512 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 303. 



reservations by the President of the United States. These 

 reservations are the property of the people, and they have 

 a right to demand that the army shall be used to defend 

 this property from trespassers or intruders v\'ho destroy 

 the woods or kill the game or in any way mar the beauty 

 or impair the value of what has been dedicated to their use 

 and enjoyment forever. 



The issues which now absorb public attention, and which 

 this Congress must meet, are grave and urgent, it is true ; 

 but the wisest possible action of our representatives in 

 regard to the tariff or the currency or taxation or our re- 

 lations with foreign powers, or to all of them combined, 

 would not do as much to advance public prosperity as 

 would the adoption of some measure laying broad and 

 deep foundati^ons for a stable and efficient forest-policy. 



The present method of distributing seed by the De- 

 partment of Agriculture is vigorously attacked by Secre- 

 tary JMorton, and his arguments are reproduced at length 

 in the President's Message, who devotes considerably 

 more space to this subject than he does to that of 

 forestry. The story of this abuse is an old one, but al- 

 though every one knows that the whole business is waste- 

 ful and fraudulent, the practice has been kept up long after 

 any man of sense has presumed to justify it. More than 

 half a century ago the Commissioner of Patents conceived 

 the idea of distributing some improved varieties of seed 

 among farmers, which he did at his own expense. After- 

 ward a small appropriation was made to help on this 

 praiseworthy object. From this small beginning the prac- 

 tice has swelled year after year until last year more than 

 $135,000 were expended in buying seeds, bulbs and cut- 

 tings, most of them of ordinary kinds, and distributing them, 

 gratis, among the people. From an analysis of what is dis- 

 tributed, Secretary Morton estimates that enough cabbage 

 has been sent out to plant 19,200 acres, a sufficient quan- 

 tity of beans to plant 4,000 acres, of sweet corn to plant 

 7,800 acres, and so on, with beets, cucumbers and water- 

 melons in like profusion, until a total of more than nine 

 million of packages is summed up, or enough flower and 

 vegetable seeds to plant 89,596 acres of land, and all this 

 in a single year. All those who receive these seeds are 

 instructed to report results upon them ; but, of course, no 

 one makes any report whatever, so that it is evident that 

 in popular estimation this dissemination is considered alto- 

 gether a gratuity. The Secretary might have pursued his 

 investigations still further and found some interesting data 

 as to the quality of the seeds purchased and the prices paid 

 for them, but perhaps the disclosures made are enough for 

 one year. The Secretary wisely declares that the system 

 ought to be abolished, or, at least, that no seeds except those 

 of new varieties should be distributed, and these should be 

 sent to the experiment stations where their value could be 

 tested. 



Fences. — III. 



INTRINSIC ugliness, as we have said in former articles, 

 is the first sin one notes in considering American fences 

 collectively. But the sin of inappropriateness is just as 

 apparent. Sometimes we see a pretentious stone-wall, 

 with heavy, ornate gate-posts, encircling small grounds 

 and a wooden cottage ; and no matter how fine in itself the 

 fence then may be, it distresses any one who appreciates 

 the prime artistic virtue of fitness. Still more often a cheap 

 or shabby fence surrounds beautifully kept grounds and a 

 costly house, injuring harmony of effect, and seeming to 

 prove that the owner spent more lavishly at first than he 

 could afford and ran out of funds before his fence was 

 reached. Again, a hedge has been planted without proper 

 consideration of the exposure or of the character of the soil, 

 and wears a forlorn expression which the intelligent ob- 

 server will know to have been inevitable ; or a high fence 

 stands where a low one would have been in better taste, 



or a very low one where thronging men or animals de- 

 mand something higher for the satisfaction of the eye at 

 least. 



No fence can be good which is not suitable ; and none 

 can be suitable which has not been designed with proper 

 respect for its relation to the character of the buildings it 

 accompanies ; to the practical requirements of protection ; 

 to the general aspect of the road or street, and to the nature 

 of the district as rich in one building material or another. 

 A gilt-tipped wrought-iron fence of the most artistic design 

 would not look well around a cottage set on a rocky New 

 England bluff or on the edge of an Adirondack lake, nor a 

 rustic cedar fence in a dignified suburban street of villas. 

 A brick wall, which would be eminently appropriate in a 

 region devoid of stone, would not be as well suited to a 

 place in the stony Berkshire hills. A wall of cut stone, or 

 even of white marble, has the right expression near the 

 quarries of these hills, while, if transported to the New Jer- 

 sey shore, it would seem an inartistic bit of ostentation. In 

 certain cases an owner may well sacrifice a justifiable pref- 

 erence for some type of fence if it would conflict disagree- 

 ably with his neighbors' fences, thus injuring the general 

 aspect of the street. And then, when considerations of fit- 

 ness have determined what material shall be used for the 

 fence, its height, its solidity and its degree of elaboration 

 should be determined in the same manner, with careful 

 regard to the size and expression of the house, the extent 

 of the grounds, and the nature of the highways. 



Finally, there is a third sin to be noted as too frequently 

 characteristic of our fences. The effect of the good ones 

 is too often injured, and the effect of the poor ones ren- 

 dered still worse by inexcusable neglect and untidiness. 

 An intelligent observer of agricultural regions accepts their 

 fences as a pretty fair indication of the general temper and 

 habits of the population. The ragged sod-walls of the Irish 

 peasant, compared with the neat hedges of the English 

 peasant, tell a plain tale with regard to differing social and 

 economic conditions lasting through many centuries. 

 Every traveler through New England knows that here a 

 well built and kept stone-wall or neat wooden paling 

 means thrift, prosperity and a corresponding degree of 

 contentment and refinement, while a tumbling wall or 

 broken paling means a worn-out farm, boys gone off to the 

 city, poverty, shiftlessness, and the death of hope. No- 

 where, in ante-bellum days, could the difference between 

 the north and the south be more clearly read than in the 

 unlikeness of the neat fences of a Massachusetts village to 

 the ragged unkemptness of those in a Georgian village — 

 the self-respecting prosperous working-man had built the 

 former, the negro or the "poor white" the latter. 



Of course, the significance of such signs as these may be 

 overestimated, especially in comparing a newly settled dis- 

 trict with one which has been long inhabited. It would be 

 foolish to expect such fences as should encircle a small New 

 England farm to be repeated around the great new farms of 

 the west, and foolish to look in a region poor in both stone 

 and wood for the same solidity in fencing that is natural in 

 a tree-covered, rocky land. Moreover, all America is new 

 as compared, for example, with England, and in few parts 

 of it can we expect an Enghsh neatness of wall and hedge. 

 Foreigners undoubtedly do us injustice if they gauge our 

 general love for order, frugality and niceness in matters of 

 details by our fences alone. Nevertheless, even from our 

 own point of view, and making all due allowance for 

 national newness and special local conditions, our fences 

 are not, as regards mere neatness, half as good as they 

 ought to be. This is true even with regard to rural districts 

 and small villages. But it is painfully true with regard to 

 those suburban districts and summer colonies which are 

 inhabited by well-to-do people, and often by the wealthiest 

 people of America. There is nothing more surprising at 

 Newport, for example, than the average poverty and unti- 

 diness of the fences as compared with the costlmess of the 

 houses and the almost excessive neatness with which their 

 grounds are kept. Many of the fences around the finest 



