lUNE II, 189O.] 



Garden and Forest. 



281 



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 I'OST OFFICE AT NEW YORK, N. Y. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 11, 1890. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Editorial Articles:— The American Elm. (Illustrated.)— Legislation for the 



Adirondacks.— Formal Gardening in America 281 



Trees in their Spring Attire : - 282 



The Art o£ Gardening— An Historical Sketch.— XXI. The Mahometans in 



India Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer. 283 



Selenipedium caudatum, var. Warscewiczii. (illustrated.) 284 



Foreign Correspondence :— Letter from Haarlem C G. Van Tubergen. 284 



Cultural Department :- Notes on Shrubs 7- G. J. 285 



Fern Notes IV. H. faplin. 286 



Some American Plants F. H. Horsford. 286 



Hardy Plants for Cut Flowers E. O. Orpei. 288 



Papaver lasvigatum. — Ornithogalum Arabicum. — Columbines. — Aquile- 



gia dichlora. — Aquilegia alba grandiflora G. 288 



Sowing Seeds.— Ten Weeks Stocks John Thorpe. 289 



Correspondence :— The Fruit Outlook E. Williams. 289 



The American Association of Nurserymen :— Fifteenth Annual Meeting 289 



Grapes as Affected by Climate and Situation George IV. Campbell. 290 



Success with Peaches 7- H.Hale. 290 



The Value of Piece-root Grafting as compared with Crown Grafting and 



Budding Professor L. H. Bailey. 291 



New Varieties of Fruits H E. Van Deman. 291 



Notes z 9 2 



Illustrations:— Selenipedium caudatum, var. Warscewiczii 285 



American Elm-tree at Sandwich, New Hampshire, 100 years old 287 



The American Elm. 



THE Elm-tree is dear to the heart of the New Eng- 

 lander. No other tree is so associated in his mind 

 with the idea of home ; it forms the most remarkable 

 feature of the domestic New England landscape, and in 

 no other part of the country is there a tree which occupies 

 the same position in the affection of the people as the Elm 

 does in that of the inhabitants of New England. The peo- 

 ple who settled the shores of Massachusetts Bay brought 

 with them the remembrance of the Elm-trees which were 

 such an important and conspicuous feature in the country 

 where they had been bred ; and it is not surprising that 

 they sought to reproduce in the new country something of 

 the old by planting by their doors the most familiar of the 

 English "roof trees." So the habit grew of setting an 

 Elm-tree close by the home hewn out in the wilderness, 

 and these house-trees, planted by the early settlers of New 

 England or by their descendants of the early generations, 

 are the oldest and noblest trees which have been planted 

 by man in North America. 



The American Indians were not planters of trees, but 

 they discovered the white man's love for them, and the 

 story is told that in Massachusetts early in the last cen- 

 tury a party of them came to the Reverend Oliver Peabody, 

 the pastor of Natick, and the successor of Elliott, the apos- 

 tle of their race, bearing two Elm-trees on their shoulders 

 and begging that they might be allowed to set them out 

 before his door as emblems of friendship. The larger of 

 these two trees was struck by lightning and destroyed 

 ninety years afterward, when the trunk girthed twenty-one 

 feet just above the ground. An account of these trees and 

 of two other Elms planted by the Indians in 1753 hi front 

 of the house of Mr. Peabody's successor, the Reverend 

 Stephen Badger, as a sign of their respect for him, ap- 

 peared in the fourth volume of the New England Farmer, 

 published in 1826, from the pen of Mr. John Welles. 



The affection for the Elm-tree, thus early developed in 

 the New England heart, often saved it when the land was 

 cleared for cultivation ; and when roads were made and 

 provided with trees, as they were more generally in New 



England a hundred years ago than they are now, the Elm 

 naturally was selected to shade the traveler from the burn- 

 ing sun of summer. The noble stem supporting the broad 

 head of light and pendulous branches, the delicate spray, 

 indescribably beautiful in winter, and the abundant foliage 

 of summer, make the American Elm one of the most de- 

 sirable of road-side trees when placed in a suitable situa- 

 tion, and a fitting ornament to stand by the stateliest man- 

 sion or the humblest farm-house. 



The illustration on page 287 shows a fair example of a 

 typical New England Elm a century old. It has been 

 made from a photograph taken by Dr. William H. Rollins, 

 of Boston, of a tree planted a hundred years ago in the 

 town of Sandwich, New Hampshire. The soil in which 

 this tree has grown is dry and rather sterile, and the tree 

 is not an exceptionally large one for the age, the trunk 

 girthing only twelve feet at three feet above the ground. 

 The effect of the poor soil is already apparent, and the 

 leaves are smaller and drop earlier in the autumn than 

 they did ten years ago, for the American Elm will not live 

 to a great age or develop all its beauty in every situation. 

 It dreads drought and starves in poor soil ; its home is on 

 fertile intervales along streams, where the deep alluvial soil 

 is never dry and where plant food is never lacking. The 

 Elms which grew to such great size by the farm-houses of 

 New England owed their stature to the nourishment stolen 

 from the neighboring garden, or to the moisture drawn 

 from the well which their branches shaded. Thus they 

 grew to great size and lived out their span of life, which at 

 the best is not very great, for the Elm is a fast-growing 

 tree, and rarely lives during a longer period than two cen- 

 turies or two centuries and a half. The most vigorous of 

 them begin to show the first signs of decay before they 

 have seen a century and a half go by, and an Elm a hun- 

 dred years old in perfect health is now difficult to find, 

 except on some exceptionally fertile river-lands like those 

 which border the upper Connecticut. Our Elm, there- 

 fore, being so impatient of drought, and being so dependent 

 on abundant nourishment, is not a safe tree to plant in all 

 sorts of soils and situations, although it has long been the 

 habit to plant it everywhere in some parts of the country. 

 As growth and vigor diminish insects multiply ; and none 

 of our trees suffers to such an extent from their ravages. 

 There can be no more forlorn spectacle, certainly, than the 

 rows of half-grown, stunted Elm-trees which may be seen 

 in our cities and their suburbs, disfigured by the canker- 

 worm and by hordes of other insects. The Elm is one 

 of the best of trees to plant where the soil is deep and 

 rich and where moisture is abundant and constant ; it is 

 one of the least desirable of all trees to set by the side of 

 city streets, where plant-food is always lacking and where 

 moisture is quickly carried off by the artificial drainage of 

 road-bed and service pipes. Give it a fair chance and the 

 American Elm will hold its own against any tree in the 

 world in its own peculiar light and graceful beauty ; but, 

 unless all the conditions favor it, there is no tree less sat- 

 isfactory, and it should not be planted unless these condi- 

 tions can be supplied. 



North America, or the eastern half of the continent, for 

 no Elm grows naturally in the far west, is well supplied 

 with Elm-trees. The American Elm {Uhnus Americana) 

 ranges from Newfoundland to western Texas, and from 

 the Atlantic seaboard to the eastern base of the Rocky 

 Mountains. The Slippery Elm {Uhnus fulvd), dear alike 

 to the youthful heart and to that of the purveyor of nos- 

 trums, is widely scattered over a large portion of the east- 

 ern part of the country. In the south the Wahoo {Ulmus 

 alata), a much smaller tree than the American Elm, with 

 corky branches and small foliage, grows by the banks of 

 streams and is now often planted as a roadside tree. The 

 Rock Elm, known to botanists as Uhnus racemosa, be- 

 cause the flowers are produced in short racemes, inhabits 

 the western states. This is little known still to cultivators, 

 although of much promise as an ornamental tree, and 

 although the wood which it produces is not equaled by 



