628 



Garden and Forest. 



[December 24, 1890. 



price of $1.50 a box has been received during five years. The 

 tree is a Black Tartarian, thirty-five years old, sixty feet high, 

 with a trunk which girths more than ten feet at a height of six 

 feet above the ground. It stands in deep, rich sandy loam on 

 bench land near the American River. The ground is irrigated 

 each year immediately after the fruit, which matures very 

 early in the season on account of the warm and sheltered 

 location of the tree, is picked. 



Under the heading " Populus heterophylla, L." the editor of 

 the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club says : " Another 

 locality for this rare tree in the middle states has been dis- 

 covered by Rev. L. H. Lighthipe near Woodbridge, Middlesex 

 County, New Jersey. The stations now known for it at the 

 north, besides those given in my ' Catalogue of Plants for New 

 Jersey ' and its somewhat wide distribution on Staten Island, 

 are Northport, Long Island, and Guilford, Connecticut, as re- 

 corded by Professor Sargent in his Forestry Report in the 

 Tenth Census." 



Herbaria were not common two centuries ago. Gibson, 

 whose " Account of Several Gardens near London " was writ- 

 ten in 1691, says of a Mr. Darby at Hoxton : " He has but a little 

 garden, but is master of several curious greens that other 

 sale-gardeners want and which he saves from cold and winter 

 weather in greenhouses of his own making. . . . He is very 

 curious in propagating greens, but is dear with them. He 

 has a folio paper book in which he has pasted the leaves and 

 flowers of almost all manner of plants, which make a pretty 

 show and are more instructive than any cuts in herbals." 



A correspondent of the American Garden, speaking of the 

 many kinds of plants which are used for hedges in our south- 

 ern states, says that one of the most beautiful for the purpose 

 is the Gardenia or so-called Cape Jessamine. In the South 

 Carolina garden where he saw it, "it flourishes in those parts 

 of the shrubberies which lie on the edges of the Rice-fields, 

 where it is valuable as being a handsome evergreen shrub 

 which can stand water. During the spring freshets the fam- 

 ily take to the canoes and are paddled between the rows of 

 Gardenias, which hedge in a favorite walk, and which will 

 emerge as green as ever from their bath of several weeks' 

 duration. Even the smaller plants and cuttings do not object 

 to a submersion which would kill the Magnolia and other 

 native plants." 



In his " Notes on England " the historian Taine has well ex- 

 pressed the difference between the type of garden developed 

 in the south of Europe and that which owes its origin to Eng- 

 land and has spread through all northern countries. For the 

 inhabitants of the south, he says, a garden has always been a 

 sort of open-air salon, the chief use of which is to provide a 

 pleasant, convenient place for social intercourse. Thus, its 

 formal, architectural design and artistic decoration with foun- 

 tains, statues and balustrades is eminently appropriate ; while, 

 as the peoples of the north look upon a garden as a place in 

 which to escape from men and commune with Nature, they 

 have inevitably developed a style from which regularity and 

 all other evidences of artificiality are banished in favor of 

 arrangements which preserve or simulate the work of Nature 

 herself. 



A late bulletin from the New Jersey Experiment Station 

 commends the potash salts as insecticides. It has been ob- 

 served that farmers who use the muriate or Kainit in Corn- 

 fields as a fertilizer have no trouble from wire-worms, white 

 grubs or the Corn-root louse. Peach-trees have also been suc- 

 cessfully planted in lice-infested orchards where all had for- 

 merly died by first treating the soil with Kainit. Professor 

 Smith made some experiments of his own which substan- 

 tiated the opinions of the farmers. He also tried solutions of 

 the muriate and of Kainit for spraying, using one ounce to a 

 pint of water in each case. The spray killed aphides on Wheat- 

 heads and on Rose-bushes, and mealy bugs on greenhouse 

 Camellias. In most cases the plants were uninjured, the 

 Kainit inflicting damage more rarely than the muriate. With- 

 out further experiment these salts should be used with caution 

 on foliage; but for underground species of destructive insects 

 they should be tried whenever practicable. They have a high 

 fertilizing value, and will help the plants to overcome insect 

 injury by encouraging their growth as well as by destroying 

 the insects. 



Gotthelf Wilhelm Poscharsky, who held an honorable posi- 

 tion among the landscape-gardeners of Germany, died recently 

 at Dresden in the seventy-third year of his age. For many 

 years he had been Court-gardener in that city, and to his labors 

 as a cultivator added those of a designer in laying out some of 



the gardens attached to the suburban residences of the royal 

 family. In his youth he had studied architecture under the 

 famous Gustav Semper, and this preparation stood him in 

 good stead when he turned his attention to gardening. Before 

 his appointment as Court-gardener he had designed many 

 charming private gardens in the outskirts of the town which 

 now have been swept away to make place for solid lines of 

 buildings. But every visitor to Dresden must remember the 

 splendid avenue of Chestnut-trees which leads from the 

 Neustadt to the Waldschlosschen restaurant, high on the 

 northern bank of the Elb ; and this will long remain a monu- 

 ment to Poscharsky, as he planted the trees with his own 

 hands about forty years ago. The beautiful gardens in Chem- 

 nitz were also of his creation. 



The Boston Advertiser asserts that Dr. Hale thinks he has 

 found a possible solution of the mystery which hangs around the 

 origin of the name of Rhode Island. "In his wanderings 

 about the country regions he has found that the Rhododendron 

 grows luxuriantly all over the island in its season, and he 

 queries within himself whether the early settlers may not have 

 made use of this fact in selecting a name for their habitation." 

 It is probable that this curious query originated in the mind of 

 some newspaper hack, rather than in Dr. Hale's. Aside from 

 the fact that the Rhododendron is very rare in all regions 

 north of New York, it is difficult to suppose that men of a turn 

 of mind at once so unscientific and so unpoetic would have 

 named an island after a flower. It is still more difficult than to 

 accept the common theory that they named it from its fancied 

 resemblance in shape to the Island of Rhodes in the Old World. 

 But even in the highly improbable case thataflower inspired the 

 choice of a name, it would more likely have been the Wild 

 Rose, the " Rhoda" of the Greeks, than the Rhododendron or 

 "Tree-rose," since the Wild Rose grows as prolifically in this 

 region as the Advertiser asserts to be the case with the Rhodo- 

 dendron, which only grows now in one locality within the 

 state of Rhode Island, namely Worden's Pond, and is not 

 known to have grown at any time on the island of Rhode 

 Island. 



The International Agricultural and Forestry Congress, which 

 was held in Vienna during the month of September last, at- 

 tracted some 1,200 persons. Its most important feature seems 

 to have been an address delivered by Chief Forest-Master 

 Prosper Demontzey, of Paris, on "The Works of Reforesta- 

 tion and Stream Correction which have been undertaken in 

 France since i860." The speaker was most competent to dis- 

 cuss his subject, having himself been at the head of many of 

 the works in question, and the facts and statistics he gave, as 

 we find them reported in Gartenflora, are extremely interesting. 

 To show the damage which may be done by streams which 

 have become what the Germans call "wild" in consequence 

 of the deforestation of the high lands where they rise, he de- 

 scribed the catastrophe at St. Pous (Herault), in September, 

 1875, when, in a few days, 150 buildings were swept away, 

 more than 100 persons perished, and a damage of over 3,000,- 

 000 francs was suffered. Such disasters are now prevented 

 by replanting the high lands, by turfing the banks of the 

 streams, and by regulating with dams the flow of the water. 

 Of course, to accomplish these ends strict and far-reaching 

 legislation, as well as a great outlay of money, has been re- 

 quired. The government has the right to expropriate such 

 lands as it sees fit, and to enforce the execution of needful 

 work by private individuals, assisting them with premiums or 

 subsidies. A certain amount of return for the outlay comes 

 from the land reclaimed from the beds of "wild" streams, 

 which is often admirably adapted to agricultural purposes. 

 During the twenty-eight years covered by the speaker's de- 

 scriptions (1861-1888) an area amounting to 145,000 acres had 

 been replanted. Sixty thousand six hundred acres of this 

 were state lands, 50,200 acres belonged to communes, and 

 34,200 to private individuals who had been subsidized by the 

 government. Twelve and a half million francs had been 

 spent in the purchase of lands, and 25,000,000 had been ex- 

 pended in actual work upon these and other government pos- 

 sessions. Six million francs had been paid out in subsidies 

 and 8,000,000 for salaries and other general expenses. Of the 

 25,000,000 credited to "actual work" on government property 

 over 7,000,000 were spent in planting, about 12,500,000 in con- 

 trolling streams and more than 5,500,000 on accessory works, 

 such as road and fence building. As a total we see that 

 51,500,000 francs — more than $10,000,000 — have during twenty- 

 eight years been spent by the French government in partially 

 repairing the damage caused by just such a willful destruction 

 of the forests as is going on to-day, with tenfold greater rapidity 

 than ever in Europe, in almost every part of our own wide land. 



