January 29, 1890.] 



Garden and Forest. 



5> 



sprays. The blue Lobelias were carefully distributed so that 

 they did not offend the eye by contrast with inharmonious hues; 

 and, in general,' excellent use was made of all the white flowers 

 to separate and relieve those of vivid colors. In certain other 

 French towns the grass-plots sometimes showed a central bed 

 of flowers or foliage-plants, while shrubs were set near their 

 angles ; but no such instances were noticed in Paris, and the 

 effect is far better when the grass furnishes a perfectly quiet 

 background for its brilliant border. 



Of course the spring and early summer aspect of such a 

 border is different from the one we have described ; but it 

 must be equally charming, especially as then most of the 

 standard shrubs would be in bloom. From the artistic point 

 of view these beds are inlinately better than the flat pattern bor- 

 der; they are less mechanical in themselves, and, so to say, 

 furnish a distant view more effectively, and they give the 

 chance to use a great variety of beautiful flowers instead of 

 only a few sorts combined with showy foliage-plants. From 

 the practical point of view their superiority is as manifest. 

 The standards, of course, are permanent ; there is much less 

 cost for wintering the other material, and much less labor in 

 its arrangement and its subsequent care. After the summer 

 planting has been done no care, indeed, is needed but watering 

 and the occasional clipping of a plant which has run out too 

 far over the grass. No one could question the beauty of the 

 system who saw it last summer where it was most extensively 

 and beautifully used — in the new gardens which occupy the for- 

 mer site of the Tuileries and connect the courtyard of the 

 Louvre with the old Tuileries garden. Here acres were laid out 

 with straigiit walks, grass-plots and long flower-beds, the lines 

 being sufficiently varied to prevent monotony ; and even when 

 a large flower-bed stood by itself at the intersection of paths, it 

 was arranged in a mannersimilar to that shown in the borders. 

 The free beauty of the many flowers was enchanting as one 

 passed by the successive beds ; and the effect of the whole 

 was harmonious yet brilliant in the extreme, and admirably 

 adapted to the neighborhood of the stately buildings. In this 

 case, and, indeed, in most others, the beds are not protected 

 by the railing which in the Luxembourg garden somewhat in- 

 jures their effect, but are merely divided from the walk by a 

 narrow strip of grass, or at times by two such strips with a line 

 of gravel between them. 



Such borders are called by the gardener " French par- 

 terres," but it will be a pity if their use is long limited to 

 France. Of course they too would be inappropriate as fea- 

 tures in a natural landscape-design, but we often employ de- 

 signs of this sort when formal arrangements would be better ; 

 and in these cases the graceful and varied symmetry of the 

 French parterre strikes the happy medium between over-free- 

 dom and over-rigidity. With the great number of hardy flow- 

 ers and shrubs at our disposal it ought to be easy — if, indeed, 

 we possess an equal feeling for color harmonies — to exceed 

 even the beauty of recent Parisian essays. 



Californian Palms. 



"THE most remarkable arboreal feature of the deserts of 

 A southern California is the Washingtonia. It is as pre- 

 eminent in its arid home as the Sequoia is in the forests of the 

 Sierra, which it further resembles in growing only in a 

 limited area. Perhaps the comparison may be carried further, 

 for as the " Big Trees " now living are but the lingering giants 

 of a vanished forest, so it is probable that these Palms are the 

 scattered descendants of a more abundant race that once 

 occupied the borders of the arm of the Californian Gulf which 

 filled formerly the bed of the desert they now inhabit. We 

 find them further north and west, at Whitewater, at an altitude 

 of 1,126 feet. Thence the desert, broadening into a wide valley, 

 falls rapidly, till at Indio, only seven miles away, it is twenty 

 feet below the sea level, and at Frink's Spring, twenty miles 

 further east, it is 260 feet below. In this depression the linger- 

 ing waters formed a salt lake so recently that the record 

 of its slowly receding levels is still visible in the discolorations 

 of the cliffs which in places once formed its shore. It is along 

 the hills which border the bed of this extinct sea that the most 

 extensive Palm-groves are found, while scattering trees mark 

 the direction of the channel which once led to the gulf. 



These considerations may explain the anomaly presented 

 by this Palm of being the only arborescent species in the 

 United States which grows at any great distance from the sea.* 

 Its station at Whitewater is the northern limit of Palm growth 

 on the western side of the American continent, more than a 

 degree further south than is reached by the Sabal Palmetto 

 on the eastern coast. 



*In Lower California, where it is found, Washingtonia is also a littoral species. 



The Southern Pacific Railway runs through the desert I 

 have mentioned, and between Indio and Seven- Palms stations 

 some large groves of Washingtonias can be seen at the bases 

 of the hills, a few miles to the north. A surface overlaying 

 water, brown with alkali, produces here strips of damp soii, 

 whitened with saline incrustations, which coat even the 

 stems of the salt grass {Distich/is maritima) which spreads 

 a sod of dingy green, grateful amid the surrounding bare- 

 ness. Here the Desert Palm finds a congenial soil, for it is 

 an oasis plant, and requires moisture for its roots. 

 Though the most accessible, these are not the most satisfac- 

 tory groves to visit. The number of really fine specimens here 

 is not great, and most are badly damaged by fire. Their open 

 situation exposes them to the full force of the desert siroccos, 

 so that they have a gaunt and worn look, as if the struggle 

 for existence had been hard. A smaller but much finer group is 

 to be found in a sheltered canon of the San Jacinto Moun- 

 tains, some ten miles south of Seven-Palms station. Follow- 

 ing a short distance the slender stream of clear water that 

 runs through the narrow bed of this canon, a more open place 

 is reached, floored with wet sand in which lie half buried great 

 angular fragments of granite. Here are growing a hundred 

 Palms, mostly in the sand, but a few on the steep hillsides. 

 There are some noble trees here, and the whole grove has an 

 aspect of thrift. 



Dr. Parry tells us * that the Desert Palm was discovered by 

 the botanists of the Mexican Boundary Survey, who supposed 

 it to be the Palmetto of the Atlantic coast. However, no men- 

 tion is made of it in the report, and its first appearance in botan- 

 ical literature is in the Smithsonian Report for i860, where 

 Cooper refers it doubtfully to Brahea dulcis, Mart. Then Herr 

 Wendland, the distinguished Palmographer of Hanover, 

 placed it in Prichardia, as P.filamentosa. Later, erecting for 

 it a new genus, he called it Washingtonia ftlifera, fittingly re- 

 viving for the generic name one formerly bestowed on the 

 Sequoia, but which the law of priority did not permit that 

 genus to stand. The change in the specific name was less 

 happy, as the strict construction of the recent reformers of 

 nomenclature will demand that it be changed to filamentosa. 

 Somewhere it has also picked up the name of Brahea filifera, 

 by which it is usually known in horticulture. Its common 

 names in California are Desert Palm, Fan Palm, or sometimes 

 San Diego Palm, from its growing wild, in the United States, 

 only in that county, and not in San Bernardino, as is usually 

 stated in botanical works. 



Seventy-five feet is probably the greatest height reached by 

 the Desert Palm. The top is crowned by a cluster of light 

 green leaves, whose stout stems, deeply channeled and beset 

 along the edges with hooked spines, are eight feet, or more, 

 in length. The plaited blades are some four feet in diameter, 

 gladiately cleft at the edges, which are abundantly furnished 

 with long, thread-like filaments. The leaves gradually turn 

 down with age, until at last, layer over layer, they surround the 

 trunk with a dry thatch, which descends in a regular cone 

 from the verdant crown to the ground. This makes an ad- 

 mirable natural protection to the trunk from the scorching heat 

 and drying winds of the desert. Unfortunately most trees have 

 been deprived of this mantle. Its inflammable material is 

 easily kindled by an accidental fire, and is an almost irresist- 

 ible temptation to the passing vandal; but the most destruction 

 is attributed to the desert Indians, who are said to burn the dry 

 leaves that they may more easily gather the fruit. That any 

 plants survive this ordeal of flame is strong evidence of the 

 vitality of the species. No endogen could live through such a 

 martyrdom. But of all the Palms of a fruiting size growing in 

 the Colorado Desert very few have escaped it. I remember see- 

 ing only one tree, and that not over twenty feet high, with its 

 protecting thatch uninjured. Naturally it would persist cer- 

 tainly many years. On cultivated trees, where the dead leaves 

 are kept cut off close to the trunk, their fibrous bosses adhere 

 so long that not more than four feet at the base will be free 

 from them in a twenty-year-old tree. The bark is then seen 

 to be gray, with close transverse fissures. The wood is fibro- 

 vascular, with a specific gravity of .51. 



A mature tree produces in June three or four large panicles 

 of small scorious flowers. The stout terete peduncle ascends 

 from the axil of a leaf near the centre of the crown, and is of 

 the length of the petioles, so that the ultimate divisions droop 

 over the blades. Gradually the peduncle declines, till, in Sep- 

 tember or October, the ripe fruit hangs pendent over the mass 

 of dead leaves. Each cluster produces some ten pounds of 

 fruit, the size of a large pea, with a thin, sweetish pulp and a 

 bony seed. 



The Desert Palm was early planted at the old Spanish mis- 



*San Francisco Bulletin, March, 1881. 





