November 15, 1893.] 



Garden and Forest. 



471 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office ; Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducled by Professor C. S. Sargent. 



ENTERED AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER AT THE POST OFFICE AT NEW YORK, N. Y. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1893. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles : — Francis Parkman 471 



What Shall we Plant? 471 



Botanical Notes from Texas. — XIII E. N. Plank. 472 



Notes on the Forest Flora of Japan.— XXIV C. S. S. 473 



Plant Notes: — The Chinese Red Bud in America. (With figure.) 474 



Foreign Correspondence ; — London Letter t^ W. Watson. 474 



Cultural Department : — Grapes under Glass .... . . 5 Win. Tricker. 475 



Some Work of the Season ...(. W. H. Taphn. 477 



Epidendrum radicans E. O. O. ^tj 



Exhibitions: — ^The New York Chrysanthemum Show 478 



Chrysanthemums at Boston 478 



Chrysanthemums at Philadelphia 479 



Notes 479 



Illustration : — The Chinese Cercis in Flushing, Long Island, Fig. 69 476 



Francis Parkin an. 



FRANCIS PARKMAN died last week after a short ill- 

 ness at his home, on the banks of Jamaica Pond, in 

 Boston. It doesnot come within ourprovince to speak of Mr. 

 Parkman's great achievements as a man of letters which 

 have added such lustre to American scholarship ; nor is 

 it our purpose here to repeat the story of the fortitude, endur- 

 ance and singleness of purpose which enabled him to com- 

 plete, under the most trying physical limitations, the work 

 which, as a youth, he laid out for himself, and upon which 

 he labored heroically during half a century. His life has 

 made the nation greater; and its example is a blessing to 

 every American. His love of nature was one of the strong 

 characteristics of the man ; he loved to woo her in her un- 

 tamed solitudes, and to paint in glowing words the beau- 

 ties of the forests and the streams, which were the great 

 stages upon which his characters played their parts. It 

 vitalized his pages and made his descriptions of our Ameri- 

 can forests of two centuries ago at once the most pic- 

 turesque and the most accurate which have been written. 



Every one who has read one of Mr. Parkman's histories 

 knows how he loved Nature, but many of our younger 

 readers, perhaps, will have forgotten that twenty years 

 ago he was a successful and distinguished horticulturist. 

 When the historian of the conquerors of the great lakes 

 and rivers of the continent could no longer follow their foot- 

 steps in the forest he found solace in the garden, where 

 he tried to regain his lost health and strength. It is 

 as a rosarian that Mr. Parkman is best known amons: 

 horticulturists. He was one of the first Americans to culti- 

 vate a collection of Roses upon scientific principles, and his 

 example has done more, perhaps, than that of any other 

 man to raise the standard of Rose-growing in America to 

 its present excellence. The Book of Roses, which he pub- 

 lished in 1866, and which embodies sound cultural instruc- 

 tion with an account of the different races of his favorite 

 flower, is still the best work within the limits of this field 

 that has been written on the subject. 



In 1 86 1, a small collection of plants, purchased from 

 a nurseryman at Yokohama by Dr. George R. Hall, was 



placed in Mr. Parkman's hands to propagate. This was 

 probably the first collection of plants sent directly to 

 America from Japan ; in it were several plants now well 

 known in our gardens, including the double-flowered 

 Apple, which bears Mr. Parkman's name and which is still 

 standing in his garden, several Retinosporas, Thuya do- 

 lobrata, Rhododendron brachycarpum, Andromeda Ja- 

 ponica, the double-flowered Wistaria, and bulbs of the 

 familiar Lilium auratum, which INIr. Parkman flowered 

 before any one else in America or Europe. 



To the cultivation of Lilies, which were always favorites 

 WMth him, he devoted much attention, trying to improve 

 them by cross-breeding ; in this he had at least one con- 

 spicuous success W'ith Lilium Parkmani, which he raised by 

 crossing Lilium auratum with Lilium speciosum. A paper 

 from his pen, published in the Bulletin of the Bussey Insti- 

 tution of Harvard College, records the results of his experi- 

 ments in hybridizing Lilies. In the improvement of plants 

 by cross-breeding, Mr. Parkman was always interested, and 

 many good varieties of Iris, Delphinium, Peeony and Poppy 

 were born in his garden. He was one of the first Americans 

 to grow a collection of herbaceous plants ; and his garden 

 was always full of interesting shrubs, bulbs and hardy 

 perennials. 



For a short time Mr. Parkman was professor of horticul- 

 ture in Harvard University, which he served faithfully for 

 many years as an Overseer and then as a Fellow, and for 

 two years he was president of the Massachusetts Horticul- 

 tural Society. 



In the development of horticulture in America, Mr. 

 Parkman's influence has been considerable and always 

 in the right direction, and of those Americans who have 

 practiced the gentle art, not one has brought to it a more 

 sincere love or a keener intelligence. 



What Shall we Plant? 



WHEN a man begins to plant his home-grounds, with 

 the primary aim of making a consistent picture of 

 the whole, or, if he is waser still, and designs his house and 

 its surroundings together so that they make one insepara- 

 ble composition, he should select every tree and shrub 

 and herb, not for its individual decorative qualities, but 

 for its value in helping to realize and express the ideal 

 house-scene which he has mentally created. His fences, 

 his walks and lines of approach, his stretches of grass, the 

 masses of verdure which connect his house-foundations 

 with the grounds, are all features of one scene, and they are 

 all sorelated'to each other that w^e should not consider the at- 

 tractiveness of single elements apart from the rest, but should 

 estimate their value as they help to round out the symme- 

 try and beauty of the whole. To create a good house- 

 scene is the work of a real artist, and artists of the first 

 rank are rare in every profession, more rare, perhaps, in 

 landscape-gardening than in any other of the arts of design. 

 But men may plant with pleasure and intelligence even 

 when they have not this high creative faculty. To secure 

 a collection of shrubs chosen for striking habit, or profuse 

 flowering, or because they are curious and rare, or simply 

 because they are vegetable anomalies, whose merit consists 

 in blanched or spotted or highly colored foliage, may not be 

 an unworthy ambition. And since the collector's regard is 

 for individual plants, he is not to be criticised if in his ar- 

 rangement of them his onl}^ aim is to show each one to the 

 best advantage, without any regard to the effect which they 

 produce when taken together. It is safe to say, however, that 

 any one fails to get the highest possible enjoyment out of 

 horticulture unless he recognizes some definite system under 

 which he selects and arranges his plants. If he is interested 

 in them simply because they are odd or novel he should 

 not delude himself with the belief that he loves them for 

 their beauty. He may obtain keener enjoyment from 

 vegetable freaks and curiosities than from plants which are 

 simply beautiful, and if this is so no one has a right to 

 protest against the indulgence of such a passion. The 



