July 31, 1889.] 



Garden and Forest. 



361 



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, JULY 31, 1889. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial :— Country Foot-Pafhs. — How to Mask House Foundations 361 



Recent Botanical Discoveries in China. — V W, B. Hevisley. 362 



Magnolia s^lauca in its Most Northern Home J- G. Jack. 363 



Notes Upon Some North American "Yvee^.^lW. . .Professor C. S. Sargent. 364 

 New or Little Known Plants : — Vaccinium hirsutum (with illustration), 



C. S. S. 364 



Foreign Correspondence : — London Letter. l-F. Goldring. 365 



Cultural Department: — The Small Fruit Garden E. Williams. 366 



Rose Notes W. H. Taplin. 367 



Orchid Notes "Calypso," John Weathers. 367 



Notes on Wild Flowers F. H. Horsford. 369 



Plant Notes : — Trachelospermum Thunbergii 369 



Courespondence : — Thinning Forests B. E. Fernow. 369 



Rosa humilis, var. plena G. N. Best. 370 



Flower-beds in Chicago Parks H. W.S.Cleveland. 370 



The Bermuda Lily W. Watson. 370 



The Albemarle Pippin J. J. Thomas. 371 



Recent Publications 371 



Notes 372 



Illustrations: — Vaccinium hirsutum. Fig. 119 365 



A Specimen Plant of Trachelospermum Thunbergii, Fig. 120 368 



Country Foot-Paths. 



WRITERS on health have long lamented that Amer- 

 icans, and especially American women, take little 

 exercise on foot. As compared with the English and the 

 Germans, our distaste for pedestrian exercise is very 

 marked, and it is a familiar fact that even men and women 

 who walk a great deal in town, content themselves in 

 summer with sitting out-of-doors, boating and driving ; or, 

 if young and active, turn to tennis or some other sport, 

 but walk comparatively little. Yet we are not a lazy, 

 apathetic race, but a nervous, energetic, even restless race; 

 and we are not, like the French, so wholly devoted to so- 

 cial pleasures that we are comparatively indifferent to the 

 charms of Nature. Nor does our climate afford a sufficient 

 explanation of our distaste for walking. It is true that we 

 have many summer days when the sun is very hot and the 

 temperature very high. But we have many others, even 

 in the middle of summer, and long successions of them in 

 spring and autumn, when Nature seems to have done her 

 very best to tempt men out-of-doors — when, under the 

 right conditions, walking would be pure pleasure. 



The real trouble is, perhaps, that we cannot always 

 walk in the country under the right conditions, and the 

 fact that we cannot is doubly unfortunate. It would be 

 better for our health as a people if the love of exercise were 

 more general ; and it would be better for our intellectual 

 and spiritual development if the love of Nature were more 

 general. We do not associate these two statements in a 

 casual or careless way. The love of walking and the 

 love of Nature are more intimately connected than most 

 persons realize. Only he who goes abroad on foot can 

 really learn to know the beauties of Nature, because only 

 he lives, for the time being, with those beauties, passing 

 among them, not beside them, and seeing the smaller ones 

 as well as the greater, the more intimate and secret as 

 well as those which are freely displayed. To con- 

 template a beautiful prospect from a veranda or to traverse 

 a charining country in a carriage means much to him who 

 has eyes to see ; but to spend an hour in the woods or to 

 follow on foot the course of a winding river means vastly 

 more. And while a beautiful outlook from one's home or 



the chance to drive and ride at will are luxuries of the 

 rich, the foot-path is free to the poorest. 



But just here is the trouble— just here we find the reason 

 why we cannot walk under the right conditions. Broadly 

 speaking, there are no rural foot-paths in America. 

 There is the high-road which takes us where it wills, 

 not where we will, and never, of course, into the heart 

 of Nature's loveliness, and, which, moreover, is too 

 often hot and dusty. There are the fields and meadows 

 that walls and fences encircle even when the crops are 

 gone and upon these we must not tread. And there are 

 the woods with a few paths, perhaps, but often trackless, 

 briery and tangled ; and, even when they offer easy pas- 

 sage, often secluded from approach by cultivated fields, 

 brooks or marshes. Of course the born lover of Nature, 

 blessed with sturdy thews and sinews, makes light of such 

 impediments to his pleasure, and might possibly say that 

 he preferred the wildwood flavor of an American country 

 walk to the tamer enjoyment offered by an English lane 

 or a German forest-path. But such vigorous enthusiasts 

 form but a small minority among the multitudes who live 

 all the year round in country neighborhoods, or go forth 

 summer after summer in search of health and recreation ; 

 and among these multitudes are thousands who might 

 grow to be lovers of Nature too, if only the path were 

 made a little smoother for them. It is not, in the ma- 

 jority of cases, a matter of mere taste or convenience. 

 Even a strong woman is seriously hampered by her cloth- 

 ing in a cross-country walk, and to a delicate woman the 

 effort involved would be impossible. To climb fences or 

 take down heavy rails, to ford brooks, to clamber up 

 rough hill-sides and over rugged fields and under matted 

 forest branches, and, if it has rained of late, to-get soaking 

 wet in the process, is a prospect uninviting to the average 

 city-bred man, even, and necessarily deterrent to the aver- 

 age city-bred woman. Both are thrown back perforce on 

 the high-road with its very limited offers of pleasure ; and 

 the days are indeed many in an American summer when 

 the high-road is as forbidding, in its own way, as is the 

 trackless forest. 



In England, on the other hand, one may walk through 

 a county without troubling the high-road. The winding 

 by-road with its bowery sides is everywhere at our ser- 

 vice, and everywhere, too, we find the foot-path, crossing 

 private grounds, perhaps, as sanctioned by some ancient 

 right-of-way ; edging the little river and passing it by the 

 bridge which is always to be found where needed ; bor- 

 dering the farmer's fields, leading from one hospitable gate 

 or turn-stile to another, and finding its way to every at- 

 tractive point of view. Of course the physical conditions 

 of the two countries are very unhke— England has been 

 cultivated for so many centuries that scarce an acre ap- 

 pears which the hand of man has not put to some sort of 

 service, while even in the most thickly-settled parts of our 

 older States there are many tracts which are still almost in 

 their primitive condition. Horses, too, are cheap with us 

 and dear in England, so the English rustic is obliged to 

 walk where his American cousin may ride if he will. But 

 to explain why we have not so many foot-paths as the 

 English is not to confess ourselves satisfied with the 

 want of them. Nor is there any reason why we should 

 not have them in far greater numbers. It costs a good deal 

 to make a road but very little to make a foot-path, for, 

 of course, we need merely a narrow path which a well- 

 shod and sensibly-dressed person can traverse with a 

 moderate degree of comfort — not a gravel-walk fit for 

 slippers and muslin gowns. Often a couple of planks 

 across a brook, a few loads of earth dumped in a marshy 

 spot, two or three stones set, as steps, against a wall or 

 fence, and a little cutting away of tree-branches and under- 

 growth, would open up"a delightful tract of country which 

 now is almost impossible of approach. Nor do we think 

 that the farmer's or landed proprietor's interests would 

 suffer by such trifling civilities paid to possible pedestrians. 

 More persons would cross his property, but those who did 



