February 19, 1890.] 



Garden and Forest. 



85 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office : Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducted by Professor C. S. Sargent. 



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



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY [9, 1890. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Editorial Articles: — The Waverly Oaks. (Illustrated.) — Forest Fires 85 



The Coast of Maine Charles Eliot. 86 



Entomological : — An Enemy to the Egyptian Lotus. (Illustrated.) 



Professor John B. Smith. 88 



New or Little Known Plants : — Gladiolus Turicensis. (Illustrated.) 88 



Foreign Correspondence: — Berlin Letter Dr. Udo Dammer. 88 



Cultural Department : — Fern Notes IV. H. Taplin. 90 



Protection Against the Striped Cucumber Beetle. (Illustrated.) 



Professor E. S. Goff. 90 



Orchid Notes F. Goldring; IV. 92 



Brussels Sprouts W. H. Bull. 92 



Doronicum Harper Crewe. — Seed-Sowing John Thorpe. 92 



Lachenalia Nelsoni E. O. Orpet. 93 



Christmas Roses T. D. H. 93 



The Forest : — The Need of a Forest Policy in Pennsylvania, 



Professor IV. A. Buckhout. 93 



Correspondence : — Australian Trees in California W. S. Lyon. 94 



Action of Root-hairs Professor J . T. Rothrock. 94 



Kalanchoe carnea John Thorpe. 94 



Recent Publications 94 



Exhibitions 95 



Meetings of Societies 95 



Notes 96 



Illustrations: — Botis nelumbialis; larva, Fig. 18 ... 88 



Botis nelumbialis; moth, Fig. 19 88 



Gladiolus Turicensis, Fig. 20 •. 89 



The Waverly Oaks 91 



A Simple Plant Protector, Fig. 21 92 



The Waverly Oaks. 



THERE is in Belmont, one of the suburbs of Boston, 

 and formerly a part of the ancient town of Water- 

 town, a group of Oaks which has come to be known in 

 recent years as the Waverly Oaks, from the village near 

 which they stand. These' Waverly Oaks are, all things 

 considered, the most interesting trees in eastern Massachu- 

 setts, and although there are larger Oaks in New England 

 and in the Middle States, a group containing so many large 

 trees is not often seen now anywhere in eastern America. 

 There are in this group twenty-three large Oaks and one 

 large Elm growing on an area of two or three acres. The 

 Oaks are all White Oaks, with the exception of a single 

 Swamp White Oak. They occupy mainly the slopes of a 

 terminal moraine, along the base of which flows Beaver 

 Brook, the "Sweet Beaver, child of forest still," sung by 

 Lowell. The Waverly Oaks are well known to all Boston- 

 ians interested in nature, and strangers not infrequently 

 make the pilgrimage to Belmont to look upon these ven- 

 erable products of Massachusetts soil. It is strange, there- 

 fore, that so little has ever been printed about these trees. 

 Emerson, the historian of the trees of Massachusetts, makes 

 no reference to them. Piper, who wrote of the trees of 

 America, and who lived not very far away, in Maiden, 

 seems to have overlooked them, and traveled all the way 

 to Stowe to find his typical New England White Oak. Brown, 

 another Massachusetts man who published books about 

 trees, passed them by without a word. The poets and 

 philosophers of Cambridge and Concord, who doubtless 

 often passed by Beaver Brook, make no mention of its 

 great trees, which first appear in print, apparently, in 1881, 

 in Harper s Magazine, where Mr. F. H. Underwood, writing 

 of James Russell Lowell, speaks of them on page 262 as 

 "the only group of aboriginal trees standing on the Mas- 

 sachusetts coast" — a statement to which some exceptions 

 might be taken. The Committee on Grounds of the Mas- 

 sachusetts Horticultural Society visited the Waverly Oaks 

 on the 28th of June, 1884, and the chairman, Mr. J. G. Bar- 

 ker, joined to its report printed in the transactions of the 



society for that year the other short account of the trees 

 which has appeared coupled with a timely suggestion for 

 their preservation. 



This suggestion we desire to repeat and enforce; and 

 that the public may know the beauty of these trees 

 and of the spot where they grow, we reproduce on page 

 91 a view taken by Dr. W. H. Rollins, of Boston, showing 

 a portion of the group. 



The age which these trees have attained and the vicissi- 

 tudes they have survived entitle them to respect, and the 

 people of Massachusetts might wisely secure their preser- 

 vation through the purchase and dedication to public use 

 of the land on which they stand. 



The age of these old Oaks can only be surmised. One 

 famous naturalist is said to have declared that the smallest 

 of them had existed through more than a thousand years. 

 It is probable that this statement is greatly exaggerated. 

 The largest tree in the group girths seventeen feet three 

 inches at three and a half feet from the ground.* The 

 principal tree in our illustration is smaller, with a girth of 

 only thirteen feet four inches, measured at the same dis- 

 tance from the ground. An actual examination of the wood 

 of this tree shows that it has increased three inches in 

 diameter during the last twenty-four years. Had it made 

 the same rate of growth during the whole period of its exist- 

 ence, it would have been 408 years old, and the largest 

 tree in the group would be, with the same rate of increase, 

 508 years old. It is probable that they are both younger 

 than these estimates make them. They may have 

 grown less rapidly for several years at the beginning of 

 their life, but there must have been a number of years, 

 probably several hundred, when they increased more rap- 

 idly in diameter than they have during the last quarter of 

 a century. The appearance of the trees justifies this sup- 

 position. They are still healthy, and are growing with con- 

 siderable vigor ; but there can be no doubt that 

 their period of most rapid development has passed, or 

 that, while they may continue, with proper care, to live 

 and increase slowly for centuries perhaps, they will grow 

 less rapidly now than they did one or two hundred years 

 ago. But after making all due allowance for differences 

 in the rate of growth at different periods in the existence 

 of these trees, it is safe to surmise that the youngest of 

 them had attained to some size before the Pilgrims landed 

 on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, and that the oldest 

 was at that time a tree of some size. 



The ponderous lateral branches of these trees, reaching 

 out in every direction, shows that they grew up in the 

 open ground, which must have been cleared four or five 

 hundred years ago, if, indeed, the dry and gravelly soil 

 ever produced any other forest growth contemporaneously 

 with these Oaks. 



The Waverly Oaks grow within a few hundred yards of 

 the station at Waverly, on the Boston & Fitchburg Railroad, 

 on a piece of ground directly opposite the property of the 

 trustees of the Massachusetts General Hospital, occupied 

 by the country home of that institution. The whole region 



* Messrs. L. L. Dame and Henry Brooks, of West Medford.who are engaged in pre- 

 paring for publication an account of some of the most remarkable Elms and other 

 trees of Massachusetts, obligingly send the following measurement of the largest 

 of the Waverly Oaks, which stands on a steep slope : At five feet from the lower 

 side, twenty-one feet six inches ; at five feet from the upper side, sixteen feet six 

 inches. There is a difference of several feet in the height of the ground 

 at the upper and at the lower sides of this tree, and our measurement of sev- 

 enteen feet three inches, taken at three feet and a half from the ground on the 

 lower side, is perhaps as correct as any measurement can be made. Other meas- 

 urements of Massachusetts White Oaks sent us by Messrs. Dame and Brooks are 

 seventeen feet eight inches for the Oak at Bernardston; twenty-four feet five inches 

 for the Oak at Boyleston; fifteen feet ten and a half inches for the Avery Oak at Ded- 

 ham; fourteen feet one inch for the Elliott Oak at Natick; and thirteen feet seven 

 inches for the Topsfield Oak. These measurements are all made at five feet from 

 the ground. A White Oak recently cut on the estate of Peter C. Brooks, Esq., of 

 West Medford, Massachusetts, measured at eight feet from the ground eight feet 

 ten inches, and had approximately 200 layers of annual growth, as counted by 

 Dame and Brooks. 



Mr. John Robinson, in his account of the "Woodv Plants of Essex County, Mas- 

 sachusetts," gives the following measurement of White Oaks : The Topsfield 

 Oak, in 1875, had a circumference one foot from the ground of nineteen feet seven 

 inches ; the same trunk measured sixteen feet eleven inches at three feet from the 

 ground, and twelve feet eleven inches at five feet from the ground. Two White 

 Oaks on the Burleigh Farm, in Danvers, measured respectively nineteen feet and 

 seventeen feet ten inches, both measurements being made at the ground, the first 

 measuring thirteen feet six inches at six feet from the ground and the second 

 twelve feet at five feet from the ground. 



