December 7, 1892.] 



Garden and Forest. 



577 



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. Y. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1892. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles :— The Defacement of Scenery 577 



Llewellyn Parlt. (With figure.) 578 



Notes of a Summer Journey in Europe. — XIX J. G. Jack. 578 



Botanical Notes from Texas E. N. Plank. 579 



New or Little-known Plants : — Prunus tomentosa. {With figure.). . J. G. Jack. 580 



Foreign Correspondence : — London Letter W. Watson. 581 



Cultural Department :— The Cherries of North-eastern Europe, 



T. H. Hoskins, M.D. 583 



Winter Protection E. O. Orpet. 5S4 



Flowers in the Conservatory T. D. H. 585 



Orchid Notes M. Barker. 585 



Notes from the Harvard Botanic Garden M. Barker. 585 



Correspondence :— A Spurious Elseagnus longipes N. A. Lindsey. 586 



Flowers at Wellesley Casual. 586 



The Use of Cultural Directions G. 587 



HorUcultural Education Professor L. H. Bailey. 587 



Notes - 587 



Illustrations: — Prunus tomentosa, Fig. 99 581 



Main Entrance to Llewellyn Park, West Orange, New Jersey, Fig. 100 583 



The Defacement of Scenery. 



A FEW days ago The Tribune, of this city, published a 

 letter from a correspondent whose sensibilities had 

 been outraged by the sight of a staring advertisement 

 painted on the face of Storm King, on the Hudson. The 

 writer desired to know whether there was no body organ- 

 ized for the purpose of stopping vandalism of this sort, and 

 he was informed that no such association existed, although 

 a law had been enacted in this state which made the deface- 

 ment of scenery a misdemeanor, punished by fine or impris- 

 onment. But laws, however stringent their provisions, are 

 of very little avail unless they have strong public opinion 

 behind them, and the great mass of our people do not seem 

 to resent it as a personal injury when the natural beauty, 

 which it is their right to enjoy, has been marred or oblit- 

 erated to serve some private purpose. Not long since, 

 within the limits of this city, and on grounds controlled by 

 the Park Department, the rocks were covered with violent 

 invitations to purchase somebody's stove polish and to 

 swallow a particular kind of hver pill, and no protesting 

 voice was heard. Our public highways and pleasure- 

 grounds, as well as private places, are amply protected 

 against invasions of this sort, but public officials and pri- 

 vate owners rarely assert their rights. It is a misfortune 

 that there are men who are willing to make every pleasing 

 prospect hideous for the sake of advertising a nostrum in 

 which they have a proprietary interest. It is a much more 

 disagreeable fact that the public sentiment on this subject 

 is so feeble that no effective protest is made against it. 



The same number of The Tribune which contained the 

 letter spoken of also contained a paragraph to the effect 

 that the higher slopes of Greylock Mountain were being 

 rapidly stripped of their forest-growth, and that the inhab- 

 itants of the surrounding region were distressed because 

 the mountain views were thus robbed of their attractive- 

 ness. It was also stated that the portion of the mountain 

 thus denuded was owned by some association and held as 



park property. We know nothing of the facts of the case, 

 but everybody knows that destruction of this sort is going 

 on almost everywhere where there is a mountain or a for- 

 est, and that the men who are sweeping away these woods 

 are turning scenes of beauty into scenes of desolation more 

 rapidly and completely than this can be achieved with an 

 advertiser's paint-pot. Now, it is not to be hoped that all 

 our forests can be left standing to satisfy the assthetic 

 sentiment of a portion of the community. Lumber must 

 be had from some source, and men who own timber-trees 

 have a perfect right to sell them for economic use. At the 

 same time it is undeniable that many places could be 

 named where, even in a pecuniary sense, the trees are 

 worth more to look at as they stand than they will be after 

 they are sawed up into lumber We have so often spoken 

 of the money value of attractions of this sort that there is 

 no need to enlarge upon the subject, but it may be added 

 that there is no reason why certain forests should not be 

 worked so as to yield the highest product possible and yet 

 retain their beauty as portions of the landscape. 



The simple truth is, that few persons ever think of natural 

 beauty as a possession worth considering by "practical" 

 men, much less as a public possession which it is a patriotic 

 duty to preserve and transmit to posterity. Few persons 

 look upon the natural landscape-beauty of the country as a 

 factor in promoting mental and spiritual health, as well as 

 a source of elevated pleasure. And yet it is strictly true 

 that this is one of the functions of beautiful scenery, 

 and if the people hold any inherited rights in blessings of 

 this sort, the destruction of such beauty is a public offense 

 akin to that of poisoning the free air or polluting the gen- 

 eral water-supply. An occasional spasm of indignation 

 against the advertiser's agent who irreverently lifts his 

 hand against a few stones and fences may be an encourag- 

 ing symptom, since it shows that there does exist among us 

 a slumbering sense of the right of the people to the enjoy- 

 ment of natural beauty. But, after all, the advertising-man 

 is a petty offender when compared with many great cor- 

 porations. What wealthy company w^as ever known to 

 make the slightest effort to protect the scenery from unneces- 

 sary defacement in locating or constructing a railroad .? 

 What corporation ever takes thought to preserve the fair 

 face of nature from needless scars when opening a mine or 

 working a quarry or building a factory ? How many lakes 

 in the Adirondacks, and how many reservoirs elsewhere, 

 are surrounded by a fringe of death, as the water has risen 

 and drowned the roots of the trees on their banks, and who 

 took any thought to prevent this hideous and depressing 

 effect when the dam was built? 



Of course, civilized man must have mines and quarries, 

 reservoirs and railroads. Constructions of this sort ne- 

 cessitate some displacement of the elements of beauty 

 in scenery ; but they need not inflict frightful and incura- 

 ble wounds, and if their owners and builders had a proper 

 respect for the rights of others the defacement would in 

 most cases be trivial. Works of this sort could often be 

 made, under artistic direction, to beautify rather than dis- 

 figure the scenery, so that each generation would leave 

 the earth to its successors a more attractive place for 

 human habitation. Societies for preserving natural beauty 

 have been formed in more than one European country, and 

 they will be organized here with increasing enhghtenment. 

 They are needed for wider duties than the protection of 

 the unparalleled grandeurs of Niagara from vulgarization or 

 the preservation of the forest-crown of conspicuous 

 mountains like Greylock, or the rescue of Storm King from 

 vandal hands. Their success must grow out of a gen- 

 eral appreciation of the value of all scenes of natural 

 beauty as a public possession. Is it too much to hope that 

 the time will come when a wanton or needless destruction of 

 the natural beauty of the world, which is our common 

 heritage, will be treated as a gross offense against public 

 decency, and when such an offense will be considered as 

 truly a felony before the law as any other invasion of the 

 natural rights of the people ? 



