92 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 367. 



in construction from their original meaning- and purpose 

 that they are not even good parodies of the artist's ideal. 



Since the foregoing was in type the engineer in charge of 

 the Harlem Speedway has expressed resentment at being 

 considered subordinate to the landscape-architect, and has 

 sent a letter of resignation to the Park Board. This resig- 

 nation was not accepted at once, as would have been 

 expected, and the Board passed a resolution with the 

 apparent purpose of limiting the power of the landscape- 

 architect. This resolution places him in charge of the 

 "landscape and architectural features of the work subject 

 to the supervision and approval" of a committee consist- 

 ing of Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, Mr. Augustus St. 

 Gaudens and half a dozen distinguished architects. Of 

 course, this was not a well-considered step. It degrades 

 the position of landscape-architect from what ought to be 

 its true rank in the well-ordered system of park manage- 

 ment. It is an indignity laid upon Mr. Vaux personally, in 

 that it assumes beforehand that his work needs supervision. 

 It assumes that a pleasure-ground need not be a consistent 

 work of art with unity of motive and purpose, and that it 

 is possible to separate such a work into its elements with 

 an engineer to make the roadway, an architect to build the 

 wails and a gardener to treat the landscape, each one work- 

 ing without regard to any comprehensive and congruous 

 plan. Fortunately, the gentlemen who constitute the new 

 Park Board are men of integrity and intelligence, and, there- 

 fore, there is no reason to fear that they will cling obstinately 

 to this erroneous conception. After they have given more 

 study to the matter, and the full light of public discussion 

 has been turned upon it, we may expect them to abandon 

 the untenable position they now hold. 



Notes on North American Oaks. 



QuERCUs TouMEYi. — I propose this name for asmall White 

 Oak* discovered in July, 1894, by Professor J. T. Toumey, 

 of the University of Arizona, on the hills above the mining 

 town of Bisbee, among the IMule Mountains, in south- 

 eastern Arizona. It is a tree twenty-five to thirty feet in 

 height (see figs. 13 & 14 on pages 94 & 95 of this issue), with a 

 short trunk six to ten inches in diameter, dividing near the 

 ground into spreading limbs, which form a broad, irregular 

 head. The bark of the trunk is about three-quarters of an 

 inch thick, deeply furrowed, dark brown tinged with red, 

 and broken on the surface into small, thin, closely ap- 

 pressed scales. The summer branchlets are light red and 

 more or less covered with pale tomentum, and in their 

 second and third years are slender, with thm dark brown, 

 nearly black bark divided into small plate-like scales. The 

 leaves are crowded at the ends of the branches, oblong or 

 ovate, rounded or cordate at the base, acute and apiculate 

 at the apex, entire with thickened revolute margins, or 

 remotely spinulose-dentate, or often minutely three-toothed 

 at the apex, thin and firm, light blue-green, glabrous and 

 lustrous above, pale and pubescent below, from one-half 

 to three-quarters of an inch long, from a quarter to a half 

 of an inch broad, conspicuously reticulate-venulose, with 

 slender midribs raised and rounded on the upper side and 

 thin arcuate primary veins ; they are borne on short 

 petioles about one-sixteenth of an inch long and probably 

 fall early in the spring with the appearance of the new 

 growth. The flowers are unknown. The fruit is sessile, 

 solitary or in pairs, and ripens in June ; the nut is oval or 

 ovate, from one-half to two-thirds of an inch long and a 

 quarter of an inch broad, light brown and lustrous, covered 

 at the acute apex with pale pubescence, and glabrous on 

 the inner surface ; the cup, which encloses less than a 

 quarter of the nut, is thin and shallow, cup-shaped or 



turbinate, light green and pubescent within, and covered 

 on the outer surface by thin ovate acute regularly and 

 closely imbricated light red-brown scales with short 

 rounded tips and coated on the back with hoary tomentum. 

 Quercus Toumeyi forms on the Mule Mountains the 

 principal part of the narrow forest zone immediately above 

 that in which Quercus Emoryi is the principal tree, the two 

 trees mingling toward the lower margin of the belt of 

 Quercus Toumeyi. Among North American species Quercus 

 Toumeyi most resembles some of the spinescent or entire- 

 leaved forms of Quercus undulata, from which, however, 

 it differs in the dark brown deeply furrowed bark, that of 

 Quercus undulata being ashy gray or light reddish brown 

 and scaly, in the nearly black bark of the branchlets, the 

 thinner and less pubescent leaves, and in the thinner cup- 

 scales. 



Quercus grisea. — Liebmann'stypeof this species, collected 

 near El Paso by Charles Wright, shows that, as Engelmann 

 always believed, this is a form of the very polymorphous 

 south-western Quercus undulata. It is a plant with cordate, 

 mostly entire leaves, and nearly identical leaves can be 

 found on plants growing on the cliffs above the caiion 

 of the Arkansas River, in Colorado, which produce, 

 among leaves of several different shapes, the undu- 

 late-dentate leaves of Torrey's type of Quercus undulata. 

 Quercus undulata, which can always be recognized by 

 the blue color of its foliage from the green-leaved Rocky 

 Mountain White Oak, Quercus Gambelii, with which it has 

 often been confounded, is distributed from the cafion of 

 the Arkansas River, in Colorado, to western Texas and 

 through New Mexico and Arizona to southern Utah and 

 Nevada and to northern Mexico. Usually shrubby, it was 

 found last summer by Professor Toumey growing into a 

 small bushy tree in some of the sheltered canons of the 

 mountain ranges of south-eastern Arizona. It is a form of 

 this species with small entire or spinescent leaves (Quercus 

 pungens of Liebmann), often clothed on the lower surface 

 with fulvous pubescence, that covers the mountains of cen- 

 tral Arizona, south of the Colorado plateau, with vast 

 thickets six or eight feet high, from which cattle and sheep 

 obtain the best fodder furnished by this region. 



A good deal of confusion with regard to our south-west- 

 ern Oaks has been caused by the mistaken reference of one 

 of the New Mexican and Arizona White Oaks to Liebmann's 

 Quercus grisea. This Arizona tree (Quercus undulata, var. 

 grisea, Engelmann, Whipple's Rep., vi., 250) is one of the 

 largest and commonest Oak-trees of the south-west, and is 

 found scattered over all the mountain ranges south of the 

 Colorado plateau above elevations of about five thousand 

 feet ; it has oblong or obovate, entire or irregularly dentate, 

 mostly cordate, narrow leaves, strongly reticulate on the 

 lower surface, which, like the branches, is covered with yel- 

 low pubescence. The leaves vary much in width. Last 

 spring I found at Fort Huachuca, in Arizona, trees of this Oak 

 mostly covered with leaves of the ordinary form which 

 bore individual leaves on fertile branches that were broadly 

 obovate, and not distinguishable in shape and size from those 

 of Quercus reticulata, a species with long-stalked, spicate 

 fruit, of which, at first sight, this tree might be considered an 

 extreme form, especially as its leaves resemble those of 

 that species in their pubescent covering and prominent 

 reticulate veinlets, but these trees differ in the character of 

 the bark, in the length of the peduncles, which on Quercus 

 reticulata are often five or six inches long, in the size and 

 shape of the fruit, in the thickness of the cup-scales and in 

 the cotyledons ; these are purple and very astringent in both 

 species, but in the former are united into a solid mass 

 like those of Quercus oblongifolia and of the Live Oak 

 of the southern states, ."^s this species is without a 

 name, I propose to call it Quercus Arizonica,! as it is 



* Quercus Toumeyi, n. sp. Leaves ovate or ovate-oblong, rounded or cordnle 

 at tlie base, acute and apiculate at tlie apex, entire or remotely spinosedentate, 

 reticulate-venulose, persistent. Flowers unknown. Fruit sessile; nut oval or 

 ovate, acute, glabrous on the inner surtace ; abortive ovules basal: cup thin, 

 shallow, cup-shaped or turbinate, the scales u\ate, thin, regularly and closely 

 imbricated, tonientose on the back-, produced into short free tips rounded at 

 the broad apex. 



t Quercus Ari-zoiiico. 



Quercus Emoryi. Watson, U''liee!rr's Re/i., 17 (not Torrey) (1874). 



t^uercus undulata, var. gi-isea, Engelmann. Rothrock \\' liceln-^s Rep., vi., 250 (not 

 Quercus grisea. Liebmann) (187S). — Greene. Western Aitjerican Oaks. 30 (in part), t. 14. 



Quercus gi'isea, Sargent, Forest Trees N. Am,, Tenth Ce/:sus U, S,, i.\., 144 (eTccl. 

 syn.) (not Liebmann) (18S4). 



