Garden and Forest. 



[January i, 1890. 



relieve us from the stigma of standing alone among civil- 

 ized nations in disregarding the value of the forest as the 

 foundation of all permanent national prosperity. 



If the forests of this country should perish, agriculture 

 and the arts would perish with them. Material develop- 

 ment would be arrested and poverty would replace pros- 

 perity from one end of the land to the other. 



The Deciduous Cypress. 



THE view of a Cypress-swamp in southern Indiana, which 

 appears upon page 7 of this issue, will serve to give an 

 idea of the appearance of the Deciduous Cypress as it is found 

 growing toward the northern limits of its distribution, where 

 it does not attain to the vast size which characterizes this tree 

 further south, and especially in Mexico. But in Indiana, even 

 the Cypress, if not as large as it is often seen south of the 

 Ohio River, is still a tree of respectable size ; and Mr. Robert 

 Ridgway, of the Smithsonian Institution, who has sent us the 

 photograph from which our illustration has been made, has 

 measured trees in the swamps near the mouth of White River 

 nearly 150 feet high, and trunks eight feet through above their 

 swollen and buttressed bases. Trunks twelve or fourteen feet 

 through have been seen in the southern States ; and a few 

 years ago it was not difficult to find them ten feet in diameter 

 in the great swamps bordering the lower Mississippi and some 

 of the other rivers of the Gulf States. 



The Deciduous Cypress first appears in the Atlantic States in 

 the lower portion of Delaware ; thence it extends, generally 

 near the coast, to southern Florida and through the Gulf 

 States and the Valley of the Mississippi to the banks of the 

 lower Ohio. This species, or a related one hardly to be dis- 

 tinguished from it, reaches far south into Mexico, where it at- 

 tains enormous size and an individual existence lasting through 

 centuries. 



The Cypress in the United States grows always in water or 

 on low, flat land adjacent to rivers or great shallow lakes, often 

 covered with water during weeks or months at a time. That 

 part of the trunk which is covered with water, or which is lia- 

 ble to be, is greatly enlarged and strengthened by huge, often 

 hollow, buttresses, which project out in all directions. Each 

 of these buttresses terminates in a large branching root, which 

 extends out to a great distance, sending down stout anchor- 

 roots deep into the ground, and with many lateral roots, from 

 which spring the " knees " peculiar to this tree. The trunk, 

 covered with furrowed, dark red bark, shoots up perfectly 

 straight from its enlarged base, forming a tapering column 

 eighty or ninety feet high, when it divides into a number of 

 long, stout, horizontal branches, which form the wide, flat top, 

 which is hung generally with the long stems of the Southern 

 Moss {Tillandsia xisneoides). Naturalists have puzzled over 

 the Cypress knees and the purpose of this development, 

 almost ever since the tree was discovered ; and they have 

 formed the subject of many essays. The knees first appear, 

 often close together, as small tubercles on the upper side of 

 the roots. They grow rapidly until they attain a height of 

 from two to ten feet, or have pushed well above the water- 

 level, when they cease growing upward, and increase in 

 diameter. The upward growth is very rapid, and the bark 

 covering the growing top is soft and spongy. There are 

 various facts which seem to indicate that the service which 

 these peculiar growths perform for the tree is to bring air to 

 the roots, otherwise cut off by the water which covers them 

 during a considerable portion of the year, from all connection 

 with "the atmosphere. This is the view of Professor N. S. 

 Shaler, who has made a careful study of this tree, and who 

 finds "that it is not unreasonable to conjecture that this func- 

 tion of the knees is in some way connected with the aeration of 

 the sap."* His facts are "the failure of the knees to develop 

 when the trees have grown on high ground; the development 

 of the knees above the permanent water-level, and to a height 

 varying with that level ; and finally, the destruction of the trees 

 whenever the level of permanent water rises above the top of 

 the knees." These views are confirmed by a more recent 

 paper,! published by Mr. W. P. Wilson, in the Proceedings 

 of the Philadelphia Academy, in which it is shown that 

 other plants besides the Cypress, which grow habitually with 

 roots covered with water — the Water Gum (Nyssa silvatica, 

 var. aquatica), Avicennia nitida and Pinus serotina — develop 

 similar root-processes ; and what is still more suggestive, Mr. 



* Notes on Taxodium distic/ium in Men. Mus. Comparative Zoology, xvi., Nos. i 

 and 2. 



t The Production of Aerating Organs on the Roots of Swamp and other Plants, 

 Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. Phil., April 2d, 1889. 



Wilson has induced plants of Indian Corn to send roots above 

 the surface of the soil by keeping it continually saturated with 

 water. 



There is another point, and an important one, in the life his- 

 tory of our Cypress, which has never been satisfactorily 

 explained. The great masses of this tree and the largest indi- 

 viduals are found in swamps or in shallow ponds, which are 

 never dry except during periods of exceptional drought, and 

 where the water is several feet deep at the time the seed would 

 germinate. How did these great trees begin their existence, 

 which may have extended through centuries, and how did the 

 seed from which they spring find an inch of dry ground to 

 attach itself to ? The evidence points to a larger quantity of 

 water in all our rivers and swamps five hundred or a thousand 

 years ago than at present, and it is certainly improbable that 

 the great swamps of the southern states could have been dry 

 at any time during the period that the Cypress has occupied 

 its present territory. Seedlings do not now appear among the 

 old trees growing in the wet swamps and ponds, and they 

 are only found on the margins of swamps in comparatively 

 dry ground. Professor Shaler's hypothesis that the great trees 

 in deep water have grown from branches blown down from 

 neighboring trees, and rooted in the mud, is hardly consistent 

 with the manner of growth of coniferous trees, and some 

 other solution of this phenomenon must be sought for. 



The vast size and beauty of this tree, the great age to 

 which it attains, the peculiarities of its growth, the value of 

 the material which it supplies to man, and its commercial 

 importance, are not more interesting than its history. Like its 

 near relatives, the California Sequoias, Taxodium, represented 

 now only by our southern tree of comparatively restricted 

 range, and by a very similar species in China (Glyfitostrobus 

 or Taxodium Sinense), once played a much more important 

 part in covering the surface of the northern hemisphere than 

 it does in these days. For in latest tertiary times just preced- 

 ing the glaciation of the northern hemisphere, our Taxodium, 

 with Sequoias and various Ginkgos, grew in Greenland and in 

 Spitzenburg, and then was widely spread through North 

 America and Europe, where grew, too.aGlyptostrobus almost 

 identical with the existing Chinese tree. The coming of the 

 ice drove all these trees out of Europe entirely, and forced 

 Taxodium into what is now our southern states, and on to the 

 highlands of Mexico, where the survivors of this once mighty 

 race, barely altered by their new environments, now find 

 their only abiding place. 



The Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch. 

 XVI. — Mediaeval Europe. 



\ylf HEN barbarian hordes from beyond the Rhine began to 

 * * spread over the lands where Rome had ruled, first the 

 isolated country-seat and then the suburban villa was aban- 

 doned, all classes seeking refuge within the walls of towns. 

 Once deprived of constant skillful attention, the gardens of 

 the Romans gradually decayed. " The walks were overgrown 

 first with grass, then with bushes and then with forest trees, 

 and on the former beds and playgrounds the shepherd pas- 

 tured his flocks."* Yet we must not think of the ruin as 

 immediate or complete. Even a Goth or a Vandal could ap- 

 preciate the charms of an Italian country home, if he lacked 

 the power to preserve them in perfection. We read of Theo- 

 doric restoring and improving the imperial gardens at 

 Ravenna, and of Totila (strange conjunction !) inhabiting 

 Hadrian's villa at Tivoli ; and a story is told of some Christian- 

 ized Goth who diversified his clipped Box-trees by causing 

 some of them to be cut into the shape of the cross. When, 

 in the sixth century, the troops of Belisarius entered Grasse, 

 about fifty miles from Carthage, they found a palace of the 

 Vandal kings and countless villas, surrounded by gardens 

 "which might deserve the Persian name of Paradise," and 

 which Procopius declared were finer than any he had seen in 

 the East or the West.f Of course they were an inheritance 

 from the Roman colonists whom the Vandals had dispossessed 

 three centuries before. Even at the dawn of the Renaissance 

 there were traces of ancient gardens still to be found in vari- 

 ous parts of Italy and southern France which, together with 

 the descriptions that Pliny and others had bequeathed, greatly 

 influenced the re-birth of the art of ornamental gardening. 



In the north, however, Roman relics perished more quickly 

 and there was small effort made to replace them. Almost the 

 only gardeners of the early mediaeval world were the monks, 

 who, within the walls of their great establishments, cultivated 



* Jaeger: " Gartcnkunst and Gaerten." 



t Gibbon : " Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ; " chap. xli. 



