6i8 



Garden and Forest. 



[December 24, 1890. 



Downing, one of its members, in which he shows that if 

 drainage and repairs to the roads are made at the proper 

 time, it will 'save each tax-payer under the present system 

 from twenty-five to fifty per cent, of road taxes. This 

 means that the present labor tax is enormously wasteful. 

 The cost of maintaining the average township road in the 

 eastern counties of the state is estimated at $1,500, of 

 which $1,200 are spent in wages for work done late in the 

 spring, to suit the convenience of farmers, after gulleys 

 have been deepened and much destruction has been 

 allowed by this neglect. It is further shown that four men 

 by draining and filling at such times as their work is 

 needed could keep the same roads in repair by eight 

 months' work at a saving of $410— that is, a land-holder 

 who pays $20 road tax under the present plan would save 

 $6.75 under the cash plan, or if the service lost to the 

 farmer is added, the total waste will be more than $10 out 

 of every $20 of taxes paid. 



Bad roads are expensive roads ; improper maintenance 

 is a shameful extravagance ; in too many instances the 

 men who are paid for repairing roads should in justice be 

 fined for obstructing them. Any revolution in law or prac- 

 tice which will ensure to our people such roads as are com- 

 mon throughout Europe will materially lessen the expense 

 and add to the comforts and pleasures of country life. 



The North Woods Thirty-six Years Ago. 



WE chanced not long ago upon a book called " Hills, Lakes 

 and Forest-Streams, or A Tramp in the Chateaugay 

 Woods," written by S. H. Hammond, and published in 1854. 

 The author's name is not now familiar, and his work has no 

 great literary interest, being a simple account of a summer 

 outing, written by a man who evidently enjoyed Nature and a 

 wild life keenly, but had no desire to collect statistics of any 

 sort or describe the scenes he saw in anything more than a 

 general way. But his words have, incidentally, great docu- 

 mentary value, as proving how short a time it has taken to 

 bring the Adirondack woods into their present condition of 

 semi-ruin. 



" If," he says in the preface, " the reader will lay before him 

 a map of the counties of Clinton, St. Lawrence, Franklin and 

 Essex, and, beginning at the Chazy Lake, run his eye thence 

 along to Bradley's Lake, then to the Chateaugay, then west to 

 Ragged Lake and Indian Lake and so down through the series 

 of small lakes to the St. Regis and then to the Saranacs, and 

 down along again through three small lakes to the Racquette 

 River, and then down that beautiful water-course to Tupper's' 



Lake and to Long Lake, he can trace out a circle of 



some 200 miles in circumference enclosing natural scenery 

 the most wild and romantic, lakes and rivers the most beauti- 

 ful imaginable. I was out there several weeks in the woods, 

 along the streams and floating on those beautiful lakes, and 

 saw during that time no face of a white man save that of my 

 guide." In short, when this book was written all this *' broad 

 sweep of country containing millions of acres was a perfect 

 wilderness." That was only thirty-six years ago. What is this 

 country now ? From Upper Chateaugay Lake, only a few 

 miles south of the St. Lawrence, where the banks have been 

 wholly stripped of trees by the charcoal-burners, to the 

 southernmost limits of the area described, devastation has made 

 its way — here total, there as yet but partial, but everywhere 

 sufficiently apparent to mean distress to the eye of the lover 

 of Nature, and imminent danger to the mind which knows the 

 value of our water-courses and their intimate dependence upon 

 the forests of elevated regions. Thirty-six years ago the 

 traveler had to construct his own canoes on lakes where now 

 tourists swarm by the hundreds, where the railway whistle 

 may be heard, and where the lumberman and charcoal-burner 

 are ubiquitous, an axe in one hand and a torch in the other. 

 Ignorance, carelessness and greed have worked hand in hand 

 during the life of one generation only, yet the wreck they have 

 wrought no statistician can compute and centuries of the un- 

 fettered ministration of Nature could not undo. 



When we read of the primeval Adirondack forest in those 

 old journals, where the experience of the first missionaries is 

 embalmed, we do not think of it as a possession which once 

 was ours. It seems to have belonged to far-off ancestors for 

 whose ill deeds we are not responsible, and whose aims and 

 methods, we fondly fancy, were inferior in intelligence to our 

 own. But when we see that this primeval forest stood intact 



thirty years ago we begin to realize our responsibility for past 

 sins, and, which is still more important, we gain a fresh sense 

 of future danger. Such agencies as have been active in this 

 forest do not carry on their work in simple arithmetical pro- 

 gression. If a certain amount of damage is done during one 

 year, the next year will see, not a similar, but a vastly greater 

 amount. If thirty years have accomplished the ruin we now 

 behold, thirty more years, with the same agencies at work un- 

 checked, will more than suffice to sweep the Adirondack 

 forests off the face of the earth — to put them in the same cate- 

 gory as those so-called forests of England, where to-day sees 

 only wide wastes of underbrush and an occasional isolated 

 Oak or Beech. A letter from an American traveler which we 

 read last summer described a drive in the south of France 

 near Nimes which, according to the map, traversed a "forest" 

 for miles and miles. " We could not exactly agree about it 

 when the day was over," said the writer ; " my wife insists 

 that the forest contained seven trees; but she is an optimist by 

 nature — I only counted six." This sounds like farce;, but it is 

 simple truth. And if present methods of procedure remain 

 unchecked there will certainly be vast districts of Adirondack 

 forest which, thirty years from now, a traveler may truthfully 

 describe in a similar way. 



The Autumn Flora of the Lake Michigan Pine 

 Barrens. — III. 



THOUGH the Sunflowers have mostly disappeared from the 

 barrens, two of them are still found upon the ridges, Helian- 

 thus divaricains and H. occidentalis. The former has a rough 

 stem and leaves, and rather small flowers. The latter has an 

 odd appearance for a Sunflower, by reason of its leaves being 

 mainly near the root, the stem being nearly naked above, giv- 

 ing to it a scape-like aspect. It is not seen in as great num- 

 bers as the former. 



Of Prenanthes, three species may be found in favorable 

 localities. Among the low bushes in the richer ground P. 

 altissima and P. alba are not uncommon, and in considerably 

 drier localities P. racemosa. In the companion genus, the 

 common Hawkweed for September, is Hieracium Canadense, 

 growing like most of its kind in the dry grounds. 



Two Polygonums may be deemed specially characteristic, 

 both small and of slender but erect habit, with slender branches 

 and very narrow leaves. They are Polygonum tenue and 

 Polygonella articulata. Polygonum tenue, though rarely 

 more than a foot in height, has long, simple branches 

 more or less provided with small white flowers. The 

 Polygonella is commonly of about the same height, but is 

 sometimes taller. Since thedeaves become disjointed and fall 

 off it has a naked look. The erect branches are abundantly 

 furnished with small, but yet showy flowers, as they are often 

 very bright colored. In the barrens they vary much in color. 

 The tints run from red through rose and flesh color down 

 through pale pink to white. Some years white will be the 

 predominating color, or white tinged with pink; in other years 

 white will scarcely be found, the rose shades characterizing the 

 flowers. Those which appear latest in the season seem to 

 have the brightest colors. Both plants succeed in the driest 

 locations, where the sands may, at the time they are in bloom, 

 bear few plants besides them. 



Lobelia Kalmii continues to blossom in the damp sands 

 during the early fall, the smooth and slender stems showing 

 a spike of pale blue but delicate little flowers. In the adjoining 

 dryish ground will be seen specimens of Buchnera Americana, 

 a taller plant, with an erect stem, generally without branches. 

 It is a rough plant, and has a spike of small but deep blue 

 flowers raised above the sparse grass amid which it is apt to 

 grow. But it, like the Lobelia, is more characteristic of the 

 late summer flora. 



A papilionaceous plant yet persists in flower by the shore 

 of the lake, though in other localities in seed or beyond that 

 stage. It is our most common Prairie Clover, Petalostemon 

 violaceus. The dense spikes of violet flowers, though much 

 less abundant, are as complete as they were earlier in the 

 season. It is established everywhere upon the sand ridges, 

 and its foliage of fine and pretty leaflets keeps fresh and green 

 till late in autumn, yielding only, like Artemisia, to the hardest 

 frosts. Its form and habits, especially when close to the shore, 

 are quite different from what it takes in the grassy prairie, 

 where its natural home is deemed to be, and where it is single- 

 stemmed, or nearly so. But in the sands it strikes downward 

 with a strong, branching root, sometimes nearly an inch in 

 diameter at the crown, the size corresponding to that of the 

 plant. From this root rise several stems (the most I ever counted, 

 twenty-six), forming a roundish bunch that may measure a 



