February 13, 1895.] 



Garden and Forest. 



61 



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, FEBRUARY 13, 1895. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Article;— The Red Cedar. {With figure ) or 



Black Locust in the West Froffssoi- C/utrks A. Ki'J^er. (12 



California Experiment Stations. — II Otarles H. Shinn. 62 



New or Little-known Plants : — New Cypripediums.... 63 



Plant Notes 64 



Cultural Department: — Vegetables under Glass M. Barker. 64 



Violets ". r.D.H. 66 



Chrysanthemums IVilUain Scott. 67 



Win'tcr-tiowering Begonias William Scott. 67 



Correspondence : — The Saghalin Knot-weed Professor L. //. Painmel. 67 



New Orchid Baskets and Plant Tubs //. Nehrlnig. 67 



Meetings of Societies: — Nebraska State Horticultural Society.— Ill 67 



Western New York Horticultural Society. — III 63 



R ECENT Publications - 69 



Notes to 



Illustration : — -4 Red Cedar in Eastern Pennsylvania, Fig. 9 65 



The Red Cedar. 



THE Red Cetiar, which is not a Cedar at all in the 

 botanical meaning of the vv^ord, but a Juniper, is 

 one of the commonest and most widely distributed trees 

 of North America. Indeed, it is not easy to recall any 

 other coniferous tree which inhabits such an extended area, 

 with the exception of another plant of the same genus, the 

 Juniperus communis, found in various forms in all northern 

 countries, and the great Siberian Spruce, Picea obovata, 

 which ranges from the eastern borders of Russia to the 

 Manchurian shores of the Pacific Ocean, and to central 

 China. The Red Cedar is equally at home on the dry 

 gravelly hills of New Brunswick and New England, on the 

 northern shores of Georgian Bay, in the fertile valleys of 

 Pennsylvania, on the limestone hills of eastern Kentucky 

 and Tennessee, where it forms, with stunted shrubby 

 growth, great forests or " Cedar Breaks" ; \y\ the swamps 

 of the Florida peninsula, and on the rich bottom-lands of 

 the Red River and its tributaries,where it grows to its greatest 

 size. Less common in the west than in the east, the Red 

 Cedar is apparently as much at home in one region as in the 

 other ; it is scattered over the eastern slopes of the Rocky 

 Mountains of Colorado ; and when the Mission of Santa 

 Fe was established the Spanish priests might have seen it 

 on the cliffs above the stream that enabled them to change 

 a desert into a garden ; it flourishes in northern Arizona, 

 where the melting snows of the Rocky Mountains pour 

 through the mighty chasm that divides the Colorado 

 plateau, and it grows on the borders of lakes and streams 

 in northern Montana and Idaho, and on Vancouver's 

 Island. 



The habit of the Red Cedar is as varied as the regions it 

 inhabits. Sometimes it is bush-like, with many spreading 

 stems, and at others it grows nearly a hundred feet tall, 

 with a beautiful straight trunk four or five feet in diameter ; 

 sometimes all the branches are wide-spreading and form a 

 symmetrical round-topped head ; at others they are pressed 

 close to the stem and the tree is pyramidal with a narrow 

 spire-like top. These varieties of habit do not appear to 

 be governed by any recognized conditions of environment. 

 Often pyramidal trees grow side by side with round-topped 

 or bushy ones, and in old age they all appear to lose their 



pyramidal habit and to become round-topped. The pyra- 

 midal habit, however, is, perhaps, rather more marked and 

 constant in fertile lands, such as are found in the valley of 

 the Hudson River and in eastern Peimsylvania, than it is 

 in New England, although pyramidal trees are common 

 there. Of remarkable constitution and possessed of great 

 powers of adaptability to varied climatic conditions, the 

 Red Cedar only displays its full size and develops its 

 greatest value in the warm and humid atmosphere of the 

 south, and at the north and in the far west it looks as if it 

 selected some particularly exposed and wind-swept hill for 

 its home in order to show its toughness and indifference to 

 the coinforts of life. 



The earliest European settlers on the Atlantic seaboard 

 delighted in the Red Cedar, which reminded them of some 

 inhabitant of their Old World gardens, and in its bright red 

 fragrant wood which the Indians had known and valued 

 before them ; and the narratives of the old voyages and 

 settlements usually describe the Cedar which was often 

 included in the lists of treasures yielded by the new-found 

 land. They did not exaggerate its value as they did that 

 of the Sassafras and many other products of the American 

 soil. There is no tree in America that will grow better 

 fence-posts, for the wood does not decay and insects do not 

 molest it. A well-selected Red Cedar post will last an 

 incredibly long time in the ground ; and for the sills of 

 buildings placed immediately on the soil no wood is 

 more valuable. Moths flee from its pleasant pungent odor, 

 and every good housekeeper knows the value of a red 

 cedar chest, or a closet lined with this wood. Red cedar 

 is the wood of lead pencils ; and practically the wood in all 

 these indispensable articles, at least in pencils of good 

 quality, is the wood of this tree from Florida, where there 

 are great factories belonging to German manufacturers, 

 devoted to cutting up cedar wood into pencil stock. Every 

 artist in all the civilized world, every man of letters, every 

 school-teacher, all the bankers, lawyers and other men of 

 affairs, the men and women who control the world, and 

 all the school-children who are going to control it, hold 

 every day in their hands a piece of this wood. It would be in- 

 teresting to know what proportion of these men and women, 

 the most intelligent and best-educated of the human race, 

 knows anything of the origin of these little cylinders of 

 wood, of the character and appearance and of the name 

 even of the tree that builds them up in its long life of slow 

 accretions. 



It is not our purpose to speak now of the botanical pecu- 

 liarities of the Red Cedar, the Juniperus Virginiana of 

 botanists, because they are perfectly well known to every 

 one who is interested in trees in their scientific aspects, 

 but of its horticultural or decorative value as an orna- 

 mental plant, because it does not seem to be fully ap- 

 preciated or recognized in American plantations, at least 

 in the eastern states, although in the west a few years 

 ago it was largely grown by nurserymen and planted in 

 considerable numbers on the plains and prairies of the 

 Missouri River basin. In all the northern states the Red 

 Cedar can be made to take the place in formal gardens of 

 the Cypress, to which the gardens of southern Europe owe 

 so much of their charm, and which cannot be grown in our 

 severer climate. If it is desired to produce certain effects 

 in a garden by the use of trees that are formal in oulline, 

 the Red Cedar will produce this effect better than any other 

 tree that is hardy here ; and if trees cut into fantastic shapes 

 such as delight the Chinese or the Japanese, from whom the 

 Dutch learned this fashion, no tree bears with less injury 

 than the Red Cedar !he annual suppression of its growth 

 under the gardener's shears. In natural gardens also the 

 Red Cedar can be made to play a useful, and sometimes an 

 important, part, as no tree is better suited to enliven a 

 broken, rocky hillside or to crown its to]j with its dark 

 green foliage, which in autumn is studded with bright blue 

 berries. Other coniferous trees with pyramidal habit, like 

 the Arbor-vitcc, are often planted in such situations ; but 

 the Arbor-vitif is a gregarious tree and an inhabitant of 



