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Garden and Forest. 



■■December 31, 1890. 



The Beginnings of Fruit-culture in Germany. 



A' 



N article published not long ago in the Illustrirte Gar- 

 - tenzeitung, of Vienna, gave, on the authority of old state 

 papers, some interesting facts with regard to the fruit-culture 

 of former times in the kingdom of Wurtemberg. It seems 

 that the earliest mention of this industry is found in accounts 

 of the destruction of vineyards and orchards during the 

 wars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, while the first 

 recorded edict for their protection dates from 1515, and im- 

 poses a fine on any one who shall cut down fruit-trees, wild 

 or cultivated, on open grounds. Another edict, dated 1552, 

 declares that children caught stealing fruit shall be punished 

 by their fathers, or imprisoned, or put in baskets and dipped 

 in the water. That wild fruits were still largely depended 

 upon is proved by an ordinance of the year 1 566, saying that a 

 cultivator may pick up the fruit from wild trees, but must not 

 shake them, as what remains on the branches must be left for 

 the animals which at that period the upper classes so greatly 

 delighted to hunt. It appears that the planting of fruit-trees 

 was not prescribed until about 1600, when the setting out of 

 Mulberry-trees was ordered. Each grown man under the age 

 of forty was to plant one, and each stranger coming to reside in 

 the province was to plant two on public land ; and from later 

 edicts it appears that the fruit of such trees could be gathered 

 by the planter during his life-time and then by his widow, but 

 that after her death they reverted to the commune. The edict 

 of 1655, which declared that fruit-trees must not be planted 

 nearer than seven feet and nut-trees not nearer than ten feet 

 to a neighbor's boundary line, still holds good. The Mulberry 

 continued in high honor through the eighteenth century, for 

 we read of an order dated 1755 which prescribes the planting 

 of all new roads with two lines of these trees, standing sixteen 

 feet apart. In the following year Apple and Pear-trees are 

 also named for such service, but merely in positions where 

 Mulberries would not grow or bear. Only in 1792 was heed 

 paid to the fact that the interval between the trees which suf- 

 ficed for Mulberries was insufficient for the other sorts. Then 

 a distance of twenty-four feet was prescribed for old roads and 

 of thirty-two feet for new ones. 



In 17 18 a desire to maintain the reputation of the vineyards 

 which produced the then famous Neckar wine, called forth 

 an order against the planting of fruit-trees in vineyards, ac- 

 companied by sentence of immediate death against all that 

 had already been thus planted, unless they were over fifty 

 years of age, when they might be preserved until their time 

 of bearing should be over. In 1723 a money reward was 

 offered for the destruction of wasps' nests. 



Until the end of the last century there were no nurseries of 

 fruit-trees in Wurtemberg. The first was founded by Duke 

 Charles Eugene when he established the Karls Akademie on 

 his estate, " La Solitude," and decided that horticulture should 

 be among the branches taught. The father of the poet Schil- 

 ler was, after his retirement from the army, for many years 

 director of this horticultural school. 



Wine is, of course, mentioned very early in this series of 

 public documents, but only in 1644 does one read of inns 

 where beer as well as wine is sold, and drinks made from 

 other fruits than the grape are not mentioned until 1650. The 

 preparation on a large scale of all such drinks is then forbid- 

 den on account of the practice of using them to adulterate 

 wine. It is only permitted to each farmer to prepare a certain 

 stipulated small quantity for the consumption of his own 

 household. Otherwise, it is declared, it would soon be impos- 

 sible for the poor, and especially for women in childbed, to get 

 their needful draught of pure wine, to say nothing of the ruin 

 that might come on the country at large were this capital in- 

 dustry to deteriorate. A little later even the fabrication of 

 small amounts of cider is forbidden; but it seems to have been 

 impossible to enforce so radical a measure, and there is soon 

 a return to laws which do not prohibit, but strictly control and 

 limit its making. Not until 1735, however, was the sale of 

 cider allowed, and even then the warning against its admixture 

 with wine was reiterated. Sometimes the two beverages 

 could not even be sold at the same time, though cider might 

 be alone. The use of certain inferior kinds of fruit for brew- 

 ing drinks is also often forbidden even at this late date. Much 

 fruit seems to have been used in those days for cooking pur- 

 poses, even more, proportionately, than at present, although 

 the Germans are remarkable to-day for their love of this kind 

 of food. Yet cooked preparations of fresh fruit seem to have 

 been almost exclusively employed, for references to dried 

 fruits are few, and the prices named for them in 1622 are so 

 high that they appear to have been then a luxury. These care- 

 ful and strict regulations, of which we have here quoted only 

 a few among many, prove that the government of that time 



took a truly paternal interest in the affairs of private cultiva- 

 tors as well as of the commune as such. But there can be no 

 doubt that such regulations did much to encourage the devel- 

 opment of local industries, or, at least, to keep them in the 

 best path that the wisdom of the time could discover. More- 

 over, they were sometimes in the direction of enlarging, not 

 restricting, the liberty of poor farmers, as is proved by a law of 

 1567, which gave them the right to transplant young wild fruit- 

 trees from the forests without any payment therefor. This 

 privilege was a greater one than it may seem to modern 

 readers, for there were vastly greater numbers of such trees 

 in the forests then than now ; and it was also more of a con- 

 cession than we can easily realize, for hunting was then the 

 one great amusement of the rich, and not only beasts 

 of the chase were carefully preserved, but likewise the 

 woods wherein they found their food. It should be noted, 

 however, that the permission is given for personal use only; 

 no transplanted tree is to be sold, and it seems as though each 

 peasant were allowed to take but a single tree. 



Vancouver's Park. 



T N Stanley Park the City of Vancouver has a unique posses- 

 *■ sion. It is in fact a section of the original forest, with all 

 that is venerable and impressive in such an object, connected 

 with a brisk young city, where everything is bright and new. 

 Five years ago not a house stood here, where 15,000 people 

 are now riding in electric motor cars through streets brilliant 

 with electric lights. The city has the best hotel in British Col- 

 umbia, and one of the most beautiful theatres on the conti- 

 nent, and is in touch with cities east, west and south, and even 

 with Alaska. 



In the skurry of growth on our side of the border a park is 

 one of the last things to be thought of. Here it was one of the 

 first. This is because Vancouver is not a mushroom town, 

 but is growing normally and soberly, and without the rush and 

 ruffianism of most new settlements. The wealth of the pro- 

 vince in fish, fur, gold, coal, building stone and timber made 

 a town needful hereabout, and the Canadian Pacific Railroad 

 focused it on Burrard Inlet by making that its terminus. The 

 city stands on a peninsula of high and healthy land, with room 

 for metropolitan expansion, and its pleasure-ground covers a 

 second peninsula given off from this, a slightly elevated tract 

 ten miles around. It is encircled by a road; a drive-way and a 

 few corduroy paths have been run across it ; at the entrance, 

 which is reached from town by a pretty bridge crossing a salt 

 inlet, there is a bit of lawn and garden, a keeper's cottage and 

 a few cages of native animals — bears, wolves, foxes, badgers, 

 hawks, owls and eagles ; but except for these slight changes 

 and additions, and the huts of a score or two of Indians, who 

 enjoy squatters' rights and have not been asked to move on, 

 this reservation is in a state of nature, and it is designed to 

 keep it so, in so far as consists with public use. 



An inhabitant of eastern towns finds this park unlike any- 

 thing that he has seen before. It is covered with forest down 

 to the edge of the sea ; indeed, the trees lean above the waves 

 and fall into them in their decay. Burrard Inlet on the east, 

 " the Lions' Gate " on the north and the Georgian Gulf on the 

 west enclose it with ocean water that softens and cools the air, 

 while the spicy fragrance of Cedar enriches it. On the land- 

 ward side, great mountains, peaked with snow and scarred 

 with avalanches, tower in alpine majesty, and this combina- 

 tion of sea, mountain and forest cannot be matched on our 

 north Atlantic coast. Everything has a luxuriance that sug- 

 gests a warmer zone, even the kelp in the bay throwing its 

 streamers on the tide to a length of eight fathoms from tip to 

 root, and the trees on shore rising from one to three hundred 

 feet high. These trees are the glory of Vancouver. The 

 height of them is less striking when seen in mass than when 

 seen alone, for the breadth of green detracts from the apparent 

 altitude, just as the width of Niagara Falls has an effect, at first 

 view, of diminishing their height; but when they stand alone, 

 or when a cabin or other familiar object is near enough to 

 offer a standard of comparison, one better appreciates their 

 majesty. I found that the readiest way to guess their height 

 was to imagine one of our sky-scraping New York flats erected 

 beside them, and to mark off with the eye spaces of fifteen or 

 twenty feet, the number of such intervals indicating the num- 

 ber of stories that such a structure would contain. I judged 

 from this crude measurement that the Times and Tribune 

 buildings would be nearly hidden, in many parts of the wood, 

 from the view of a person who was so placed as to look over 

 the tops of the trees. 



The Douglas Fir here has its noblest growth, and it is little 

 surpassed by the giant Sequoias of California. Its grace and 

 shapeliness are no less remarkable than its height, for it has a 



