February 13, 1889.] 



Garden and Forest. 



75 



be made as pleasant as possible to look at, to linger in or 

 to play in? How shall the public park, to which many 

 hundreds or thousands will resort at one time, be so 

 made and preserved as to be to all city dwellers a revela- 

 tion of nature's beauty and peace ? 



Only special study and long observation will fit a man 

 to solve successfully these problems of landscape garden- 

 ing. Says Mr. Ruskin : "Art, properly so called, cannot 

 be learned in spare moments nor pursued when we have 

 nothing better to do. To advance it men's lives must be 

 given, and to receive it, their hearts.'' To the art of pre- 

 serving, enhaiicing or creating out-of-doors beauty, whether 

 natural or formal, the landscape-gardener gives his days. 

 One week will find him plotting the half formal ways and 

 plantings of a city-square, and the next may see him 

 working to bring out and to emphasize all the beauty a 

 piece of park-land can be induced to yield. One day he 

 is designing a garden-terrace for a stately country-seat ; 

 another day finds him suggesting ways of perfecting the 

 charm of a rocky wilderness by the seashore, or the beauty 

 of a meadow or pondside or woodside in the country ; 

 while a third day may be given to the planning of 

 the plantations which are to make some ugly, wind- 

 swept field a pleasant place. He shares with the archi- 

 tect the designing of homesteads — fits the part called the 

 house to the surrounding parts, plans the necessary ap- 

 proaches, and works out such appropriate changes in the 

 surrounding scene as trained taste and experience suggest. 

 He plans, with care, the roadways and the foot-paths by 

 means of which the people shall enjoy their country- 

 park without harming it ; he studies sites and surveys pre- 

 paratory to laying out new suburbs or new neighborhoods 

 of summer-cottages ; he devises the surroundings of 

 hotels, hospitals and public buildings — everywhere en- 

 deavoring to supply every convenience of arrangement, 

 and, at the same time, to preserve or to create as much 

 as possible of beauty, be it picturesque or formal. 

 Boston. Charles Eliot. 



The Kentucky Coffee-tree. 



THE specimen of the Kentucky Coffee-tree, of which 

 a view appears in our illustration upon page 79, is, 

 by far, the largest and handsomest I remember to have 

 seen. It was planted in 1804, directly in front of the his- 

 torical Verplanck mansion, at Fishkill-on-Hudson, occupied 

 for some time by Baron Steuben during the Revolution, and 

 the scene of the first meeting of the Society of the Cincinnati. 



This tree is now seventy-five feet high, and the short 

 trunk girths, three feet from the ground and below the 

 point where it forks into two main stems, a Httle more than 

 ten feet. One of the main stems was struck by light- 

 ning in August, 1887. The damage inflicted was consid- 

 erable; it has, however, now partially recovered, although 

 it hardly seems probable that the great rent torn by the 

 lightning can ever entirely heal over, or that the tree can 

 ever regain all its old vigor and beauty. 



The Kentucky Coffee-tree {Gyninodadus dioicus), although 

 occupying a comparatively wide area in North America, is 

 nowhere common. The most northern limits of its distri- 

 bution are in the Province of Ontario and in southern Minne- 

 sota ; it is found from western New York and southern 

 Pennsylvania as far west as eastern Nebraska and the 

 Indian Territory, although east of the Mississippi River it 

 has not been noticed anywhere south of the central part of 

 the State of Tennessee. It is always found scattered among 

 other forest trees, upon rich hillsides, or on the bottom- 

 lands of rivers. The trunk is erect and rather slender for 

 its height, rarely attaining a diameter of two feet and a 

 half, and is covered with dark, gray-brown, conspicuously 

 furrowed bark. The branches are all erect, not spreading, 

 giving to the tree, even when old, a narrow, ovoid out- 

 line; the branchlets are unarmed, very stout, covered with 

 thick, coarse bark, and entirely destitute of spray — a pe- 

 culiarity which led the French botanist Lamarck to give 

 to this tree the name Gymnocladus, formed from two 



Greek words, yv^vo<^ and 7iXadoi, meaning "naked "and 

 "branch." The leaves, like those of the other plants of the 

 Pea family, are alternate ; they are two to three feet 

 long, unequally twice-pinnate, with four to seven pairs of 

 pinnae, which are seven to thirteen foliolate, with the 

 exception of the lowest, which is reduced to a single leaf- 

 let. The leaflets, which stand vertically upon the stems, 

 are an inch or an inch and a half long, ovate-acute, 

 stalked, membranaceous and pale green. The flowers are 

 polygamo-dioecious — that is, upon some plants there are 

 perfect flowers, with well-developed pistil and stamens — 

 and upon other plants male flowers only, with perfect 

 stamens, but rudimentary pistils. 



They are borne in slender, terminal racemes, which, 

 upon the male plants, are four or five inches long and 

 more compact than those of the perfect flowers, which are 

 ten or twelve inches long. The flowers are long stalked, 

 pubescent, greenish white, an inch long, with an elon- 

 gated, tubular disc, a calyx of five oblong petal-like 

 sepals, and four or five small, oblong, equal, spreading, 

 imbricated petals, inserted, with the sepals, upon the sum- 

 mit of the disc. There are ten short, included stamens, 

 those opposite the sepals being rather longer than the 

 others. The anthers are two-celled, introrse, and open by 

 two longitudinal slits. The pistil, which, in the male 

 flower, is reduced to a small conical process, consists of a 

 sessile, hairy ovary contracted into a slender style, obliquely 

 dilated into a terminal stigma, with two spreading lobes 

 covered with stigmatic hairs. The fruits, of which three 

 or four are sometimes developed upon one raceme, are 

 oblong, somewhat falcate, chestnut-brown pods, with thick, 

 hard walls, six to ten inches long by two inches broad, 

 containing a thin layer of sweetish, yellow-green pulp sur- 

 rounding the obovate, slightly flattened, long stalked seeds, 

 which are half an inch in diameter, and covered with a 

 hard, dark chestnut-brown shell. The embryo, with 

 fleshy cotyledons, and short, erect radical, is surrounded by 

 copious, horny albumen. 



The wood of the Kentucky Coffee-tree is quite heavy, 

 although not very hard, strong and coarse grained, the 

 layers of annual growth being strongly marked by one 

 or two rows of large, open ducts. In color it is light 

 rich brown, tinged with red, the thin sap-wood, which 

 turns into heart-wood generally at the end of five years, 

 being much lighter. It is very durable when placed in 

 contact with the ground, and is therefore sometimes used 

 for posts and fence-rails. It is occasionally used, also, in 

 cabinet-making, as it works easily and can be made to 

 take a good polish. It is liable to check, however, in dry- 

 ing, and the grain is rather coarse for fine work. The 

 seeds were sometimes used as a substitute for coffee be- 

 fore and during the Revolution by the inhabitants of the 

 then remote regions west of the Alleghany Mountains 

 — a fact which has given to this tree its popular name. 

 It is said that the fresh leaves, macerated and sweetened, 

 are sometimes used to poison house-flies, but I have never 

 been able to substantiate this statement to my satisfaction. 



The Kentucky Coffee-tree has a good deal of value in 

 ornamental planting. It is an excellent street tree, possess- 

 ing the merit for this purpose of not putting forth its leaves 

 until late in the spring. The foliage is light and graceful, 

 and in winter this tree is always a conspicuous and interest- 

 ing object, with its upright branches and thick branchlets. 

 It requires a deep, rich and rather moist soil. It is ncA^er 

 a fast growing tree, but this peculiarity is not a disadvan- 

 tage in the case of ordinary street-planting. 



The tree from which the very fine specimen log in the 

 Jesup collection in the American Museum of Natural His- 

 tory was cut, grew in Missouri, not far from St. Louis, and, 

 altiiough only eighteen inches in diameter, was 105 years 

 old. This, perhaps, should be taken as about the average 

 rate of increase of this tree growing naturally in the forest, 

 although the Verplanck specimen, which was probably 

 several years old when it was planted in 1804, has grown 

 much, more rapidly. 



