May 14, 1890.] 



Garden and Forest. 



233 



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, MAY 14, 1890. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles :— The Greendale Oak and Wclbeck Abbey. (Illustrated.) 



— Roaarians Wanted in America 233 



The Mandioca Thomas Morong. 234 



The Redwood Forest Carl Purdy. 235 



Vegetation in Central Pennsylvania Professor W. A. Buck/tout. 235 



New or Little Known Plants : — Bucldeya distichophvlla. (With figure.) 



C S. S. 236 



Foreign Correspondence : — London Letter W. Watson. 236 



Cultural Department:— Some Notes on Echinocactus C. R. Orcutt. 238 



Chrysanthemums in Pots.— II T.D.H. 238 



Roses Under Glass IV. H. Taplin. 240 



Notes on American Plants F. H. liorsford. 240 



Hardy Plants for Cut Flowers.— IV E. O. Orpet. 240 



The Bulb Border, Androsace sarmentosa. Ranunculus fumariscfolius, 

 Gold-laced Polyanthuses, Aquilegia flabellata, Myosotis alpestris 



Victoria G. 241 



Gathering Asparagus 5. 241 



Recent Publications : — Forestry in North America. — II... Sir Dietrich Brandts. 241 



Correspondence: — The Decorative Use of Flowers John De Wolf. 243 



Notes 243 



Illustrations :— Buckleya distichophylla, Fig. 37 237 



The Greendale Oak 239 



The Greendale Oak and Welbeck Abbey. 



A PORTRAIT of the Greendale Oak, representing- the 

 tree as it appears to-day, is published on page 239. 

 The Greendale Oak is familiar by name at least to most 

 persons who take any interest in the venerable or other- 

 wise remarkable trees of England. It was a tree of such 

 unusual size 176 years ago that the then Duke of Portland 

 laid a wager that he had in his park at Welbeck a tree so 

 large that he could drive a carriage and four through a 

 hole cut in the trunk. He won his bet and ruined one of 

 the most remarkable trees in Europe, which, in spite of this 

 barbarous mutilation at the hands of the noble proprietor 

 of Welbeck, has continued to exist almost in the same con- 

 dition that it appears to have been in 1775, when the draw- 

 ing of it was made that was published eleven years later 

 in Hunter's edition of "Evelyn's Sylva." Another portrait 

 of the tree appeared in Hayman Rook's " Description and 

 Sketches of Some Remarkable Oaks in the Park at Wel- 

 beck," a rare and interesting book, published in London in 

 1790. Rook states that the Greendale Oak was "thought 

 to be above 700 years old ; and that, from its appearance, 

 there is every reason to suppose that it had attained to that 

 age at least." He gives the following statistics of its size : 

 Circumference of the trunk above the arch, thirty-five feet 

 three inches ; height of the arch, ten feet three inches ; 

 width above the middle, six feet three inches; height of the 

 top branch, fifty-four feet. The tree has probably increased 

 very little since these measurements were made just a cen- 

 tury ago, although we have not, unfortunately, any recent 

 authoritative measurements with which to compare them. 

 The archway, however, has certainly been much narrowed 

 by the extension of the bark round the edges of the cut 

 since the Duke drove his carriage and four through it. 

 Another portrait, somewhat idealized, of the Greendale Oak 

 appears on the title page of Strutt's noble "Sylva Britan- 

 nica," in which are gathered the portraits of the most ven- 

 erable and most interesting trees of Great Britain. 



The Duke, who ruined this fine tree to win an after- 

 dinner bet, was not the only eccentric owner, to use a very 



mild expression, of Welbeck Abbey; and to the late Duke 

 belongs the somewhat equivocal honor of having spent 

 more money badly on a country estate than any man 

 whose operations are accurately known. He enjoyed the 

 title during twenty-five years only, but he spent in that 

 time at Welbeck not less than $35,000,000. Money was 

 never spent more foolishly or with less results, and much 

 of it disappeared underground. An old high-road crossed 

 the park within sight of the windows of the Abbey. The 

 Duke did not like his privacy encroached upon, so he car- 

 ried the road through a tunnel a mile and a half long and 

 leading right under the lake to a point where it could not 

 be seen from the mansion, and where the traveler was al- 

 lowed to emerge again into the light of day. This tunnel, 

 arched with brick, made water-tight with cement and 

 lighted day and night with gas, was an expensive affair. 

 But the Duke, having once got the taste for burrowing, 

 kept at it until he had made a vast picture gallery 158 feet 

 long below r the surface of the ground, connected with a 

 great underground ball-room and joined with the mansion 

 by long subways. Other subways lead to a great under- 

 ground kitchen and to the stable a mile away. The con- 

 servatories were all underground, too, and the tired and 

 astonished visitor may w r ander for miles through passages 

 lighted only from occasional bull's-eyes placed at a level 

 with the surface of the ground. Great sums of money 

 were spent in building. A new wing was added to the 

 Abbey, which was flanked by a broad, flat terrace leading 

 down to the lake, a long, narrow sheet of artificial water, 

 with margins bare of vegetation and marked by formal 

 edge stones. A mile from the house and between it and 

 the gardens are grouped a number of great stone build- 

 ings erected by the Duke. He never drove and rarely 

 rode, but his stables had accommodations for 200 horses. 

 The riding-school, the finest in Europe, it is said, is roofed 

 with glass, and is 385 feet long and 104 feet wide. Eight 

 thousand gas jets are provided to light it in case it is ever 

 used at night. A tan gallop, enclosed in brick and covered 

 with glass, 1,240 feet long, in which horses can be exer- 

 cised in bad weather, stands near the riding-school ; and 

 not far away are coach-houses and farm-buildings, a 

 poultry-yard, a timber-yard with a saw-mill, the house of 

 the manager of the estate, and a club-house with a read- 

 ing-room for the use of the working-people. The kitchen- 

 garden and forcing establishment occupy eighteen acres, 

 surrounded with a solid brick wall eighteen feet high. 

 There are miles of glass in this enclosure, and some of the 

 best fruit-trees in England. Seventy-five men keep this 

 garden and the grounds about the mansion in order, and 

 the work is well done. It would be hard to find a garden 

 in better order or one more productive of good crops of 

 fruit and vegetables of the highest quality ; but outside the 

 garden there is little of real interest on the estate. 



The old Duke was all alone in the world. There was 

 no one to help him waste his millions or to enjoy the re- 

 sults he thought he obtained ; no kinsman or friend was 

 allowed to cross his threshold ; the only people he saw 

 were the workmen who built up and pulled down at his 

 command, and kept delving deeper and deeper into the 

 ground. When his time came to die it was not even at 

 Welbeck that the messenger found him. Was there ever 

 a sadder spectacle of misdirected energy, of wasted for- 

 tune, of fruitless striving ! That most of the money spent 

 at Welbeck by this eccentric old man was wasted, there 

 can be no doubt ; for Welbeck Abbey, in spite of the mil- 

 lions which have been lavished on it, is one of the least at- 

 tractive of the great homes of England. The house is set 

 down in a hole, close to the ugly, formal lake, and the 

 only view it commands is across the lake, and this view is 

 ruined by a pair of ugly copper gates standing right in the 

 middle distance, without other support than that afforded 

 by a low metal boat-house. The view of this part of the 

 park would, without this blot, be fine, as many such 

 English park views are fine, from the natural grouping of 

 the old trees they contain, and from the great bands of 



