August 6, 1890.] 



Garden and Forest. 



387 



Correspondence. 



Our Schools and Gardening. 



To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir. — I have lately had occasion to discuss elsewhere the 

 subject of our common school education as bearing on rural 

 life, horticulture and fanning. This was recalled to me by an 

 editorial recently in Garden and Forest on horticultural 

 education. Agricultural colleges are of value in their way ; 

 but they are too far along and their inlluence is exercised too 

 late. A boy, graduate of our common schools and sent to an 

 agricultural college, goes charged with a popular bias in favor 

 of trade. It is a simple fact that commerce in any form is held 

 to be honorable, but land-tillage is looked down upon. My 

 friend Parker can retail my potatoes, peas and berries, but the 

 raiser of vegetables and berries for market, and the first sale 

 of the same, brands one as belonging to a lower caste. It 

 needs considerable decision to get on a load of cabbages 

 and take them to market. Now, I have learned to trace this 

 error in public judgment to a foundation or causal error in 

 education. The trouble in this case is that our schools are in 

 no sense whatever adjusted to farm life and farm work. "Any 

 one can be a farmer. It needs no special education to grow 

 onions." This is the public sentiment that must be corrected, 

 and with it the false methods of study. There will be no de- 

 mand for higher education in horticulture or agriculture until 

 pupils are started in the right direction in the common schools. 



A man who sends his boy to school with the direct purpose 

 of qualifying him to comprehend and love the things which 

 come under his eye and other senses, and in order to enable 

 him to enter into sympathy with his work in the field, will be 

 disappointed. The horticulturist needs to understand vegeta- 

 ble and animal life — their history and evolution, the possibili- 

 ties involved in climatic and other environments — and 

 should be prepared for the comparative and experimental 

 cultivation of plants, trees and animals. Will the curricu- 

 lum of the common school prepare the boy or the girl 

 in these directions ? Out of this they get neither botany nor 

 zoology ; neither horticulture nor gardening in the narrower 

 sense ; neither a knowledge of soils, nor of rocks, nor of vegeta- 

 ble chemistry. What is given to the child is more specifically 

 that which inclines him to trade, and away from land culture. 

 It will not do to rely on a higher training after the bias is 

 given. The suggestive plan proposed by Garden and Forest 

 and by Professor Bailey, covers the advanced need of a pupil 

 already under way with elementary biology. But until our 

 schools specifically recognize, from the outset, the dignity of 

 gardening and field work, education will unfit, rather than fit, 

 us for being an agricultural people. 



I am persistent in beginning with all my children at a knowl- 

 edge of soils and rocks, the land under their feet, and its make- 

 up geologically. Then I pass on to the life on the earth — 

 vegetable and animal. So long as I can find an elementary 

 book like that of Professor Shaler there is no trouble with 

 geology. As for zoology and botany we are also fairly well 

 supplied with good books. Chemistry in laboratory work fol- 

 lows. And so the lads from ten to twelve years of age have a 

 knowledge first of all of the world about them and the life on 

 it. It is mostly field work and laboratory work ; and with it 

 goes drawing, from the outset. Such a course gives them a 

 passion for the soil and plants and animals, from the beginning 

 of their mental development. I may add that they never think 

 of such studies as tasks, but as enthusiasms. I do not advo- 

 cate directing a boy to land culture when he has a marked 

 taste for machinery or for literature ; hut the retention by wise 

 and fitting education of those who naturally should be farmers 

 and gardeners. 



Clinton, N. Y. E. P. Powell. 



Bermuda Grass. 

 To the Editor of Garden and Forest: 



Sir. — The grass on the lawn of your correspondent at Frank- 

 fort, Kentucky, " making a growth all through June," is doubt- 

 less the Bermuda Grass (Cyuodou Dactylon), as you have 

 determined it; but it is not usual to find it troublesome where 

 other lawn grasses will grow, and this experience with it in 

 Frankfort is very interesting. The foliage of this grass is so 

 easily killed by frost that it does not seem able to gain a foot- 

 hold north of the Potomac. Botanical works give its range as 

 from Pennsylvania southwardly ; but I have never been able 

 to find a specimen except in the ballast ground near Philadel- 

 phia, where it occasionally springs up from the seeds brought 

 in the ballast, but does not spread beyond. In the admirable 

 list of the "Flora of New Jersey," from the pen of Dr. Britton, 



just published as part of the work of the Geological Survey, it 

 is noted only in a few instances on wharves or in ballast heaps. 



That it rarely seeds in the United States is, I think, a popular 

 error. It flowers rather early, and before its later creeping 

 habit begins. In that state it attracts popular attention, and 

 there no seed vessels are seen. Years ago, when examining 

 the horticulture and agriculture of Louisiana and Mississippi, 

 Colonel Hillyard, now of New Orleans, remarked to me on one 

 occasion near New Orleans, "They say this never seeds. 

 Look, it is abundantly seeding here." Again, some years 

 later, I was crossing the then unfinished grounds in front of 

 the new National Museum at Washington with Professor Por- 

 ter, of Easton, who called my attention to the abundant fruit- 

 ing of the grass on that waste ground. A specimen that I 

 gathered there I subsequently sent to Doctor Thurber, who had 

 given currency to the non-seeding reputation of the Grass. 



The "dwarfed, late-starting Grass of the northern states, so 

 destructive to northern lawns" (page 363) is probably Panicum 

 sanguinale. 

 Germantown, Pa. Thomas Meehan. 



Recent Publications. 



Les Champignons, Traite elementaire et pratique de Mycologie 

 suivi de la Description des Especes utiles, dangereuses, re- 

 marquables. Par J. Moyen avec une Introduction par Jules 

 De Seynes. Paris: J. Rothschild. Pp. xxxv., 762, 20 chromo- 

 lithographs and 334 wood-cuts. 



The French certainly understand the art of making popular 

 treatises on natural history. To artistic skill in the production 

 of plates they generally add a style which, although approach- 

 ing diffuseness, is clear and easily followed. The present work, 

 in spite of its 800 pages, is so well arranged that the reader 

 can easily find what he wants to know and read it quickly. 

 It is one of a class of books of which a considerable number 

 have appeared in the last few years whose object is to give to 

 the unscientific, or mildly scientific, reader a general view of 

 the forms and properties of all kinds of fungi and a more de- 

 tailed knowledge of the species which are edible or poisonous. 

 It contains a large amount of information, and we do not know 

 any better elementary work of the same scope. The numer- 

 ous .wood-cuts are a great help to the beginner who wishes to 

 study the subject from a botanical point of view, and the ama- 

 teur who is only in search of some ready means of recogniz- 

 ing the principal edible and poisonous forms will find the col- 

 ored plates a practical aid. The larger part of the text is 

 devoted to a " Flore Mycologique," or description of the most 

 important Basidiomycetes and the larger Ascomycetes, fol- 

 lowed by an artificial key to the species and a glossary of 

 technical terms. The medical man would perhaps prefer the 

 work of L. M. Gautier, Les Champignons, and the expert my- 

 cologist would require more technical works, but the present 

 book is to be recommended to those general readers and 

 amateurs who desire to begin the study of fungi, for it offers 

 in a condensed and simple form the substance of a good many 

 books. The reader may perhaps feel that too much is given, 

 but that error, if it be an error, is one easily pardoned. 



Notes. 



California nectarines are in the market, and very good they 

 are. Some of the California peaches, too, are fair, and there 

 are few others to be had in the city. Jamaica oranges are just 

 coming. 



In an article on the " Botanic Gardens atKew," recently pub- 

 lished in the Popular Science Monthly, it is said that between 

 six and seven hundred thousand persons visit them in the 

 course of a year. 



It is reported in the American Agriculturist that a rust has 

 appeared on the Canada Thistle. The fungus spreads rapidly 

 and is very destructive of the host plant, which is well known 

 as one of the most pestilent of weeds. 



We are advised that Hill & Co., proprietors of the Rose 

 Nursery at Richmond, Indiana, have retired from the retail 

 business. Hereafter the Messrs. Hill, in a new location not 

 far from the city, will limit themselves to a wholesale and 

 noveity trade. 



C/ethra barbincrvis, obtained from Japan through Mr.Thomas 

 Hogg in 1875, is now in bloom at the Kissena Nurseries, Flush- 

 ing, and a very striking shrub it is. It is a strong grower, with 

 leaves six and a half inches long and three inches wide on leaf 

 stems one inch long. The (lowers are pure waxy white, with 

 white pistil and stamens, and they are arranged in racemes six 



