312 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 227. 



Garden or of separate papers issued by its officers may be ad- 

 dressed to Professor William Trelease, the director at St. 

 Louis. 



Notes. 



At a recent floral festival of the Linnsean Society of Jamaica, 

 Long- Island, one table contained seventy-five different varieties 

 of wild plants in flower which were collected in the immediate 

 vicinity, most of them rooted in pots. It was observed that 

 this collection was the most attractive one in the exhibition, 

 although the display of cultivated flowers was very showy. 



A fortnight ago, New Hampshire's first state park was dedi- 

 cated. This reservation consists of five acres of mountain- 

 top on the elevation knovi^n as Pack Monadnock, in the 

 southern part of the state. The elevation of the park is 2,385 

 feet, rising abruptly from the surrounding plains. The dome 

 of the State House in Boston and the peak of Mount Washing- 

 ton are visible from the boulder which crowns the plateau. 

 The land is the gift of private citizens. 



No garden at this season is complete without the stately 

 beauty of the Foxglove. Occasionally we see these plants 

 massed together in a bed, but they lose nearly all their effective- 

 ness in this way. They need to stand singly or in loose groups 

 on the borders of a shrubbery or in some other place where 

 their tall and graceful spires can be outlined against a green 

 background. All of the colors through which they range are 

 good, but a certain number of white ones are indispensable for 

 the best effect. 



Mr. Joseph Meehan writes us that in one of the open 

 meadows at the National Cemetery in Arlington he recently 

 noticed a specimen of Ouercus falcata with a trunk measur- 

 ing twelve feet in circumference. At about seven feet from 

 the ground it branched into great limbs which reached out 

 horizontally until they shaded a circle one hundred feet in 

 diameter. There are many natural groves of White, Red and 

 Black Oaks at Arlington. There are also some admirable ever- 

 green Magnolias near the old dwelling and a good Cryptomeria ; 

 Deodar Cedars also thrive well here. 



Zinc labels have been recommended for trees, and the 

 prescribed practice has been to roll the labels simply around a 

 branch, with the idea that as the wood grew the label would 

 be expanded and the bark would not be cut. Median's Monthly 

 says that this is an error, and asserts that the branch will grow 

 over and around the label even when it simply rests on the 

 upper part of the branch by its own weight. It is added that 

 the only way to prevent any label or wire froin growing into 

 the bark of a tree is to attend to it every year or so and loosen 

 it so that there is plenty of room for the wood cells to form. 



In an article about Richard Jefferies, whose delightful 

 books upon English rural scenes we have often quoted, a 

 recent writer in Literary Opinion tells of a visit she had just 

 paid to his parents who have been living for some years in 

 Bath. She found his father, she says, " a healthy, good-looking 

 man of seventy-five years of age, evidently the prototype of 

 the Farmer Iden of 'Amaryllis,' and his mother a small 

 woman of seventy-three, an invalid." They talked freely 

 about" Dick," telling how he was always "sitting in the window, 

 writing with a piece of pencil " ; but they had read few of his 

 books, had no conception of his fame in the world, and mar- 

 veled much that for his sake they should be objects of interest 

 to strangers. 



In a late bulletin from the Agricultural Experiment Station, 

 California, Professor Hilgard records some investigations 

 made on prunes, apricots and peaches with a view to ascertain 

 the proportion of pits to flesh, juice to fleshand sugar contents 

 of the juice, and the flesh of different varieties. In regard to 

 the nutritive value of certain fruits it has been stated in former 

 bulletins that the orange in California rated the highest, but 

 these researches give the apricot an equal rank, while the 

 prune follows next, with grapes, bananas, apples and pears 

 succeeding each other probably in the order named. Grapes 

 stand first among the fruits in the quantity of mineral matter 

 they take from the soil. The apricot, taken according to weight, 

 holds the second place in this respect, while the prune and the 

 orange come third. 



In his recently published book, called, "With Poets and 

 Players," in a chapter devoted to " Botany on the Boards," 

 Mr. W. D. Adams says : " Great progress has been achieved 

 of late years in the art of making stage trees and shrubs and 

 flowers seem natural and convincing. In theatrical arboricul- 

 ture in particular great strides have been taken. It is nothing 



new to find the centre of the scene occupied by what, to all 

 appearance, is a genuine tree, with real trunk, arms, leaves 

 and blossoms. In these respects the stage mechanists of to- 

 day can almost, if not quite, deceive the eye. . . . But such 

 triumphs of the imitator's skill do but serve too often to show 

 up in brilliant relief the unreality of the mock stone and wood 

 surroundings in the way of house or fence. And too often, 

 indeed usually, the stage-tree is only too obviously of the 

 stage, stagey." 



There are so many beautiful kinds of Lilies, each with a 

 charm of its own, that it would be hardly just to single out one 

 and pronounce it more beautiful than all the rest. But cer- 

 tainly it would be hard to name one that excels in good quali- 

 ties the old-fashioned Ascension Lily (Lilium candidum), which 

 has been cultivated probably as long as any other flovver known 

 in gardens. The disease which has injured it for some years 

 past seems to have run its course ;^ at least, these Lilies were 

 never more luxuriant or the flowers more perfect than they 

 have been this year. A mass of these flowers in full bloom, 

 with some dark green foliage behind them, is a beautiful spec- 

 tacle, and so is a group of them mixed with the tall blue spikes 

 of the perennial Delphiniums. Hardy Lily-bulbs are usually 

 planted in the autumn, but the bulbs of this one should be 

 lifted in late July or early August and planted at once. At that 

 time the stalks have died down, and soon after new roots begin 

 to put out, and some glossy radical leaves spread over the 

 ground and remain green all the winter. The bulbs should be 

 planted before this new growth starts, or there will be a great 

 loss in the vigor of the plant's growth. 



The last number of Forest Leaves contains an interesting 

 illustration, entitled, " A Historic Tree in Transit," and it repre- 

 sents a tree, seventy feet long and thirty-six inches in diameter, 

 placed on a platform and moved along on rollers by block and 

 tackle. The tree itself has a historic value, as it is an offshoot 

 of the great Penn Treaty Elm which stood in Philadelphia. 

 This tree measured twenty-fourfeet around the base, and one 

 branch of it was one hundred and fifty feet long. It blew down 

 in 1810, and a shoot which came up from the roots of the old 

 tree was carried to the Oliver estate at Bay Ridge, New York, 

 where it has stood for more than fifty years. This is the tree 

 which was removed from there to the grounds of General 

 Paul A. Oliver of Forest Roads, Oliver's Mills, Pa., whose 

 ancestors owned the ground on the Delaware where the Treaty 

 Elm stood. It was a bold undertaking to move so large a tree 

 for 175 miles, especially since it had to be moved by horse and 

 hand-power at the beginning and end of the route. General 

 Oliver wrote on the 20th of June that the tree seems to be 

 growing well and promises to thrive in its new home on the 

 mountain-side as well as it did by New York Bay. 



That portion of France which is called the Midi (the South), 

 says Monsieur de Vilmorin, in his recently published book on 

 The Flowers of Paris, includes all the territory lying south of 

 Orange, and, consequently, the lower valley of the Rhone and 

 the borders of the Mediterranean ; but the term is more spe- 

 cially applied to the French portion of the Genoese coast be- 

 tween Hyeres and Vintimille. This region is the great winter 

 flower-garden of Paris, and, indeed, of a very large part of 

 Europe. And its special adaptation to the winter cultivation 

 of flowers is thus explained : " The peculiar climate depends 

 upon several causes. In the first place, heat is persistent, as 

 solar action is interfered with by clouds only one day in four. 

 Then mildness is preserved in the valleys by the fact that they 

 do not open directly upon the sea, but approach it obliquely ; 

 and thus, of course, the hills which lie between them and the 

 sea are well exposed to the south and offer very favorable 

 locations for plants which require a great deal of heat. This 

 disposition of valleys and hills protects them almost com- 

 pletely against the cold winds of the north, and especially 

 against the mistral, which, a little farther northward, destroys 

 all delicate plants. On the other hand, the wind which blows 

 from the sea, bringing with it the warmth of the African shore, 

 finds no obstacle, and the immediate vicinity of the sea always 

 equalizes the temperature of a country. . . . A particular char- 

 acteristic of cultivation in the Midi," adds the author, " is the 

 great use made of protective coverings ; for the same reasons 

 which cause the great heat of the day also produce great chil- 

 liness at night. The sky always being very pure, nothing op- 

 poses the radiation of the soil and its plants, and, therefore, 

 these last have always been covered by coarse mats of reeds, 

 which may also serve to protect delicate flowers from the 

 burning rays of the sun. Recently, however, glazed sashes 

 have come into use, and are now almost universally employed 

 instead of the mats, being heated, except in rare instances, by 

 nothing save the rays of the sun itself." 



