70 



Garden and Forest. 



[April 4, 18 



I have found a vase made as follows admirably adapted for 

 the natural arrangement of such flowers as Gladiolus, and, in 

 fact, for all strong; growing kinds. Take a smooth and perfect 

 length of common 6 or 8 in. stoneware sewer-pipe, paint it a 

 pleasant neutral tint ; have fitted into the smaller end a tin can 

 some 8 inches deep and supported by a flange projecting over 

 the top. Have a tinsmith make two circles of wire fittmg 

 easily into the can and have these circles filled with cross wires 

 so as to make a net work of about an inch mesh. Solder to 

 these circles— and in such a way that one of the circles is held 

 about two inches from the bottom of the can and the otlier 

 just below the top— two stout wires bent like the bail of a pail, 

 and of such length that when the circles are m place the arch 

 of the wires will be some 6 inches above the can and cross 

 each other at right angles. The two circles and the upper 

 wires will enable~one to place a spike of Gladiolus or a spear 

 of grass or any long stemmed plant so that it will retain just 

 the place in the arrangement that may be desired, while by 

 means of the wire handles the whole arrangement can be lifted 

 out of the can to remove the water when necessary. 



Detroit, Mich. ''''''''• '^'- ^racy. 



Correspondence. 



To the Editor of Garden and Forest ; 



Sir.— I was glad to see, in a recent number of your paper, that 

 you had called attention to Boronia inegastigma. The delicious 

 fragrance of its flowers certainly entitles it to more general culti- 

 vation in our green-houses. But there is another plant, equally 

 fragrant, which one seldom meets with nowadays— not nearly 

 so often as thirty years ago. This is Mahernia iierticillata, a 

 half-shrubby or woody perennial, introduced from the Cape of 

 Good Hope about 1820. In habit it is not so attractive as Boro- 

 nia, growing in a rather straggling way. But its flowers are 

 prettier— small, bright yellow bells, profusely produced and 

 as sweet as Lilies-of-the- Valley ; and it is also a much freer 

 and more rapid grower and one of the easiest of all plants to 

 propagate. In a cool green-house it will bloom throughout 

 the winter and spring, and it is one of the very best of house- 

 plants. I should think it would be an excellent plant for florists 

 to grow for winter sale in pots — in flower for room-decoration — 

 as It remains so long in blossom and its delicious odor will per- 

 meate a whole apartment. Mahcrnia may also be had to flower 

 out-doors in summer, and when I was young it was comnionly 

 grown in vases and hanging-baskets, a purpose for which its 

 habit renders it peculiarly suitable. 



Elizabctl., N.J. W. J. K. 



[Our correspondent does not say too much in favor of this 

 plant. It is not rare in old green-house collections in this coun- 

 try, and a writer in a recent issue of the Gardener' s Chronicle, 

 of London, lamenting that it has "long been lost to English 

 gardens," states that good plants can be purchased in this city 

 tor 30 cents a piece. — Ed.] 



this is once demonstrated, there will no doubt be plenty of 

 imitators, and the tide of population now ebbing so sadly will 

 flow back toward these noble hills. 

 Otis, Mass. .S". IV. Powell. 



To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir.— What Mr. Parkman said in No. i of Garden and Forest 

 of the White Mountain forests as capable— with proper treatment 

 —of furnishing a steady supply of timber, and of the serious 

 injury to the business of summer resorts and to manufac- 

 turers if speculators should cut oiT these forests, is applicable 

 to many other parts of New England. In Berkshire County, 

 Mass., White Pine comes up readily and makes a strong growth, 

 but is not cared for so as to make straight, first-class timber. 

 In this town about a million feet of lumber are cut every 

 year, and at least half of this is white pine. It is, however, 

 only fit for box-boards and on the stump is worth some $4.00 

 per' 1,000. Meantime the population is steadily decreasing, 

 deserted farm houses staring one in the face on every road. 

 There is not enough profitable occupation for even the few who 

 are left, and the most enterprising young men seek business 

 elsewhere. Here and there, however, one sees a grove of thick- 

 standing, tall and straight pine trees, proving that good and 

 high-priced lumber (and much more of it per acre) can be 

 grown whenever it is protected and a litfle pains taken to se- 

 cure a thick stand. It would prove an instructive object- 

 lesson if some one would take and sow Pine on one of these 

 farms in with whatever hoop-pole stuff will thrive best. The 

 first crop of poles should be cut close to the ground so as to 

 promote sprouting {recepage, as the French call it), and continu- 

 ous harvests of them should be taken oft' the ground until the 

 Pine begins to shade and crowd the hard wood. After that 

 thinning will be all that is required, and the material yielded by it 

 will pay for labor, interest and ta.xes. When the feasibility of 



The Forest. 



The Forest Vegetation of Northern Mexico. — I. 



nPHE tourist, who, fresh from a ride through the densely 

 -'- wooded swamps of Arkansas or Louisiana, or from the 

 Pine-covered heights of New Mexico, enters Old Mexico at 

 Paso del Norte, and mounts by night from the valley of the 

 Rio Grande to the central tablelands, where in a journey of a 

 thousand miles towards the capital he sees apparently but 

 naked plains and bare and serrated mountains (notice in Span- 

 ish the same word, sierra, for a mountain range as for a saw), 

 would doubtless be surprised at my choice of a theme for 

 these articles. Nevertheless I have something to say of for- 

 ests and forest trees in that same region, but more concerning 

 the forests covering the Cordilleras, which lie from one hun- 

 dred to two hundred miles west of the central railroad. 



The tablelands of central Mexico, mostly covered by the 

 .States of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Zacatecas and San 

 Luis Potosi, are plains, lying at an elevation of 4,000 to 7,000 

 feet, interrupted at intervals of ten to twenty miles by broken 

 ranges of mountains, whose summits are 2,000 to 3,000 feet 

 above the surrounding plains, or 6,000 to 9,000 feet above sea 

 level, and whose trend is south-east and north-west. In the 

 State of Chihuahua these mountain-bearing plains ascend from 

 the Valley of the Rio Grande on the north-east, less than 4,000 

 feet elevation, — in the State of Durango from the Laguna 

 country on the east, a region of lakes which are river sinks, 

 and less than 4,000 feet altitude — and culminate in the conti- 

 nental divide lying within but near the western bounds of 

 these two States. Where the divide is a gently swelling plain, 

 as immediately north of Cusihuiriachic, its altitude is about 

 7,000 feet ; whenever it rises to a mountain crest it attains an 

 elevation of 8,000 to 10,000 feet. It is doubtful whether along 

 all the mountain line that stretches southward from the United 

 States boundary a greater elevation than 10,000 feet is to be 

 found, until we come to the snow peaks which look down 

 upon the valley and city of Mexico. 



To the west of this divide, parallel with it, but not always 

 contiguous to it — for in some places the Pacific Slope begins 

 with a broad, gently falling plain — lies the Cordilleras region 

 of north Mexico, a belt seventy-five to one hundred and fifty 

 miles wide, closely packed, forest-covered mountains ; cut 

 through everywhere by torrents in swift descent to the low- 

 lands of Sonora and Sinaloa — torrents which have formed a 

 labyrinth of gulches, cafions and barrancas, the terror of the 

 traveler — rising higher towards the west only in the seeming, 

 because there the valleys are deeper ; in the upper or eastern 

 portion of the belt narrow, habitable valleys at rare intervals 

 only, but more frequent and broader valleys, as we descend 

 towards the Tierra Caliente, showing villages, grain fields and 

 Orange orchards. On the cool, evergreen heights of this west- 

 ern verge of the plateau is condensed the moisture borne in- 

 land by the winds of the Pacific. So a good measure of rain 

 and snow usually falls here during winter; while from July 

 till August thunderstorms are of daily occurrence. The 

 storms of winter being almost wholly lost among these moun- 

 tains, the interior, however, is left comparatively rainless from 

 October to August ; for, so slow is the eastward progress of 

 the summer rains, preparing their course step by step over suc- 

 cessive mountain chains and heated plains, that it may be as 

 late as August ere they descend to the valley of the Conchos, 

 and meet in its vicinity the rains from the Gulf of Mexico, also 

 retarded in their inland march by the similar barrier presented 

 by the Sierra Madreof eastern Coahuila and San Luis Potosi. 



But it is not due to dearth of water alone that the interior 

 plateau remains comparatively bare of forest growths. The 

 explorer everywhere observes in that region a paucity of soil, 

 because, chiefly, it has never had the benefit of glacial action 

 to grind down the rugged mountains and strew the resulting 

 earth over the land in deep and fertile drift formations. More- 

 over, the action of frost to disintegrate rocks, and bring down 

 the toppling crags, is there exceedingly slow, since water to 

 aid in its operations is generally withheld in winter. So the 

 mountains do not possess sufficient depth of soil to carry 

 through eight to ten months of drought the water supply neces- 

 sary to the life of a forest. Bv Mav, in fact, whoever travels 

 them incurs risk of perishing by thirst from inability to find a 

 living brook or spring. Therefore the trees of all the interior 

 ranges are thinly scattered and of stunted growth. In the 



