratulated on having so 

 vigorous a plant growing side by side with the neat little 

 C. Fairieanum and C. Wallisi. One great merit of C. Roths- 

 childianum is that its individual flowers endure for an un- 

 usually long time. 



A New Nymph^a. — During the year 1892 quite a list of new 

 Water-lilies was described, but I have seen no notice of 

 Nymphsea gracilis, except an incidental one in a recent letter 

 of Mr. Watson's from Kew. I flowered the plant last summer 

 and am well pleased with it. It resembles the N. stellata 

 type, has leaves about a foot across and flowers six or seven 

 inches in diameter. These flowers are very freely produced. 



* MH. Biol., xii., 725. 



