July 24, 1895.] 



Garden and Forest. 



291 



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. V. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JULY 24, 1895. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles : — Doing Too Much. — 1 291 



Additions to the Arnold Arboretum 292 



Plant-breeding at tlie Experiment Stations Professor E. S. Goff. 292 



Birds of tlie Arnold Arboretum C. E. Faxon. 292 



On the Tanning Properties of the Bark of Three North American Trees, 



Professor Henry Trtnthle. 293 



Foreign Correspondence: — Pelargoniums IV. Watson, 294 



New or Little-known Plants: — Carpinus cordata. (With figure.) C. S. S. 294 



Plant Notes 296 



Cultural Department: — Some July Flowers W. E. Endicott. 296 



Hardy Perennials F. H. Horsford. 297 



Fancy Caladiums William Scott. 297 



Papaver bracteatum, Dipladenias E. O. O. 297 



The Forest : — The Need of Forest Schools in America Gijford Pinchot. 298 



Correspondence : — Strawberries in Wisconsin George f. Kellogg. 298 



Poison I\'y. S- F. Goodrich. 299 



Common Plants M, 299 



Southern Pines (North Carolina) Experimental Farm L. f. Vance. 299 



I^ RCENT Publications 299 



Notes 300 



Illustration : — Carpinus cordata, Fig. 41 295 



Doina: Too Much. — I. 



AN utter neglect of the grounds of small country places, 

 occupied only during the summer months, was a 

 common sin in America a generation ago. It was espe- 

 cially common in seashore regions, where, moreover, it 

 often seemed that as little thought as possible had been 

 bestowed upon the house itself. No sight was more 

 frequent than the ugliest of bare cottages, unadorned by 

 the architect or the planter, surrounded by grounds which 

 had unavoidably been tampered with and vulgarized in the 

 process of building and road-making, while no effort had 

 been made to restore them to their primitive condition or 

 olhervi'ise make good their loss of Nature's kind of beauty 

 and orderliness. Of course, when many of these unkempt 

 little places existed near one another the general effect of 

 tlie "colony" was even more distressing than the effect of 

 each of its component parts. And then the constant 

 thought of the sensitive observer was that something 

 " ought to be done" — that Americans ought to be taught to 

 beautify even the most transient of their summer homes, 

 or, at least, to keep their surroundings in a reasonably neat 

 condition. 



Times have now changed in this respect, and, on the 

 whole, conspicuously for the better. It is certainly better, 

 whatever the immediate outcome of the change, that peo- 

 ple should bestow thought and pains upon their summer 

 homes — should take a real interest in them — than that they 

 should regard them with indifference, merely as needful 

 places to eat and sleep in. It is better as regards the aspect 

 of our summer resorts even when individual results are not 

 as successful, as genuinely artistic, as they might be, and 

 it is distinctly better as testifying to mental and EPSthetic 

 grovv'th on the part of those who build and inhabit them. 

 But with the usual impetuosity of the American tempera- 

 ment, we have already begun to go too far in pursuit of 

 our newly embraced aim. From the doing of nothing we 

 are steadily developing a tendency to do too much in the 

 effort to improve our small country places. 



Year by year our cities grow larger and more crowded, 

 and this means more uncomfortable during the hot weather ; 

 and, as the wealth of their middle classes has likewise in- 

 creased, their inhabitants more and more generally go 



forth to the mountains or the seashore, and stay there for 

 longer and longer periods. In our grandfathers' time even 

 a rich New Yorker or Bostonian was content to take or 

 send his family away from town for a month or six weeks. 

 In our fathers' time this period had already doubled itself, 

 and now even the sons and daughters of the citizen who 

 does not consider himself rich expect their full three months 

 of country life, while really rich people often include the 

 greater part of the spring and the autumn as well as the 

 whole of the summer in their term of rural residence. 



These facts, of course, are not merely welcome signs of 

 increasing material prosperity, but even more welcome 

 proofs of a growing love for healthful occupations and 

 pleasures. They may be confidently cited as a partial 

 refutation of the charge that life in America is growing 

 steadily more strenuous and nerve-exhausting — that the 

 pursuit of the dollar is ever becoming more all-absorbing 

 and all-sufficient ; and also of the old charge that when an 

 American stops working and wishes to recruit he makes 

 his choice between working just as hard at some form of 

 active play, or traveling with a speed which might daunt 

 a commercial drummer or a Queen's messenger. For, belt 

 remarked, while the family of the well-to-do business or 

 professional man still spends much more time in the coun- 

 try than does its working head or his grown-up sons, yet 

 these, too, get more of it than did their fathers or grand- 

 fathers. 



Another cheerful and hopeful sign is that hotel life, once 

 almost the only resource of the urban American in sum- 

 mer, now has a very powerful rival in cottage life. Indeed, 

 hotel life has been quite killed out by this rival in many 

 places, like Newport, for example, where it once flour- 

 ished mightily, and everywhere through our mountain 

 districts and along our seashores, myriads of summer cot- 

 tages yearly spring up, scattered now in rather isolated 

 ways and now gathered into compacter colonies, but al- 

 ways affording opportunities for rational and reposeful 

 family life. 



Thinking upon these changes we may, indeed, be glad 

 that, as has been said, the transient inhabitants of our rural 

 regions devote more thought and pains than of yore to the 

 aspect of their abodes, and the fact is all the more agree- 

 able because thought and pains do not by any means inva- 

 riably mean more money. Indeed, cheapness is studied 

 now to a degree of which our fathers knew nothing, for 

 the desire to own summer homes has spread far outside of 

 the classes which, in their day, alone cherished such an 

 aspiration. But our industrial and mechanical resources 

 and our architectural ingenuity and skill have lai'gely 

 developed, hand in hand with the aesthetic instincts of our 

 public ; and thus beauty is not only more desired to-day 

 than it was a generation ago, but is more easily to be pur- 

 chased for moderate sums. The type of the American 

 seashore cottage used to be a square clapboarded box, with 

 the paint of which it once had boasted largely washed off, 

 standing, perhaps, on stilts on a sandbank, surrounded by 

 shaky-looking piazzas, devoid of vines or beautifying plan- 

 tations of any sort, and surrounded by an expanse of rough 

 sand, or stony pasture-land, or ragged beach grasses, and 

 approached by a path or a drive which looked as though 

 it had been made by cattle. But its type to-day is a shin- 

 gled cottage, beautifully colored by the weather only, solid 

 in aspect, attractive in form or showing that it has tried to 

 be, more or less draped with vines and blossoming plants, 

 and encircled by grounds which show the exercise of care, 

 the effort after beauty and, often, the expenditure of a good 

 deal of money. 



But just here is the point to which we have especially 

 wished to direct attention. The grounds of our summer 

 cottages, and especially of those in seaboard districts, now 

 often prove the expenditure of a great deal too much money. 

 They prove that in gardening we have not yet advanced as 

 far as we have in architecture. In gardening we less often 

 reveal our sense of the primal facts that beauty must be 

 devised by intelligence, not simply purchased with gokl, 



