December 4, 1889.] 



Garden and Forest. 



577 



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, DECEMBER 4, 1889. 

 TABLE OF CON TENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles : — Forestry in the Agricultural Colleges and Experiment 

 Stations. — Peter Kalm's Warning Against Forest Fires. — A New Irri- 

 gation Project 577 



Holiday Notes in Southern France and Northern Italy. — VII. 



George Nicholson. 578 



Pinus Banksiana on the Maine Coast E. L. Rand. 579 



The Kauri Pine. (Illustrated.) 579 



The Art of Gardening — An Historical Sketch. — XIV., 



M7's. Schuyler Van Rensselaer. 579 

 New or Little Known Plants : — Chrysanthemum, Mrs. Fottler. (Illustrated.) 



E. H. Fewkes. 580 



Foreign Correspondence : — London Letter W. Watson. 581 



Cultural Department: — Copper Sulphate Against Fungi A. IV. Pearson. 582 



Bleaching and Keeping Celery W. H. Bull. 584 



Winter-flowering Plants W. H. Taplin. 584 



Orchid Notes F. Goldring, F. Atkins. 585 



A.utumn Flowers ..O. 585 



Gaillardia hybrida gi-andiHora. — Polygonum amplexicaule, var. oxy- 



phyllum y. N. Gerard. 585 



The Forest : — Forestry in Great Britain ... 586 



Correspondence: — Chrysanthemum, Ada Spaulding John Thorpe. 586 



A Lesson in Transplanting Evergreens Joseph Meehan. 587 



Variegated Wild Plants E. O. Orpet, Dorcas E. Collins. 587 



Recent Publications 587 



Notes - 587 



Illustrations: — Chrysanthemum, Mrs. Fottler, Fig. 147 581 



The Kauri Pine, Fig. 148 , 583 



Forestry in the Agricultural Colleges and Experi- 

 ment Stations. 

 A BULLETIN on the subject of Forestry has lately 

 been issued by the Agricultural Experiment Station 

 at Brookings, South Dakota. When we consider how 

 young this station is, and how much time is necessary to 

 determine and prove the substantial facts in relation to 

 forestry ; and when we consider further that a climate in 

 which the rainfall from the first of September, 1888, to the 

 thirty-first of August, 1889, was less than ten inches is 

 rather a discouraging one for the tree-planter, we need 

 hardly expect to find in this record much that is of general 

 interest and application. And yet every reader will be 

 pleased to note that so far as they go, these experiments 

 indicate that fruit-growing and forest-planting can be made 

 successful on some of the Dakota prairies. 



The bulletin goes into particulars as to planting and cul- 

 tivation, and gives in detail just such information as the 

 tree-planters of that region stand in need of. The problems 

 discussed, however, are not all of merely local interest, 

 for no one can read without profit the testimony in favor 

 of shallow cultivation as a means of mitigating the effect 

 of drought, for it illustrates a principle of universal applica- 

 tion. Even in sections where the annual rainfall is much 

 greater than it is at Brookings, it is important in our hot, 

 dry summers to husband the supply of soil water. The 

 records of the Dakota Station show that but a fraction more 

 than three inches of rain fell during the three . spring 

 months of this year, and that a hot June followed with a rain- 

 fall of less than one and a half inches. It is not surprising 

 that the prairie grass seemed dead for want of water, but it 

 is instructive to read that, even then, moist soil could be 

 found anywhere in the plantation of young forest-trees by 

 brushing away a little of the surface with the foot. This 

 condition was due to frequent shallow stirring with harrow- 

 tooth cultivators, and it is another evidence that a thin 

 layer of loose earth — a " dust blanket " — is a most efiicient 

 mulch in any climate, and that if "there is a remedy short 

 of irrigation for long seasons of drought, it will be found 

 in deep plowing and thorough shallow cultivation." 



The purpose of this article, however, is not so much to 



discuss the matter of this particular bulletin as to call 

 attention to the fact that the country has a right to expect 

 from the agricultural colleges and stations a good deal of 

 substantial work in forestry, even if it is elementary. At 

 the late meeting of the American Forestry Association in 

 Philadelphia, Mr. N. H. Egleston, of Washington, offered 

 a resolution " that our agricultural colleges should regard 

 it as one of their most manifest duties to give the subject 

 of forestry a prominent place in their curricula of instruc- 

 tion, and that every experiment station should engage in 

 investigating those branches of forestry which have 

 special importance in the localities in which they are situ- 

 ated, or which are of general interest to agriculture and the 

 arts." This resolution was adopted without reference to a 

 committee, and the facts of the case seem to give ample 

 justification for it. 



The forests of the country have, beyond question, import- 

 ant relations to agriculture and the mechanic arts, and it 

 was for the promotion of these that the colleges were 

 founded by the general government. The experiment 

 stations were endowed for t-he purpose of research in the 

 sciences connected with agriculture, and this purpose 

 would naturally include investigations in the field of for- 

 estry. The colleges have an endowment of about $15,- 

 000,000, with some 700 professors and 12,000 students. 

 There are forty-six experiment stations, with eleven branch 

 stations, employing 370 observers, a large portion of them 

 trained in the prosecution of experimental inquir)^ and in 

 addition to $125,000 a year given by individual states, be- 

 sides fees for analyses and the like, these stations receive 

 from the general government $600,000 a year. Institu- 

 tions manned and equipped with such care and at such 

 cost ought to be able to give some attention to so import- 

 ant a subject as that of forestry. Some of the colleges and 

 stations have begun forestry work in earnest, as this 

 Dakota bulletin testifies, and perhaps preparation for the 

 work is going on in all of them. In the great majority of 

 them, however, neither catalogues, reports nor bulletins 

 make mention of the subject. 



In a country where there is no systematic forest practice, 

 and therefore no trained foresters, M'^e cannot expect the 

 colleges to give instruction in the refinements of the art, 

 nor would it be profitable for the stations to make such 

 investigations as are carried on in the older forest experiment 

 stations of Europe. But much work of immediate practi- 

 cal utility can be prosecuted in the nursery, the field, the 

 laboratory and in the natural forest, where there is one 

 within reach and under the control of the station or col- 

 lege. This is not the place to state the problems which 

 can be hopefully attacked in this way, but an admirable 

 outline of the general field of research is given in Mr. 

 Fernow's report for 1887, which was reviewed in these 

 columns at the time it appeared. What is first wanted is 

 a realization by the colleges and stations of the necessity 

 for work in forestry and a determination to undertake it. 

 The particular course to be pursued by each will be matter 

 for after consideration. 



Peter Kalm, a Swedish naturalist and a pupil of Linnaeus, 

 visited America in 1748, at the instigation of the Swedish 

 government, for the purpose of examining the natural re- 

 sources of this country. His journal, afterward translated 

 into English, gives one of the best accounts of the natural 

 features of the northern states, in which Kalm traveled ex- 

 tensively, and of the agricultural resources of the people 

 that appeared during the last century. The following 

 quotation from this journal is as true to-day as M'lien it 

 was written 130 years ago. The same wasteful methods 

 of treating forest-property are still in force over a large part 

 of the territory of the United States. They have wrought 

 inestimable damage to great areas of country, and must 

 sooner or later destroy the productiveness of tiiis land. 

 That this habit of annual burning has not done already 

 greater damage than it has, shows the wonderful fruitful- 

 ness of this country and the recuperative powers of the 



