January i6, 1889.] 



Garden and Forest. 



25 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office : Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducted bv 



Professor C. S. Sargent. 



ENTERED AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER AT THE POST OFFICE AT NEW YORK, N. Y. 



SINEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16, 1889. 

 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles : — Schools of Horticulture.— The Trees of Central Park. — 

 A Japanese Stable (with illustration). — Boundary Walls and En- 

 trances for Prospect Park 25 



The National School of Horticulture at Versailles H. S. Codman. 27 



Foreign Correspondence: — London Letter W. Watson. 27 



New or Little Known Plants:— An Addition to the Trees of Florida (with 



illustration) C. S. S. 28 



Cultural Department: — Lachenalias W. E. Endicoit. 30 



Arctostaphylos Uva-ursi Joseph Meehan. 30 



New Chrysanthemums J. N. Gerard. 31 



Orchid Notes A. D. 32 



Principles of Physiological Botany. — III Professor George Lincoln Goodale. 32 



The Forest: — The Forest and Woodlands of New Jersey. — L. . J. B. Harrison. 33 



Correspondence : — Rare Trees of Rhode Island L. IV. Russell. 34 



The American Mistletoe Rev. John E. Peters. 34 



Shortia galacifolia Professor W. IV. Bailey. 34 



Periodical Literature 35 



Recent Plant Portraits 35 



Notes 35 



Illustrations :— Eugenia Garberi, Fig. 87 29 



A Japanese Stable 31 



Schools of Horticulture. 



A CORRESPONDENT describes upon another page the 

 organization of the National School of Horticulture 

 of France, one of the most successful in Europe for the 

 purpose for which it was established — the training of 

 practical, working gardeners. The theory of the school is, 

 that instruction in horticulture, if it is to be of any value, 

 must be both practical and scientific. The courses of 

 instruction, therefore, extend over a period sufficiently 

 long to permit the students to acquire, by actual practice, 

 under experienced cultivators, the skill which will enable 

 them to perform all the operations of the garden in its 

 various departments, and to learn, from lectures and by 

 study, something of the sciences upon which the art of 

 horticulture rests. All the operations of the establishment, 

 which is a large one and admirably kept, are performed 

 by the students ; and, although it is not self-supporting, 

 the sales of produce of various kinds are sufficient to pay a 

 considerable part of the expenses, including the salaries of 

 several instructors. The institution is an excellent 

 example, certainly, of what a large School of Horticulture 

 can be made. 



A number of Schools of Horticulture were established in 

 this country several years ago, and some of them are still 

 in operation. They have all been connected, more or less 

 intimately, with agricultural colleges; for, with the excep- 

 tion of a school for women which existed for a short time 

 in Newton, Massachusetts, a few years ago, there has 

 been no institution in this country devoted solely to horticul- 

 tural instruction. These schools have, in some instances, 

 done admirable work as horticultural experiment-stations, 

 and the country is indebted to them, in their capacity as 

 such, for much valuable information. Many of them now 

 provide an excellent course of botanical study and offer 

 instruction in some branches of practical horticulture. 

 It will not, however, be maintained by the best friends of 

 these schools, that a well equipped gardener was ever 

 graduated from any one of them. 



The causes of the failure of these schools are deep 

 seated. They spring, in part, from the want of apprecia- 

 tion of the requirement of a sound horticultural education 



on the part of their founders, and in part from the pre- 

 vailing tendency of the American people to be satisfied with 

 a hasty and insufficient training for any vocation in life. A 

 young man who devotes an hour or two a week during 

 the thirty or forty weeks of a school course, even if his 

 studies are carried into the second year, may find a certain 

 amount of satisfaction in thus playing at horticulture, but 

 he will gain little that will be of any practical value to 

 him in earning his living as a gardeiier. And yet, to 

 create gardeners of broader intelligence and greater skill 

 than can be gained from the rule-of-thumb system of the 

 old apprentice days, is the only legitimate purpose for 

 v^^hich such schools can be established merely as schools. 

 But the directors of our Schools of Horticulture are not 

 altogether responsible for the existing state of affairs. 

 Americans are in too great a hurry to learn anything thor- 

 oughly. The lad who has passed a fe^w months in some 

 successful florist's green-house, or in the garden of some 

 private establishment of good reputation, is generally 

 pretty sure, in this country, to obtain a responsible situa- 

 tion in which he is practically his own master, and where 

 he gets as high wages as if he had devoted a number of 

 years to learning his profession. It is not surprising, there- 

 fore, that Schools of Horticulture are not supported in this 

 country, and that the number of ignorant and half-trained 

 gardeners is far in excess of those who really understand 

 their business. The best gardeners in America, with a few 

 exceptions, are foreign born, and got their early training 

 before they came to this country. Really good gardeners 

 are rare, of course, in every country, for the combination 

 of knowledge with the qualities that make a great gardener 

 is seldom found. They are more rare here, however, 

 than they are in Europe, because absence of competition 

 permits very inferior men to aspire to important positions ; 

 and we must continue to depend, as a rule, upon foreign 

 nations for gardeners, until the struggle for existence here 

 is so sharp that only men thoroughly trained in their pro- 

 fession can hope to live by it, or until a more general 

 knowledge of gardening and its possibilities among the 

 class who employ labor makes it impossible for ignorant 

 men to obtain positions requiring such a high order of 

 intelligence, industry and zeal. Such a change will come 

 to pass, perhaps, in the United States, sooner or later ; but 

 in the meantime our Schools of Horticulture can wisely 

 give up trying to teach young men who do not want to 

 be taught, and devote their energies to those wider fields 

 of usefulness which, fortunately, are open to them, and 

 by experiments, and in many other wa)^s, at least help to 

 create the demand for skilled gardeners which they were 

 founded to supply. 



There is no better season of the year than winter to 

 study trees with reference to their surroundings, or to de- 

 termine the amount of the damage inflicted by one tree 

 upon another when they are brought together too closely 

 in ornamental plantations. If there is any one in this city 

 interested in trees in their ornamental aspects, he cannot 

 devote a few hours of one of the^e days of early winter, 

 before the snow makes walking uncomfortable, to a 

 better purpose than a stroll through Central Park. The 

 overcrowding and the poor condition of many of the 

 trees there is more apparent now than at any other sea- 

 son of the year, and tree-lovers will be able to see for 

 themselves that many trees should be removed at once if 

 there are to be any fine ones left in the Park at the end 

 of another quarter of a century. Large and healthy trees 

 are crowded in all parts of the Park by smaller and less 

 valuable ones. There can be but one ending to the strug- 

 gle between a strong and a weak tree ; but the process of 

 destruction is slow, and the victorious giant too often 

 carries through life the marks of the contest. IMan can aid 

 nature wonderfully by the judicious use of the axe, and 

 there is hardly an acre of the Park plantations which has 

 not suffered, and is not now suffering, from ill-judged cau- 

 tion in cutting. The sickly and often half dead Norway 



