December 3, 1890.] 



Garden and Forest. 



581 



GARDEN AND FOREST, 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office : Tribune Building, New York - . 



Conduced by 







. . Professor C. 



S. Sargent. 



ENTERED AS SECOND CLASS MATTER AT THE 



POST OFFICE AT NEW 



YORK, N. V. 



NEW YORK, 



WEDNESDAY 



DECEMBER 



3, 1890. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Editorial Articles :— National Forest-Reservations. — Landscape-Gardening 



and the Chicago "World's Fair." 581 



City House-Gardening 582 



A Vase of Chrysanthemums. (With illustration.) 582 



Notes on the Distribution of Some Kansas Trees. — I. The Red Cedar 



(Juniper us Virginiana) S. C. Mason. 583 



The Cranberry Scald. (With figures.) Professor Byron D. Halsted. 583 



New or Little Known Plants : — New Orchids R. A. Rolfe. 584 



Plant Notes: — Some Recent Portraits 584 



Ipomoea ternata, Lapeyrousia grandi flora W. 585 



Foreign Correspondence: — London Letter W. Watson. 585 



Cultural Department: — Fern Notes W. H. Taplin. 586 



The Belladonna Lily M. Barker. 586 



How to Procure Wild Flowers F. H. Horsford. 588 



Transplanting Onions CM. Weed. 588 



Ripened Wood Makes Hardy Trees Joseph Meehan. 589 



Early Chrysanthemums John Thorpe. 589 



Autumn Flowers T. D. Hatfield. 589 



Correspondence : — Care in Selecting the Seeds of Trees R. Douglas. 589 



Recent Publications 590 



Exhibitions 59 ' 



Notes 59 ' 



Illustrations :— The Cranberry Scald : A Berry Partly Scalded, Fig. 75 583 



Section of a Pustule, Fig. 76 ; A Leaf Haff Scalded, Fig. 77 584 



Chrysanthemum, Ada Spaulding 587 



National Forest-Reservations. 



ON the last day of the first session of the present Con- 

 gress a bill was passed "to withhold from settlement, 

 occupancy and sale, and to set apart as reserved forest- 

 lands " the entire basin where the waters gather and 

 through which they flow before they reach the Yosemite 

 Valley. The boundaries designated in the bill include 

 1,500 square miles, and the Yosemite reservation is thus 

 practically enlarged to thirty times its original exterrt. In 

 the same bill two other reservations are set apart south of 

 the Yosemite, which really add 150 square miles to the 

 Tulare Park provided for in a bill passed earlier in the ses- 

 sion. Besides these enactments, a bill to enlarge the Yel- 

 lowstone Park passed the Senate, and comes before the 

 House with no serious opposition beyond what is made 

 by a corporation which seems to be lobbying for some ex- 

 clusive privileges. There is little danger that Congress 

 will rescue from desolation too large an area of mountain 

 forests, and in a few years every one will wonder why our 

 law-makers were so short-sighted as to permit the failure 

 of Senator Edmunds' bill to establish a great reservation in 

 northern Montana about the headwaters of the Flathead 

 River and some of the tributaries of the Missouri, a re- 

 gion which contains some of the grandest scenery of the 

 continent. 



Of course, every year's delay makes such legislation 

 more difficult, and as the unprotected forests are burned 

 and the unprotected game is butchered much of the land 

 now eligible will be hardly worth holding in reserve. The 

 most thoughtful people of New Hampshire may well regret 

 that the White Mountain forests were not held at their true 

 value twenty-five years ago ; and it will cost the state of 

 New York millions of dollars to save a remnant of the 

 North Woods, although the entire wilderness might have 

 been bought at a comparatively trifling expense when 

 Horatio Seymour recommended such action. There is 

 little hope that any considerable stretch of the primeval 

 forests which still clothe many of the slopes and crests of 

 the Appalachian Ranges from Virginia to the Big Smokies 

 will be preserved to give our descendants an idea of 

 their magnificent proportions and their unequaled variety. 



In a few years, unless Congress continues the good work 

 recently begun, the same lamentation must be taken up for 

 the forests on the national domain which arc so rapidly 

 passing from under the control of the general Government. 

 If we assume that the recent action of Congress indicates 

 a change of policy and that other " parks" and forests in 

 our western mountains are to be reserved, some systematic 

 scheme of administration will need to be devised. The 

 attempts of governments, state and national, to protect 

 what has been reserved have not proved up to this time 

 conspicuously successful. When Congress refused to make 

 any appropriation for the superintendence of the Yellow- 

 stone Park, this wonder-land was handed over to the 

 control of an officer of the army with a troop of cavalry. 

 Although this officer as acting superintendent could only 

 exercise a limited and inadequate authority under the law, 

 the presence of a disciplined force representing the power 

 of the United States has proved the most efficient means of 

 protection which has yet been tried. It is our belief that 

 neither the national reservations nor the public forests will 

 be safe until the United States army is actively engaged to 

 protect them. It may well be that something in addition 

 to the visible power of the Government in the presence of 

 the army will be needed to secure the widest usefulness of 

 these reservations. If so, it might be well to consider the 

 advisability of some board of commissioners like the one 

 proposed in Massachusetts to administer grants of forest- 

 land, or of places of historic interest or natural beauty. 

 There are men of leisure and cultivation in the country 

 who would be glad to render such service gratuitously. 

 Or the administration of all the reservations might be en- 

 trusted to some body of similar constitution to that of the 

 Light-House Board, a body, for example, composed of army 

 officers and men of recognized acquirements in forestry 

 and such other subjects as would give weight to their 

 counsel in the management of such a trust. 



Attention is directed to these questions now, because the 

 discussion of them cannot begin too soon. We are sure 

 that the action of Congress in establishing these new reser- 

 vations will be heartily commended throughout the country, 

 and that further legislation in the same line would also be 

 approved. It is to be hoped that the action of Congress in re- 

 gard to the maintenance of these reservations, new and old, 

 will be as wise as their recent legislation has been timely. 



The appointment of Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted as land- 

 scape-gardener to the committee having the Chicago 

 "World's Fair" in charge, seems to promise that due 

 regard will be paid to the disposition of the various build- 

 ings and their interdependence as parts of an organic 

 whole. It was the masterly maimer in which the build- 

 ings were grouped and surrounded by plantations which 

 rendered the last Paris Exposition infinitely more impressive 

 and interesting than any of its predecessors in any country. 

 There, however, the fact that the site included broad slopes 

 descending to the river on one side, and from the river on 

 the other, and that on the upper slope the fine terraces of 

 the Trocadero Palace already existed, facilitated the de- 

 signers' work. At Chicago a perfectly level site must be 

 dealt with, although, indeed, it has the advantage of a 

 magnificent lake front and of wide park areas already 

 planted. Considering the character of this site there is 

 food for reflection in the following paragraph, which we 

 quote from the American Architect and Building Xews : 

 "We have always thought that the future Chicago build- 

 ings might, with a little judicious expenditure for concrete 

 terraces and similar works, be made much more imposing 

 than those of any previous exhibition. There is likely to 

 be plenty of room at Chicago, as there was at Philadel- 

 phia, and this makes it all the more advisable, as an artis- 

 tic matter, to connect the buildings by terraces, balus- 

 trades, colonnades or something of the kind, so as to avoid 

 the impression suggested at Philadelphia, that the various 

 structures had been prepared by the inhabitants of different 

 planets and rained down at random on Fairmount Park.'' 



