50 



Garden and Forest. 



[January 30, li 



habits of the present representatives of the families which 

 built them. . . . In a few instances, as at Hatfield House, 

 Lord Salisbury's favorite residence, the ancient mansions will 

 probably be kept in habitable condition for many years longer; 

 but the great majority, like Haddon Hall, the most beautiful of 

 all, will inevitably be abandoned, sooner or -later, by their 

 owners, from the impossibility of being comfortable in them, 

 and they will fall, one after another, into decay. Whether this 

 will be a great loss to architecture is not altogether certain. The 

 plans have been recorded in many books, so that we shall not 

 lose the recollection of their stately and picturesque arrange- 

 ment, but the details of the designs are rarely of a very high 

 order of merit. The rich ceilings made of plaster modeled by 

 hand are often the best portions. . . . But the wood-work 

 is no better than that done now, while the carving, both on 

 wood and stone, is of little value, either in design or in execu- 

 tion, and would hardly be noticeable except for the lavishness 

 with which it is used. . . . Moreover, the houses of that 

 period contained glaring faults. Symmetry being, in the minds 

 of the architects of that time, necessary to correct taste, win- 

 dows and bays were distributed almost without regard to the 

 interior planning, and a bay illumining a great gallery might 

 be balanced by one of equal size in the buttery. Where real 

 windows could not be used, false ones were put in without 

 compunction to preserve the symmetry of the composition, 

 and Cobham Hall, one of the best examples, is ... ' rid- 

 dled ' with sham windows, put in with real muUions and tran- 

 soms and glazed, but closed behind the glass with a wall." 



These facts are familiar to all who have really studied 

 Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture. Nevertheless, an 

 unreasonable admiration for it still persists in the minds of 

 the public. Knowing that these houses have incompara- 

 ble dignity and picturesqueness when seen in a general 

 view amid the surroundings with which the passage of 

 centuries has beautified them, even Americans often seem 

 to think that there can be no more certain way of se- 

 curing a beautiful and comfortable home than by imitating 

 them as closely as possible. We do not say that the actual 

 attempt is very often made, but it is occasionally made in 

 a more or less ambitious and conscientious way ; and we 

 could point to one house at least — one of the very costliest 

 country homes ever erected in this country — which has 

 been copied room for room and stone for stone from an 

 Elizabethan prototype. It should be needless to explain, 

 now that our own domestic architecture has developed 

 types of genuine beauty and of complete appropriateness 

 to our own wants, that such efforts must be mistakes both 

 from the aesthetic and from the practical point of view. If 

 the ancient homes of England are proving themselves un- 

 comfortable for habitation even in England, how shall they 

 meet the needs of this country — how shall they suit our 

 habits of life, which differ still more from those of the six- 

 teenth century Englishman than do those of his descend- 

 ants of to-day ? Nor does a really cultivated taste find, as 

 Mr. Gotch confesses, much to admire in the heavy, monoto- 

 nous, and often clumsy and unrefined decorative motives, 

 which were employed by the architects of the English Re- 

 naissance — their work in this direction is, in truth, far 

 inferior, both in design and in execution, to the best that 

 American architects now produce. And, of course, the 

 general and, so to say, superficial charm which old Eng- 

 lish homes possess in their original situations, is entirely 

 lost when they are transplanted to alien climes and deprived 

 of all historic associations. 



Since it was announced that certain improvements would 

 necessitate the destruction of the thirteen trees planted on 

 Washington Heights, in this city, by Alexander Hamilton, to 

 commemorate the original states of the Union, much inter- 

 est has been felt for their preservation, and a movement has 

 been started to purchase enough land about them for a 

 small park. The trees are Liquidambars, and, although 

 they are called a grove in the newspapers, they really 

 form a dense clump. They all stand within an area 

 fifteen feet square, which means that they were too closely 

 planted to permit of a healthful growth. Several of them 

 are so choked and crowded that at this age their trunks are 

 not more than six or eight inches in diameter, while the 



trunks of the larger ones are about two feet in diameter. 

 Even the best of them have no symmetrical development, 

 and the tops of most of them show considerable dead- 

 wood. We are not likely to have too many small 

 parks, and it will be fortunate if some of the land about 

 these trees can be devoted to public use. But apart from 

 their historical associations these Liquidambars have no 

 great value. Many single trees are better worth saving, 

 and, indeed, if Alexander Hamilton had planted one tree 

 where he planted the thirteen, it would now cast nearly as 

 large a shadow as they do and it would be much more 

 likely to survive another century. 



White Huckleberries. 



IN Garden and Forest of January 2d there was a no- 

 tice of the occurrence of a form of Gaylussacia 

 restnosa with white fruit in New Jersey. A similar case 

 is known to me at Shelburne, New Hampshire, where a 

 few bushes of Vaccinium Canadense bore flesh-colored or 

 pinkish berries, instead of the usual deep-blue fruit. The 

 flesh-colored berries were found at the same spot in two 

 successive seasons, but I have no means of ascertaining 

 whether their occurrence has been noticed for a greater 

 length of time. In the berries both from New Jersey and 

 New Hampshire we have simply albino forms not depend- 

 ing on the growth of a fungus; certainly in the case of the 

 New Hampshire plants, which I examined carefully. 



In Germany, however, there has been observed a white- 

 fruited form of the common Blueberry, or Heidelbeere of 

 the Germans, which is due to a fungus growth. As long 

 ago as 1859 it was described by Doll under the name of 

 Vaccinium Myrtillus van leucocarpon, but, in 1879, Schroe- 

 ter discovered that the white color was due to the growth 

 of a fungus which he called Peziza baccarum, which, in its 

 mature or ascosporic form, consists of a small cup on a 

 slender but comparatively long stalk which springs from 

 a small, hard nodule, the sclerotium. Woronin, in a very 

 interesting paper in the Memoirs of the St. Petersburg 

 Academy, beautifully illustrated, as are all his writings, 

 has recently given a full account of similar white berries 

 found by him in Finland on Vaccinium Viiis-Idcea, V. Oxy- 

 coccus and V. uliginosum, three species also found in the 

 United States, and of the fungi which produce the white 

 color. 



Woronin considers that the fungi on the different Vac- 

 cinia above named, although closely related, really belong 

 to four distinct species of Sclerotinia. The hard nodules, 

 or sclerotia, are found in the berries late in the season, and 

 the cup-like, mature form is produced early in the spring 

 from the sclerotia in the berries which have lain on the 

 ground during the winter. The ripe ascospores in the 

 cups germinate at once, and the germinal tubes make 

 their way into the young stems of the Vaccinia in the 

 neighborhood. They penetrate to the woody bundle at 

 first, and afterwards produce a cushion-like mass of fila- 

 ments under the epidermis, from which grow chains of 

 necklace-like filaments, which cover the surfaces of some 

 of the upper leaves and the young shoots and exhale an 

 odor of almonds. Each joint of the filaments ultimately 

 becomes separated from its neighbors by a peculiar 

 structure, called by Woronin a disjunctor, and they fall 

 apart and constitute what are called by botanists the 

 conidial spores. The conidial spores, which mature at 

 the end of May or early in June, are, through the agency 

 mainly of flies and bees, carried to the pistils of the open- 

 ing flowers. Those which are deposited on the stigmas 

 produce long tubes, which, somewhat like pollen-tubes, 

 traverse the styles, but, unlike pollen-tubes, do not attach 

 themselves to the ovules, but make their way into the 

 placentas. The mycelial tubes then grow and cause an 

 atrophy of the young seeds and internal portions of the 

 berries, although their general size and shape are com- 

 paratively unchanged. The tubes finally become indurated 

 and form a compact mass, and the berries blacken and fall. 



