Pebruary 17, 1892.] 



Garden and Forest. 



81 



till midwinter, but with me the end of them is, or ought to be, 

 in January. The Roxbury Russet is better and better from 

 January ist until May. The Belle Bonne, sweet, is a superl> 

 fruit through January, February and March. The Ladies' 

 Sweeting 1 do not value, but it keeps admirably till .May. 

 Grimes' Golden keeps well till April, a tairly good fruit. White 

 Pippin keeps easily till April, and is a good late apple, hand- 

 some, smooth and large. I3en Davis keeps easily till April, but 

 so will cobble-stones. Tolman's Sweet keeps without trouble 

 till March, but 1 cannot see that it deserves a place with Belle 

 Bonne. Swaar holds out till May, and in good Havor all the 

 time. 



If I were to make out a list of best very long-keepers I would 

 take Greening, Northern Spy, Kirkland, Jonathan, Seek-no- 

 further, Ro.xbury Russet, Swaar, Wagner, Belle Bonne. This 

 list I hold to include all the best qualities until the last, and 

 to give as little trouble as any. The Wagners are too delicious 

 to be left out, but are not quite the latest keepers, counting re- 

 tention of flavor. Those who are fond of GilliHeur may add 

 that. The best baking apple in the list is the Roxbury Russet. 

 My list is made out for the latitude of Boston and central New 

 York, northern Ohio and the north-west. Farther south most 

 of these apples mature earlier, and are not late-keepers. 



Clinton, N. Y. E. P. Powell. 



Tomatoes. 



EVERY gardener knows that in the past thirty years a great 

 advance has been made in the general quality of our 

 tomatoes. We also know that while the seedsmen's cata- 

 logues still contain long lists of the old ones we used to grow, 

 hardly any of them retain the same characteristics more than 

 two or three years after their introduction. The more careful 

 seedsman will select them into an entirely different type, while 

 the careless one will let them run back to some inferior an- 

 cestor. After we leave the little Pear, Plum and Cherry Toma- 

 toes it seems almost impossible to get a fixed variety. I 

 thought that I had the Dwarf Champion as completely fixed 

 as any could be, but from a lot of carefully saved seed one- 

 third made strong running vines with fruit exactly like the old 

 ■ French Tree Tomato, from which the Dwarf Champion, no 

 doubt, defined its habit. Others seemed identical with Acme, 

 and none that had the dwarf habit showed any fruit like the 

 French Tree. The fruit was reproduced, but the habit lost, 

 though some of the smooth fruits on the dwarf plants had 

 the color of the original Tree form. The whole lot was 

 a strange mixture. This tendency to continually sport in 

 new forms, or rather to revert to old ones, is doubtless 

 the reason for the diversity of opinion in regard to varie- 

 ties. Year after yea* I have sown seeds of Ignotum, which 

 has received high praise elsewhere, but I have never yet had 

 any but inferior fruit from it. Careful selection will usually 

 give us a majority of good fruit, but I have long since aban- 

 doned all idea of getting a perfectly fixed variety. I look for 

 little further improvement in Tomatoes, except, perhaps, in 

 making perfectly smooth sorts out of the big ones, like Pon- 

 derosa and Mikado. For market purposes this is hardly to be 

 desired, since sorts like Stern, Matchless, Brandywine and 

 Beauty are much better, and the extra large ones had better 

 be left to the amateur. 



The large grower cultivates mainly for the canning-houses, 

 and they demand a smooth, medium-sized, bright red solid 

 tomato. The big ones, with green ends and large hollows, 

 make too much waste. 

 Raleigh, N, c. W. F. Massey. 



Citrus trifoliata.— Your remarks on my note in regard to this 

 plant are the first intimation I have had of its showing any 

 degree of tenderness. The trees I planted eleven years ago 

 in the uplands of northern Maryland, in a locality where the 

 winter cold falls as sliarply or more so at times than in New 

 York City, have never shown any signs of tenderness, and 

 fruit very abundantly. A gentleman in Ann Arbor, Michi- 

 gan, who planted some at my suggestion, reported that they 

 came through last winter. I do not know personally of any 

 planting in New England, and am surprised to learn that they 

 kill-back there. My plants in Maryland, on the terrible ist of 

 January, 1881, were exposed at noonday in a full sunshine to 

 a temperature of four degrees below zero, with bare ground 

 deeply frozen. They were little plants turned out of four-inch 

 pots the previous spring, and had made long sappy shoots 

 late in fall, as the plant is apt to do. I supposed that these late 

 shoots would be killed, but, to my surprise, not one of them 

 was hurt. I feel perfectly sure that, for all the Middle States 

 and the south at least, this is the ideal hedge-plant. 



Shrubs in Muck Holes.— Mr. Jack's notes on the European 

 etfort to grow Kalmias and Andromedas in water-tight tanks 

 show how sensible gardeners often make sad imitations of 

 nature's conditions. Any one who notices the growth of 

 Kalmias and Azaleas on the northern slopes of our moimtains 

 could hardly fail to note that, while they thrive in cool and 

 moist locations and a peaty soil, the localities are thoroughly 

 drained by the rock-y d(Sbris among which the roots wander, 

 and moisture is due largely to the seepage of springs on the 

 mountain-side above. No water-tight tank filled with peat 

 meets these conditions. It reminds me of some of my early 

 eltorts to grow Rhododendrons in a limestone clay. I dug out 

 deep beds and filled them with peat, and for a time the plants, 

 in their imported balls of peat, bloomed, and I thought I had 

 made a success. But the excavations in the clay, filled with 

 the mellow peat, were only so many drainage-holes for the 

 surrounding soil, and after three years of gradual starvation 

 I found that the plants had not made a root outside of the 

 original balls in which they came from Belgium, and every 

 one could be lifted entire as though they had been in a pot, 

 while the mass of peat in the bed was as sour as in its original 

 swamp-bed. Some of these half-dead plants were removed 

 and planted in the edge of a wood, on a steep rocky hill above 

 the lime soil of the valley, and have since then grown with all 

 the wild luxuriance of our native mountain plants. It is a bad 

 plan to excavate beds for any plants in a compact clay, unless 

 some arrangement is made for drainage. Such drain-holes in 

 a compact clay filled with peaty soil might do for Arundos, 

 Cannas and Caladiums, but never for the hair-like roots of our 

 hard-wood forest shrubs. 



Raleigh. N.C. W.F.Massey. 



Correspondence. 



The Gypsy Moth and its " Extermination." 

 To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir, — We have now had two seasons of legislative attack upon 

 the Gypsy moth in Massachusetts, and can properly consider 

 the desirability of its continuance and the best means of deal- 

 ing with an insect whose destructiveness is conceded. Nearly 

 $100,000 have been spent — in thefirstyear$26,i7o.27 — by a paid 

 commission composed of men without special qualifications 

 for their task, and who naturally went to work in a rather 

 bungling manner, but succeeded in destroying, no doubt, a 

 great many insects. When they were discharged it was sup- 

 posed that the district over which the insect had spread from 

 its original centre at Medford covered only about eight or nine 

 towns, with an area of, say, fifty square niiles, whereas in two 

 or three months' time it was shown Py the new unpaid com- 

 mission (afterward the committee of the Board of Agriculture, 

 but consisting in the two cases of the same persons, one of 

 them a scientific man of high and deserved repute) that the 

 moth had spread over twenty-one — now thirty — towns and 

 cities, and an area at present estimated at about'two hundred 

 square miles. 



-In the second year, under the new control, $68,616.60 have 

 been spent, and the Board of Agriculture, in making its report, 

 asks for a further appropriation of $75,000 "to carry on the 

 work according to the plans laid out [but nowhere stated] for 

 1892," and a resolution appropriating that amount for "con- 

 tinuing the work of exterminating the insect " has been intro- 

 duced into the House. It is plain that no such sum should be 

 allowed, and that whatever sum is appropriated should be 

 directed toward preventing the spread and checking the rav- 

 ages of the insect, and not toward its extermination. 



This is not said in criticism of the work of the board the 

 past season. It has worked under great disadvantages, and 

 doubtless felt obliged under the "extermination" appropria- 

 tion to leave untried no possible means of effecting its pur- 

 pose. Men had to be trained to do the work, and few of them 

 could have worked to their full efficiency until the close of the 

 season, so that with the same force and the same expenditure 

 vastly more could now be done than then. Nor, if we put 

 aside the notion of extermination, can it be said that they were 

 not successful. When three men in two days' time destroy 

 over one hundred thousand caterpillars and chrysalids, and 

 when more than three-quarters of a million of egg-clusters, 

 representing from three to four hundred million possible cater- 

 pillars, are destroyed in six weeks by a force of less than two 

 hundred persons, or over one hundred batches of eggs per 

 day per person, we must believe that they have worked to good 

 account. But one of the clearest proofs of their success is 

 given in the fact that after the fall of the leaves, the men, now 

 better experienced in the work and sharper-sighted, gathered 



