April 17, 1889.] 



Garden and Forest. 



191 



zoological garden worthy of the name ? The area which Dr. 

 Shufeldt, who has carefully studied the subject in foreign 

 lands, declares barely sufficient, means one-third of the whole 

 area of this park. The remarks w-hich he adds upon these 

 accompaniments in the way of libraries, lecture-rooms, dis- 

 secting-rooms and museums which should be found in a 

 zoological garden do not so nearly concern us here. Every- 

 thing that he asks is desirable, indeed essential, to the creation 

 of an ideal zoological garden, and almost everything could be 

 secured in New York did public interest rise to the level of the 

 occasion. There might be a little longer distance between the 

 garden and the city museums and libraries than he thinks de- 

 sirable, but New Yorkers are used to long distances, and noth- 

 ing but money enough and a selection of wise and disinter- 

 ested managers, who shall not be politicians, is needed to 

 secure all other convenient and useful conditions. But the 

 clearer and wider becomes our idea of these conditions the 

 more absurd it seems that anyone should fancy for a moment 

 that the Central Park could be arranged to afford them, even 

 though it were entirely ruined, as a park, in the process of 

 adaptation. 



Correspondence. 



An Interesting Garden and a Good Gardener. 

 To the Editor of Garden and Forest: 



Sir. — Good, all-round gardeners are rare in these days every- 

 where ; perhaps they have always been difficult to iind, 

 but they are especially rare in the United States. Modern 

 fashions in horticulture have been a serious hindrance to 

 real advance except in a few very limited directions. Gar- 

 deners who have learned their business in the last thirty or 

 forty years have learned a great deal about propagating and 

 growing a few varieties of soft-wooded, tender plants, and 

 about massing them together for the summer decoration of 

 unnatural gardens, and they have learned, too, and most suc- 

 cessfully, how to flower Orchids and how to develop all the 

 beauty of leaf-coloring of many inhabitants of tropical 

 swamps. But this has often been done at too great a sacrifice, 

 and it is now rare to find a gardener who is as much at home 

 with fruits and yegetables as he is with Orchids or herbaceous 

 perennials, or one who knows much about trees and shrubs 

 or about forcing, or, what is rarer still, one who knows and 

 can grow hard- wooded, green-house plants. 



These thoughts came into my head lately as I was walking 

 through one of the old gardens of the Boston suburbs, that of 

 Mr. John L. Gardener, of Brookline, which for nearly a quar- 

 ter of a century has been under the entire charge of Mr. C. 

 M. Atkinson, one of the few old-fashioned gardeners now left 

 in America, and one of the most successful men in all depart- 

 ments of gardening who has ever been in this country. It is 

 always instructive to visit these gardens, and the visitor never 

 comes away without at least one valuable bit of information, 

 conveyed in quaint and picturesque language, about some 

 now little known or half-forgotten plant. 



There is no garden I know where the good old hard- 

 wooded plants are grown so successfully, or where so many 

 different classes and varieties of plants in the different de- 

 partments of the garden may be seen in better condition. 

 But the hard-wood plants are best worth mention, perhaps be- 

 cause they are less often seen now than any others, and be- 

 cause they are, it seems, more difficult to grow. The variety 

 is not very great, but there are admirable plants of Eriostemon 

 inter tnedhim, one of the most beautiful of the winter-blooming 

 Australian shrubs, which, perhaps, cannot be matched now 

 anywhere, and which would have done credit to the great 

 day of English horticulture, when Mrs. Lawrence reigned su- 

 preme in the London flower-shows. Eriostemon belongs to 

 the same family as the Orange, and its flowers, although 

 slightly tinged with pink and quite destitute of perfume, re- 

 semble those of the Orange in size and form. It is a compact 

 shrub, three feet or more high, of excellent habit, and it lasts in 

 flower during eight or ten weeks. One of the plants, the result 

 of twenty years of careful cultivation, was once exhibited at a 

 meeting of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society for a prize 

 offered for the best specimen plant. The prize went to some 

 quick-growing, foliage stove-plant with a spot or a band which 

 had not been nodced in any of its like, the Committee hardly 

 considering the forgotten Australian shrub worth notice. Mr. 

 Atkinson never will forget this incident, or lose an opportun- 

 ity to repeat it. There are fine old plants of some of the old- 

 fashioned Azaleas, like Decora. Heaths are well done and 

 so are Chorizemas, of which a large collection is grown. Here 

 I saw, too, for the first time in America, a plant of Anopteris 



glandulosa, a native of Van Diemen's Land. It is a member 



of the Saxifrage family, with handsome evergreen foliage and 

 erect racemes of white or rose-tinted flowers. 



These gardens are famed for their Japan Irises and for the 

 great masses of spring-blooming shrubs and bulbous plants. 



Hinsdale, Mass. -T. O. 



Injuries to Conifers. 



To the Editor of Garden and'Forkst : 



Sir. — During several weeks past many observers have been 

 noticing the large number of twigs of Norway Spruce that 

 have been scattered on the ground about the trees. In a 

 number of instances red squirrels have been seen on the 

 limbs cutting the young twigs, from which they usually take 

 the buds, and perhaps a part where the twig was severed. It 

 was interesting to notice the varied replies to questions put 

 to people who had seen the twigs on the ground. The twigs 

 come off too hard to warrant the conclusion that they separate 

 spontaneously. Most of them look as though they had been 

 pulled or torn off, and not cut smoothly, although the squirrels 

 caused the mischief. The twigs preferred are those that made 

 short growths last year. Examinadon reveals the fact that this 

 kind of work has been going on for some years at this place, 

 and some persons remember to have observed this twig-cut- 

 ting in former years. 



Our squirrels here have no difficulty in reaching any part of 

 the trees, even to the ends of slender twigs. In a very few in- 

 stances the Scotch Pines have suffered in the same manner as 

 the Spruces. 



Agricultural College, Mich. W. J.Beal. 



To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir.— Since writing in regard to possible causes regard- 

 ing the injury of Norway Spruces, I have found, experiment- 

 ally, that a high wind alone, unattended by frost, is sufficient 

 to produce the damage. If you will take hold of a branch of 

 the Spruce and give it a sharp shake, you will strew your 

 lawn with broken twigs of all sizes. Your shake does not 

 need to be any stronger than that produced by a sudden gust 

 of wind. We had quite a strong wind (north-west) last week, and 

 I found a considerable number of twigs, all freshly broken, on 

 the north-west side. Spruces standing right behind, but pro- 

 tected against the north-west, had no twigs broken on the 

 opposite (south-west) side, where the force of the wind was 

 sufficiently checked. 

 Washington, D. c. B. E. Fernow. 



Recent Plant Portraits. 



LouRYA campanulata, Revue Horticole, March 16: The 

 type of a new genus of HamodoracecB, near Peliosanthes, re- 

 cently dedicated by Baillon to the head of the indoor depart- 

 ment in the Jardin des Plantes. Lourya is a native of Cochin 

 China, where other species of this genus have lately been dis- 

 covered. It has the port and the general appearance of an As- 

 pidistra, while the flowers which are borne in compact umbles 

 close to the ground and at the base of the leaf-stalk, resemble 

 those of the Lily-of-the- Valley, although nearly twice as large. 

 The plant requires the temperature of the stove. 



Marmodes luxatum. Revue Horticole, March 16, an admi- 

 rable colored figure of this Mexican Orchid, which has long 

 been known in gardens. 



LoNiCERA fragrantissima and L. Standishii, Gardeners 

 Chronicle, February 23d. 



Notes. 



The Department of Agriculture has just issued a circular on 

 "Arbor-Day Planting in Eastern States." It has been prepared 

 by Mr. B. E. Fernow, Chief of the Forestry Division, and it 

 gives excellent advice as to the treatment of trees before and 

 after transplanting, and the proper method of planting. 



An international Congress of Pomologists will be held in 

 Ghent in the month of September next, and in connection with 

 it a large fruit-show. In tlie same city an International Ex- 

 hibition of Chrysanthemums will be open from November 23d 

 to December ist, in celebration of the centennial of the intro- 

 duction of the plant into European gardens. 



It is interesting to note that American methods of Rose-cul- 

 ture are attracting attention abroad.- An account of several of 

 our famous Rose-growing establishments was recently printed 

 in the Gardetiers' C/trontcle {London), accompanied by practi- 

 cal explanations with regard to the processes which result in 

 the production of their fine winter crops ; and a similar chap- 

 ter was published in the March number of Gartenflora. 



