March 13, 1889.] 



Garden and Forest. 



121 



GARDEN AND FOREST, 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office: Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducted by Professor C. S. Sargent. 



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



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13, 1889. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



I'AGE. 



Editorial Articles: — The Railroad in Horticulture. — Lawn Plants for Dry 

 Regions. — The Wood of the Tupelo. — The Forest Belt of Northern 



Me.xico. — Results of an Exhausted Pine Supply 121 



Recent Botanical Discoveries in China VV, B. Hemsley. 122 



The Railroad Station at Auburndale (with illustrations) 124 



Foreign Correspondence: — London Letter..'. W, Watson. 125 



Cultural Department : — Forwarding Vegetable Plants W. F. Massey. ii-j 



White Sports Among Roses IV. H. Taplin. 128 



Orchid Notes A. Dimmock. 128 



Principles of Physiological Botany. XI Professor George Lincoln Gaodale. 128 



Correspondence :— The Drayton Garden 5'. 129 



The American Pomological Society:— The Meeting at Ocala, Florida. 11 130 



Report of the Sub-Tropical Fruit Committee 130 



Varieties of the Sweet Orange E. H. Hart. 131 



The Lemon in Florida H. S. Kedney. 131 



Exhibitions: — The Recent Orchid Exhibition in this City 131 



Notes 132 



Illustrations : — Plan of the Grounds of the Auburndale Station, Boston and 



Albany Railroad Company 124 



Auburndale Station 126 



Another View of the Same Station 127 



The Railroad in Horticulture. 



THE service which the railroad is capable of perform- 

 ing in the development of horticultural taste and 

 knowledge is considerable. Every inhabitant of a town 

 visits the railroad-station, and if the town is in the neigh- 

 borhood of a city, a considerable portion of the population 

 passes through the station six days out of seven. The im- 

 pression it makes, therefore, is powerful and lasting. 



Railroad-managers, or some of the more far-sighted 

 among them, long ago perceived that a well-built and well- 

 equipped station is the best advertisement that can be set 

 up in a country town, and that the first impressions 

 received by a stranger in arriving by rail have much to do 

 in determining his choice of a home, and railroad-garden- 

 ing has, therefore, come to be considered a necessary part 

 of construction and maintenance among prosperous and 

 progressing companies seeking to develop local passenger 

 business. 



It must be confessed, however, that up to the present 

 time railroad-gardening has failed, with few exceptions, to 

 accomplish what the public has a right to expect of it from 

 an artistic point of view, and that instead of using their 

 opportunities for increasing the taste and knowledge of the 

 communities they serve, railroad managers have generally 

 been satisfied to reproduce all that was glaringly bad in the 

 prevailing horticultural fashion of the time. This was, 

 perhaps, inevitable, and it will be inevitable so long as men 

 trained in other pursuits and engrossed in absorbing occu- 

 pations feel that in these matters of taste and special know- 

 ledge they need not call for the advice of an expert of a 

 higher class than the ordinary jobbing gardener. It is the 

 old story— a man employs an architect to build his house, 

 but thinks he needs no advice in laying out the park that 

 surrounds it. 



The principles which underlie good railroad-gardening 

 are simple. They relate— so far as such gardening has yet 

 been attempted — to the improvement of the immediate sur- 

 roundings of country stations, and to the shaping and turfing 

 of the slopes rising or falling from the permanent way. 



The essential features in the surroundings of a station 

 are : convenient and abundant approaches, and some treat- 

 ment of the ground not needed for the approaches. This 

 treatment should be at once economical and permanent, 

 and of a character simple enough to be successfully main- 

 tained by the station-master and his assistants, under the 

 inspection and with the occasional advice of a higher offi- 

 cer charged with the management of the horticultural 

 affairs of the corporation. The selection of a general sys- 

 tem of treatment is the only difficult part of the undertaking, 

 and it is here that railroad-managers have usually failed. 

 Most railroad-gardens — and this is as true of Europe as of 

 America — consist of a badly laid out and constructed 

 approach, bordered with turf in which are cut as many 

 large and often grotesquely -shaped beds as can be 

 crowded in, filled during four months of the year with the 

 most showy and ill-assorted plants and quite bare of all 

 covering during the remaining eight months ; of a few 

 shrubs, mutilated almost past recognition by bad pruning, 

 and a clump of Pampas grass to complete the decoration. 

 Not infrequently this arrangement is varied by the intro- 

 duction of the name of the station printed in bold char- 

 acters with large white stones, or by pattern-beds of gay- 

 colored sand or pebbles — mere "toys," as Bacon wrote 

 three centuries ago, "you may see as good sights many 

 times in tarts." 



Station-grounds thus arranged are not artistic, and there- 

 fore are bad from the point of view of the public. They 

 are enormously expensive and difficult to maintain, and 

 therefore are bad from the point of view of the railroad. 

 It is evident that no railroad corporation, however pros- 

 perous, can go on year after year decorating station- 

 grounds on a system which requires a large annual outlay. 

 If railroad-gardening is ever to become a potent and per- 

 manent means of public education, it must be organized 

 upon a more ecomical basis, and with more regard to the 

 laws of good taste and of good business than has yet been 

 shown in the United States or in Europe. 



This is a subject which has, however, occupied the at- 

 tention of a few thoughtful men, and we feel confident that 

 some progress has at last been made in railroad-gardening 

 — a view which will perhaps be confirmed by an examina- 

 tion of the pictures of some of the suburban stations re- 

 cently built by the Boston and Albany Railroad, which we 

 begin to publish this week. The grounds surrounding 

 these stations have been laid out with a view to conve- 

 nience, neatness and simplicity. They contain no beds of 

 brilliant flowers, and make no attempt at startling effects. 

 They rely for their attractiveness upon convenient and 

 well-kept roads, neat turf, a few good trees, and masses of 

 well-selected and well-planted flowering shrubs among 

 which herbaceous and bulbous plants are allowed to grow. 

 The scheme is simple and, when thoroughly carried out in 

 the beginning, is easy and inexpensive to maintain. And 

 as true art, which consists in adapting any creation of this 

 sort to its surroundings and to the requirements of every- 

 day life, always impresses itself in the long run upon those 

 who are brought in contact with its results, these simple 

 station-yards are already exerting an influence which is 

 shown, in the communities of which they are the centres, in 

 a truer appreciation of what is most beautiful in gardening. 



The best scheme for treating railroad slopes and banks 

 has not yet been worked out. The two extremes are the 

 carefully graded and turfed bank, generally adopted in Eng- 

 land when railroads were first built, and the rough, gullied 

 slope, usually bare of vegetation or covered with an occa- 

 sional growtli of native shrubs which do not long escape the 

 annual butchery of the track-gang. Some system inter- 

 mediate between these two extremes is needed. The turfed 

 slope, in spite of all the money that has been expended 

 upon it, has not been successful even in England, where 

 the climate is much better suited to the development of 

 good turf than in any part of the United States. The grass 

 slopes there are now generally in a bad condition, cut 

 with gullies, filled with weeds, and really less satisfactory 



