292 



Garden and Forest. 



[KUMllER 281. 



cesses of landscape-gardening as the veriest Philistine, and 

 quite as blind to the good and bad work in this field. The 

 united judgment of a body like this, however, must cer- 

 tainly be in the right direction, for whatever may be the 

 specialty of each member, he can be addressed on the 

 broad principles which govern all the arts. 



The tield of the Sculpture Society with respect to outdoor 

 art is narrower, but it is still wide and important. It will 

 justify its formation if it does no more than direct attention 

 to our cemeteries until all the people learn that a monu- 

 ment to the dead, whether costly or cheap, always may 

 be and should be made a true work of art. It ought to do a 

 good work in checking the tendency to clutter up the parks 

 with bad or inappropriate statues and monuments. It should 

 keep insisting that high merit in a statue does not always 

 justify its admission to a park; that such a work ought not 

 only to be worthy in itself, but worthy as an ornament to 

 the park and appropriate for the special site selected ; and 

 that the proper placing of a statue in a park is quite as im- 

 portant as the intrinsic merit of the work. All this, in a 

 broad view of the case, means popular education, and pop- 

 ular education is slow work. It is not wise, therefore, to 

 look forward to any sudden ushering in of the millennium 

 of art. Nevertheless, when we consider that the members 

 of these associations are, as a rule, men of recognized taste 

 and training, as well as men of influence, and that they are 

 organized for actual work, we have a right to expect that 

 the public parks of this city, as well as its public buildings 

 and other outdoor features, will be more beautiful and more 

 useful for the existence of the Municipal Art Association and 

 the Sculpture Society in this city. 



Many complaints have been made against the concession 

 system at the Columbian Exposition. Some of the con- 

 cessions which seriously interfere with the comfort of vis- 

 itors have been modified, but the photograph monopoly is 

 unbroken and is likely to remain so, and the grievance is 

 not alleviated by the fact that the special privilege is held 

 by the son of one of the high officials in the administration 

 of the Fair. Every visitor who brings a camera to the 

 grounds is taxed $2.00 a day, and even then only hand 

 cameras of sizes not larger than four or five inches are 

 allowed. It is true that the beneficiaries of this monopoly 

 have paid for it and have, therefore, given financial aid to 

 the Exposition ; but a small license fee charged at the 

 gates and paid directly to the Exposition would undoubt- 

 edly have yielded more money and have allowed the vis- 

 itor to obtain much advantage from the Fair which he now 

 loses. The deplorable side of this (juestion is that perish- 

 able exhibits are passing away every day and no record is 

 made of them for future reference. In the Horticultural 

 Department there are new and curious fruits and flowers, 

 exhibits showing the influence of climate and cultivation, 

 examples of the landscape-gardener's skill, all of which are 

 ephemeral, and they can teach no permanent lesson and 

 become no part of the general stock of human knowledge 

 without pictorial illustration. It has been the boast of 

 the Exposition that it is to be an educational power, and yet 

 the only means which can rescue much of it from loss is 

 sacrificed in the interest of monopoly. One can hire the 

 official photographer to take pictures for him, but he pays 

 an exorbitant price, and is then not entitled to the nega- 

 tive. If the authorities had desired to obliterate many of 

 the best lessons of the Fair they could have hardly selected 

 a better method of doing this than by establishing this 

 photograph embargo. 



Notes on the Forest Flora of Japan. — XVII. 



THE traveler landing for the first time at Yokohama is 

 surprised at the abundance of arborescent Laur- 

 aceae, which here, with evergreen Oaks and Celtis austra- 

 lis, make the principal features of the woods which cover 

 the coast-bluffs and surround the temples. The most 

 abundant of the Lauraceae in this part of Japan appears 



to be the Camphor-tree, Cinnamomum Camphora, one of 

 the most beautiful of all evergreens, and probably indige- 

 nous in southern Japan. In that part of the country which 

 we visited, however, it had every appearance of having 

 been planted. Even at Atami, on the coast some distance 

 below Yokohama, a popular winter resort famed for the 

 mildness of the climate and for the geyser, which attract 

 many visitors, the Camphor-tree is probably not indige- 

 nous. Near the town is the grove of Kinomiya, where may 

 be seen what is popularly supposed to be the largest Cam- 

 phor-tree in Japan. It is really a double tree, as the original 

 stem has split open, leaving irregular faces, which have be- 

 come covered with bark. Between the two parts there is 

 sufficient space for a small temple. The larger of the two 

 divisions at five feet from the surface of the ground, and 

 well above the greatly swollen base, girths thirty-three feet 

 eight inches, and the smaller twenty-seven feet six and a 

 half inches. This remarkable tree, which has every appear- 

 ance of great age, is still vigorous and in good health. 

 Atami is celebrated for the skill of its workers in wood and 

 for the production of many small articles made from the 

 Camphor-tree. The hills along the coast are covered with 

 groves of Orange-trees, and in the temple-gardens were 

 many southern trees which we did not see in perfection in 

 other parts of the empire. 



On the coast of this part of Japan, Cinnamomum pedun- 

 culatum becomes a tree thirty or forty feet in height, and 

 on the neighboring Hakone Mountains ascends to eleva- 

 tions of a couple of thousand feet. It is a handsome tree, 

 with ample, ovate, acute, lustrous leaves, pale or nearly 

 white on the lower surface, and long-stalked flowers and 

 fruit. In the same region two other arborescent Laur- 

 aceae grow naturally — Litsea glauca and Machilus Thun- 

 bergii. They are both evergreens and are handsome trees, 

 especially the Litsea, which bears oval leaves sharply 

 pointed at both ends, silvery white on the lower surface, 

 and often six inches long, and near the ends of the branches 

 abundant clusters of black fruit. These two trees are the 

 most northern in their range of the Lauraceae of Japan 

 with persistent foliage, and they may be expected to thrive 

 in this country where the evergreen Magnolia and the Live 

 Oak flourish. 



The flora of eastern Asia is rich in Linderas, no less than 

 twenty species having already been found in the Chinese 

 empire and in Corea, while in North America there are 

 only two — Lindera Benzoin, the common Spice-bush of 

 northern swamps, and the southern Lindera melissaelolia. 

 Japan possesses half a dozen indigenous Linderas, although 

 none of them are endemic, and in the mountain-regions of 

 Hondo several species are common, and make notable fea- 

 tures in the shrubby growth which covers hill-sides and 

 borders streams and lakes. 



The most beautiful, perhaps, of the Japanese species is 

 Lindera umbellata, a southern plant, found also in central 

 China, which I only saw in the Botanic Garden at Tokyo, 

 where it forms a stout bush eight or ten feet high. The 

 leaves, which appear in the spring with the flowers, are 

 lanceolate-acute, very gradually narrowed at the base, 

 rounded at the apex, entire and often six or eight inches in 

 length ; they are lustrous on the upper surface, pale and 

 covered on the midribs and veins on the lower surface with 

 rufous pubescence. The fruit, which is a quarter of an 

 inch in diameter and brilliant scarlet, is produced in great 

 quantities in dense axillary clusters on the branches of the 

 previous year and ripens in August and September. As I 

 remember it, this seems one of the most beautiful plants 

 which I saw in Japan. It maybe expected to thrive in the 

 southern states and in southern Europe, but it will probably 

 not be able to support the cold of the north. 



As a garden-plant for this region, Lindera obtusiloba is, 

 perhaps, the most promising ; and we were fortunate in 

 securing a sufficiently large quantity of seeds, gathered at 

 high elevations in central Hondo, to give it a good trial. 

 Lindera obtusiloba (see figure on page 295 of this issue, 

 the first which has been published) often becomes a bushy 



