February 17, 1892.] 



Garden and Forest. 



73 



GARDEN AND FOREST, 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Ofpick: Tribune Builoing. New York. 



Conducted by Professor C. S. Sargrnt. 



ENTERED AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER AT THE POST OFFICE AT NEW VORK, N. V. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1892. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



E I lOKiAL Articik ".—Florida Pines. (With figure.) 73 



The Yosemite National Park Charles H. Shinn. 74 



Winter Rambles in the Pine-barrens. — II E. y. Hill. 74 



Notes of a Summer Journey in Europe. — VII J. G. Jack. 75 



New or Little-known Plants :— Bej^onia Baumanni. (With figure.)... J. N. G. 76 



New Orchids R. A. Rolfe. 76 



Foreign Correspondence: — Bomareas — W. Watson. 78 



Cultural Department ; — Five New Bulbous Plants IV, E. Endicott. jq 



Perennial Plants from Seed O. O. 79 



Late-keepinj^ Apples E. F. Pffivell. 80 



Tomatoes Professor IV. F. Massey, 81 



Citrus trifoliata. Shrubs in Muck Holes Professor IV. F. Massey. 81 



Correspondence : — The Gypsy Moth and its '* E.xtermination." .S. 81 



Aquatics at Farview, Staten Island J. N. G. 82 



Hardy Broad-leaved Evergreens \ViUia7n F. Bassett. 82 



Recent Publications 83 



NOTE.^ 84 



Illustrations:— Begonia Baumanni, Fig. 13 77 



Florida Pines, Fig. 14 80 



Florida Pines. 



THE picture which appears on another page of this 

 issue (see p. So) represents a scene familiar enough 

 now to the inhabitants of central and of some ])arts of 

 northern Florida, and to the thousands who visit the state 

 every winter and spring. A similar scene now meets the 

 eye on the shores of many Florida streams and lakes, from 

 which the original forests of Pine have been pretty gener- 

 ally stripped. On the left of the picture may be seen a speci- 

 men of the Long-leaved Pine, so small and stunted that it 

 has escaped the axe of the lumberman and the hatchet of 

 the turpentine-worker. On the right stands a young and 

 vigorous tree of the Pine of tropical America, which botan- 

 ists call Pinus Cubensis. Between the two Pines rises the 

 slender stem of the Palmetto. The young Pines which ap- 

 pear on the two sides of the picture are seedlings of Pinus 

 Cubensis, while the ground is covered with the dwarf 

 Saw-leaved Palm, which clothes, with the aid of its spread- 

 ing root-stocks, the sandy Florida soil as soon as the forest 

 is cut away. 



In this picture appear three of the most interesting trees 

 of the American forest. The Palmetto is the most northern 

 in range of really arborescent Palms, a true type of 

 the vegetation of the tropics, and the plant of all others 

 that most delights the northern eye accustomed only to 

 l)oreal forms of vegetation. The Long-leaved Pine repre- 

 sents the past, and the Cuban Pine the future, of the Pine- 

 belt forests of our extreme southern coast. It is a lament- 

 able fact that the Long-leaved Pine is disappearing and is 

 being replaced by less valuable species. From a time 

 probably long anterior to the arrival of Europeans on this 

 continent the southern Pine-forests have been wasted and 

 abused. First, the Indians burned over the ground on 

 which they grew, to clear away the undergrowth and in- 

 crease their chances of killing the deer and turkeys which 

 once abounded there. Then the whites, having learned 

 the practice from the Indian, kept up the annual burning 



to improve the scanty spring pasturage for their half- 

 starved animals, with the result that these forests, even 

 when the lumberman "has not invaded them, stand on 

 ground which is unprotected by undergrowth and from 

 which all the surface humus had been burned away. It 

 is not surprising, therefore, that the trees are far apart and 

 that very few young ones have grown up. These annual 

 burnings have increased in destructiveness year by 

 year for more than a century ; and therefore when the 

 lumbermen went into these forests in dead earnest, and 

 began to send the timber they cut from them to the four 

 quarters of the globe, they had a forest to deal with which 

 had lost its recuperative power. When the mature trees 

 were cut away there was no succeeding crop to replace 

 them, and the ground, through repeated burning, had lost 

 the particular quality needed to produce this Pine, and 

 other and far less valuable species replaced it. 



More destructive than the squatter's spring fires or the 

 lumberman's axe has been the turpentine-gatherer. For many 

 years the forests of the Cape Fear supplied his demand, 

 but these forests were in time exhausted. Then he began 

 to move south, at first slowly, and then more and more 

 rapidly as overproduction reduced the value of his product 

 and made all but his first year's crop unprofitable. No 

 other commercial enterprise of the civilized world has 

 been so recklessly managed or has produced such meagre 

 profits in proportion to the destruction of the property in- 

 volved. 'The cutting into the tree in order to stimulate the 

 flow of its resinous sap, especially if the process is continued 

 through several years, is a serious injury to it ; but the in- 

 jury to the vitality of the tree and to the quality of its tim- 

 ber is a small matter in comparison to the danger of fire, 

 which follows the exposure of resinous surfaces on the 

 trunks of the trees. Three-quarters of all the forests in this 

 country that have been worked for turpentine have after- 

 ward been burned to the ground. It seems almost incom- 

 prehensible that such wasteful methods can prevail, and 

 yet there are cases on record of a school board in one of 

 the southern states having sold, for twenty-five cents an 

 acre, the right to manufacture turpentine indefinitely on 

 land which they held in trust for educational purposes, and 

 which was carrying five or six thousand feet to the acre of 

 the best pine-timber in the world. The slightest forethought 

 or intelligence, however, would have shown these men 

 that tapping the trees vi'ould ruin them. Where such ig- 

 norance and indifference prevail, it is not surprising that 

 the forests disappear and agriculture languishes. All these 

 hostile agencies, the axe. the turpentine-tapper, and then 

 the final catastrophe of fire, have worked to the extermina- 

 tion of these forests, which once formed the chief wealth of 

 the southern states, and which as a compact body of avail- 

 able timber of the first quality had no equal in the world. 



A part of the territory occupied b)^ this forest, a belt 

 eighty or a hundred miles in width, which extends with a 

 few unimportant breaks from southern Virginia to eastern 

 Texas, will in time degenerate into a wind-swept desert of 

 shifting sand-dunes, which will in time, unless fires can be 

 stopped, graduall)^ spread over the whole territory. In 

 other parts of the region other species of Pines spring up. 

 At the north, that is in Virginia and the Carolinas, the 

 Loblolly or Old Field Pine, of no great worth as a timber 

 tree, is of immense value in the capacity of its seed to 

 generate in burned or sterile soil, and of the young plants 

 to grow rapidly and cover the ground and thus prepare it 

 in time for a more valuable crop. Further south, and 

 especially in middle Florida and in southern Alabama, the 

 Long-leaved Pine is replaced by a more valuable species 

 than the Old Field Pine — the Pinus Cubensis, which ap- 

 pears in our illustratioii. This is the most tropical of the 

 American Pines, and is most at home on the mountains of 

 Honduras and Guatemala, where it forms great forests. It 

 occurs in several of the West India Islands, on the Bahama 

 Ke)'S and on the mainland as far north as the South Caro- 

 lina coast. Once it was less common in the territory of 

 the United States than it is to-day, for now it is spreading 



