April 23, 1890.] 



Garden and Forest. 



197 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



TUBLISHED 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, APRIL 23, 1890. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles:— An English Forest— Public Spirit in Horticulture — The 



Menagerie in Central Park 197 



Native Shrubs of California, III Professor E. L. Greene. 198 



The Woods in Spiing Horace Lunt. 199 



The Peruvian Potato R . P. Harris, M.D. 199 



Plant Note :— Cattleya Skinneri A. Dimmock. zoo 



Foreign Correspondence : — Berlin Letter Udo Dammer. 200 



Cultural Department :— Hardy Rhododendrons H. H. Hunnewell. 201 



Notes from the Harvard "Botanical Garden M. Barker. 202 



Wild Flowers Under Cultivation Rev. IV. E. Hill. 204 



Hardy Plants for Cut Flowers— I E. O. Orpet. 204 



Endive W. H. Bull. 205 



Safety for Tender Trees Joseph Meehan. 205 



Hybrid Perpetual Roses E. G. Hill. 205 



Triteleia uniflora B. 205 



Recent Publications :— The Forests of North America.— IT 205 



Correspondence :— Botanical Names Mrs. Mary Treat. 206 



Destruction of Wild Plants by Roadsides Dorcas E. Collins. 207 



Fuchsia triphylla Thomas Hogg. 207 



Notes 207 



Illustrations :— Cattleya Skinneri, Fig. 35 201 



A Road in Sherwood Forest 203 



An English Forest. 



AN old English forest is a very beautiful and interest- 

 ing thing, although, judged by the standard of mod- 

 ern forest science, it is practically a useless encumbrance 

 of the earth, to be cleared away that the ground it occupies 

 may be replanted to better advantage. Such a forest is 

 that of Sherwood, in Nottinghamshire, the most famous and 

 historically the most interesting of all the remnants of the 

 ancient forest-covering of Britain. A view taken in this 

 forest appears in our illustration on page 203, and repre- 

 sents a portion of the high-road leading through " Birck- 

 lands," as one part of Sherwood Forest is called, because 

 Birches grow in great numbers among the old Oaks. The 

 forest-floor is densely covered with Bracken (P/eris aqui- 

 lina), making a charming carpet among the trees, which 

 stand singly, often with wide places between them and 

 unsurrounded with young trees growing up to replace 

 them. Deer and rabbits have frequented Sherwood For- 

 est for centuries, and it has been pastured at times and 

 sadly neglected and abused ; every seedling-tree, as fast 

 as it appears among the Ferns, is nibbled off and de- 

 stroyed, and no successors to the great old trees have been 

 allowed to grow up to take their place when they have 

 lived out their long lives. Very few of the old trees are 

 left ; multitudes of them fell a century or more ago to 

 replenish the purses of needy noblemen, and time has 

 laid a heavy hand upon those which escaped. And now this 

 forest, which is really not a forest at all, but rather a thickly 

 planted park, bears about the same relation to a modern 

 European forest that an English farm, with its wide, useless 

 hedgerows, its broad branched Elms shading the ground, 

 sucking up moisture from the earth and using up plant 

 food, its game carefully protected to feed upon the crops, 

 and all its wasteful methods of pasturage, bears to a mod- 

 ern German farm, in which every inch of ground is made 

 productive and not one ounce of anything is wasted. 



A drive through Sherwood Forest is one of the most de- 

 lightful things an American can do in England, although 

 he will not learn much about forestry on his trip or see 

 many things which can be applied in his every-day life at 



home. A visit to Sherwood Forest and "the Dukeries," 

 as a number of country places made in what was once a 

 part of the old forest and lying adjacent to each other are 

 called, is a common English holiday trip for people living 

 in the cities of the midland counties, and thousands make 

 it every year. The excursion is easily made from the town 

 of Worksop, in Nottinghamshire, and a day is needed to 

 make the circuit of thirty miles through the different 

 estates and the remnants of the forest. Two or three days, 

 however, can be well employed in the neighborhood of 

 Worksop if the visitor is interested in gardens and in fine 

 houses as well as in old trees. One may see in these two 

 or three days Worksop Manor and park, lying close by 

 the town — a fine park, now the property of the Duke of 

 Newcastle, the house, however, much reduced by fire from 

 its old estate. It was the home of the Earls of Shrewsbury, 

 and stout Bess of Hardwick built the mansion or finished 

 it, and ruled over its destinies, as she did in one way or 

 another over all the great families of the county. Mary 

 Queen of Scots was once a prisoner in this house. There 

 are a few fine trees in the park, including a group of noble 

 Oaks not far from the mansion. A little beyond Worksop 

 Manor the high-road leads into the enclosure of the park of 

 Welbeck Abbey, where the visitor will find the winners of 

 two successive Derbys and the most successful breeding 

 establishment in the history of the English turf. 



Just beyond Welbeck is Clumber, the seat of the Duke 

 of Newcastle. The house is low and badly placed, and 

 dwarfed, moreover, by the ugly church just completed, 

 which is placed too near the mansion, with whose archi- 

 tecture it does not harmonize. The handsome terrace 

 joining the house with the lake is one of the most success- 

 ful in England ; and the view across the lake to the rolling 

 park beyond is very fine. There are noble trees in the 

 pleasure grounds and in the park, and the lake, with its 

 margins lined with wild plants and stocked with wild fowl, 

 is certainly a most wonderful imitation of nature. The 

 view of the mansion from one of the drives where it 

 crosses a narrow arm of the lake on an old arched 

 stone bridge is deservedly famous. The house contains 

 many fine pictures and other works of art. What will 

 strike, perhaps, the American visitor to Clumber are the 

 countless thousands of rabbits running about every part of 

 the place, which seems completely undermined with their 

 burrows. The park contains no herds of deer, which 

 abound at Welbeck, and in Thoresby Park, which is just 

 beyond Clumber, and from which it is separated by two 

 pairs of gates. 



Thoresby, the seat of Earl Manvers, by far the most 

 beautiful of "the Dukeries," and one of the most interesting 

 places in all England, has a noble new Elizabethan mansion, 

 built on high ground, overlooking the large artificial lake, 

 close by which the old house stood. The park is twelve 

 miles round, and contains many interesting and exciting 

 views and many noble trees. Not far from the house is a 

 small-leaved Linden-tree not easily matched anywhere, 

 and across the lake is an avenue a mile long of splendid 

 old Chestnut-trees of immense size, forming a long vista 

 which loses itself in the mysterious depths of Sherwood 

 Forest beyond. In the shubberies near the house, although 

 not very long planted, are the finest specimens of the Hem- 

 lock-tree of the high Sierra Nevada (Tsuga Patto7iiand) 

 which can be seen in Europe. The present Earl Manvers 

 is a planter of trees, as the young plantations all over the 

 estate bear witness ; and at one point the drive leads 

 through a real forest of Beech-trees, with tall, straight 

 trunks, which a German forest-master would not be ashamed 

 of. Deer wander through the park right up to the terrace- 

 wall and to the gates of the courtyard, and from the house 

 great flocks of sheep and herds of cattle can be seen feed- 

 ing under the park trees, giving life and variety to the 

 scene and adding much to its attractiveness. 



Passing out of Thoresby Park gates the road leads 

 directly into Sherwood Forest at the point where the view 

 in our illustration was made. Then it stretches through 



