March 12, 1890.] 



Garden and Forest. 



129 



this latitude raise two crops in one season. It is best sown in 

 February or March, as it matures very quickly, and a second 

 crop can be sown here last of August and make good bulbs 

 before Christmas. 



The Striped Cucumber Beetle. — In my gardening experience 

 of over thirty years I have never found any need for 

 protectors to keep the striped bugs off of Cucumbers, Squashes 

 or Melons. These beetles usually attack the plants when 

 in the seed-leaf state, and seldom do much harm after- 

 ward. As soon as the seed-leaves appear the bugs appear 

 also, but a handful of bone flour dusted over each hill will 

 keep them away. One application usually suffices, but if 

 washed off at once a second dusting will be needed. This is 

 not only less trouble than boxing over the hills, but the bone 

 flour is a good fertilizer, and stimulates the growth of the 

 plants, so that they are soon out of reach of the beetles. 

 Devices to protect plants from the weather are useful, but bug 

 protectors are unnecessary, in my judgment. W.F.Massey. 



College of Agriculture, Raleigh, ]N. C. 



Correspondence. 



Park Construction. 

 To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir.— Every landscape gardener who has had much experi- 

 ence in the creation of parks understands that his work is 

 but half done when he has completed his design. However 

 carefully he may have prepared his plan's, detailed specifica- 

 tions and instructions, he knows that the result depends upon 

 the skill of the man who has charge of the construction. It is 

 rarely the case that the designer is allowed to exercise more 

 than an occasional supervision of the work. Having furnished 

 working plans drawn to scale, lists of trees and shrubs, 

 with explanations of all matters that cannot be represented in 

 drawings, his duties are supposed to be finished, and the work 

 of construction begins under the direction of an engineer or a 

 superintendent, who is employed by the park commissioners 

 and is subject to their direction. The designer ought, of 

 course, in all works of importance to supervise the con- 

 struction, for there is always much that is essential in carrying 

 out details, which can by no possibility be represented on a 

 plan or described in words, but must be directed on the 

 ground by the artist's eye. This, however, at least in the 

 west, is often impossible, or rather impracticable. 



Park commissioners in this section, as a rule, are unwilling 

 to incur the expense of such supervision, and having secured 

 the plan, they leave it to the superintendent and the engineers 

 to transfer it to the ground. Not infrequently the work of 

 grading, road making, etc., is let out to a contractor and the 

 tree planting to the man who will do it at the lowest cost. 

 The result in either case is sure to be unsatisfactory, and if it 

 is further complicated by the officious interference of some 

 prominent member of the Commission who has a local repu- 

 tation as a connoisseur in art, it is probable that a large amount 

 of money will be wasted on artificial decorations, which are 

 utterly incongruous and destructive of the effects of the 

 original design. 



There is but one way in which the work can be satisfactorily 

 performed, and the all-important person to ensure such per- 

 formance is the park superintendent. I speak confidently on 

 this point, from having in repeated instances witnessed the 

 worse than useless expenditure of large sums in the effort to 

 economize by dispensing with the services of a skilled super- 

 intendent, or by employing an incompetent man because he 

 could be had at a low price. 



It is all-important in the first place that the superintendent 

 should be a manager of men and able to work them advan- 

 tageously ; for otherwise thousands of dollars may be wasted 

 in loss of time or inefficient work. Where hundreds of teams 

 are employed, a load or two more or less in a day's work of 

 each one becomes a matter of hundreds of dollars before the 

 week is out. And so of every item of the work performed. 

 These are the costly leaks. A competent man will secure 

 from every employee the full amount of his labor, and without 

 any appearance of needless crowding. But this is only one of 

 the essential qualifications of a superintendent. He must be 

 sufficiently familiar with park construction to appreciate the 

 general effects intended by the design, and in directing the 

 work of grading and road making, as well as in planting or 

 removing trees, opening up woods, etc., he must work with 

 steady and intelligent purpose to develop these ideas. He 

 must know enough of soils and of tree planting to see to it 



that all newly graded ground is provided with sufficient depth 

 of fertile surface soil, and that all such soil, as well as other 

 fertilizing material, is preserved, and that the trees after being 

 properly planted are properly cared for. He will of course 

 employ tree planters and gardeners, but he must himself be 

 sufficiently skilled in the practice to know when each opera- 

 tion is thoroughly performed. 



It is plain from these considerations that a capable super- 

 intendent may save to a city in a single week more than the 

 difference between his year's salary and that of an incompetent 

 man ; and yet it is almost invariably the case that a board of 

 park commissioners is beset by candidates who are ready to 

 work for a low salary, and such a man is often selected from 

 fear that they will be charged with extravagance if they employ 

 a man who knows his business and demands what his work is 

 worth. In the course of forty years' experience as a landscape- 

 gardener, I have had such repeated evidence of the "penny 

 wise, pound foolish " policy of employing cheap men, and 

 such opportunity of enjoying the results of a wiser course of 

 action, that I take this method of presenting the matter for the 

 consideration of every one who is interested in parks and 

 their construction. H. IV. S. Clevela?id. 



Minneapolis. 



A Northern Station for Quercus lyrata. 



To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir. — On the 13th of September last, while gunning in the 

 bottoms of the Patuxent River, about three miles below (east 

 of) Laurel, Maryland, I was surprised to find myself confronted 

 by an old acquaintance in several trees of Quercus lyrata. 

 The tree was rather common there, growing aTong the banks 

 of shallow "sloughs" and in other wet situations, the trees asso- 

 ciated with it being Q. Michauxii, Q. bicolor, Ulmus Americana, 

 Liquidambar Styraciflua, and several others which thrive best 

 in wet locations, with Fagus ferruginea in the immediate 

 vicinity. While the Q. lyrata was fairly common, it was of 

 small size, none of the trees much, if any, exceeding thirty or 

 forty feet in height. 



Before finding this species, I had been struck with the 

 exceedingly close resemblance between the tree growth of the 

 locality and that of our western bottom-lands, there beino- but 

 three species {Quercus Phellos, common, and Ilex opaca and 

 Juniperus Virginiana, rare) among the twenty-three species 

 growing there which were not common to the two regions ! 

 Of course many western types, or those which are more com- 

 mon west (as Tilia, /Esculus, Negundo, Gymnocladus, Gledit- 

 schia, Cercis, Catalpa, Celtis, Juglans, Populus), were wantino-, 

 but the general facies of the silva and manner of growth were 

 exceedingly similar, Asimina, Liquidambar and Liriodendron 

 being very common. 



It is interesting to note that this station of Quercus lyrata is 

 almost exactly on the same parallel of latitude (near thirty-nine 

 degrees) as the locality where I found it in the summer of 1888 

 in southern Illinois (bottoms of the Embarras River, Jasper 

 County). 



The note in a late number of Garden and Forest on the 

 occurrence of Tillandsia in northern Tennessee reminds me 

 that in the summer of 1880 or 1881 I found this plant on the 

 eastern shore of Virginia, about midway between Cherry- 

 stone and Cobb's Island landing. It was not plentiful, but I 

 found several tresses of it hanging from the large Pine-trees 

 {Finns Tada) and Hollies {Ilex opaca), by or near the road-side. 

 This, I believe, is its most northern station on the Atlantic 

 coast. Robert Ridtnvav 



Washington, D. C. ' 



American Oaks in Belgium. 



To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir. — American Oaks have been introduced into Belgium 

 comparatively recently. The oldest in the country are hardly 

 more than a hundred years old. They thrive here admirably, 

 however, and grow with astonishing rapidity in a light, sandv 

 soil with a rather moist subsoil, the annual shoots often ex- 

 ceeding four feet in length. The Belgian government has of 

 late years devoted a great deal of attention to plantations of 

 trees along the highways. Our Elm {Ulmus campestris) in- 

 jures crops in the neighborhood of the highways with its lon°- 

 superficial roots, and on this account has been largely 

 abandoned in highway plantations ; and where the sod is 

 adapted to them, the Red and Spanish Oaks have been 

 largely planted. In the province of Limbourg, where the soil 

 is suited to them, thousands of these two trees have been 

 used with the greatest success. The growth of the Red Oak 



