152 



Garden and Forest. 



[May 23, iSSS. 



Plant Notes. 



Japanese Apples. 



OF the many species and forms of the Apple cultivated 

 for the sake of their flowers, none is more beautiful 

 than the plant introduced from Japan by Von Siebold, and 

 known in sjardens as Pyrus floribunda or P. J\Ia'iis fori- 

 hunda {Fl. dt-s Serres xv., /. 15S. — Revue Hnrlicole, 1866, p. 

 312 with /. ) Maximovvicz has referred this plant to the 

 Chinese P. spectabdis, but the deciduous calyx and very 

 small persistent fruit seem to ]:ioint rather to a derivation 

 from the Siberian, Manchurian and north China P. 

 bacca/a. 



It is a vigorous shrub or small tree, very common in 

 Japanese gardens, with long, straggling branches, forming 

 a head sometimes twenty feet through. The bark is dark 



Francis Parkman's garden in Jamaica Plain, where this 

 Apple, now a stout bushy tree, ])erhaps eighteen feet in 

 height, still flourishes. The same variety was afterwards 

 sent to the Messrs. Parsons, of Flushing, by Dr. G. R. 

 Hall, an American physician long a resident in Japan ; and 

 it now appears in trade catalogues, both as Pyrus Parkmani 

 and P. Hallcana. It only differs, however, from Von 

 Sicbold's plant in its semi-double, darker colored flowers ; 

 in the dee].icr color of the 3-oung leaves and peduncles, and 

 in its smaller fruit. 



No shrub or shrubby tree surpasses these Japanese 

 Apples in marvelous abundance and beauty of t)loom, 

 which is most attractive, perhaps, just before the pink or 

 red flower-buds expand and display the lighter colors of 

 the interior of the flowers. It is astonishing that they are 

 not better known and more often planted. They are 

 beautiful as single specimens and still more beautiful 



Fig. 30. — The Double Flowered Japanese Apple. 



brown, or nearly blacky smooth and shining. The leaves 

 are oval, rather coriaceous, dark green above, lighter and 

 somewhat pubescent on the under side. The numerous 

 large fiowers appear with the leaves ; they are borne on 

 slender peduncles three or four inches long, and completely 

 cover the branches. The petals are oval-elliplical, 

 longly unguiculate, rose on the outside, neaih' vdiite 

 within. I'he abundant fruit from which the calyx falls 

 before maturity, leaving a minute eye, is hardly larger 

 than a pea ; it is round or so.:netimes oval, dull yellow 

 or red in color, and decays and then dries upon the 

 branches before separating from the peduncles which 

 remain attached to the branches until the fojlowing spring. 

 Our illustration above represents a flowering branch 

 of a form or variety of this Apple from a plant which 

 was sent to this country by ]\Ir. F. Gordon Dexter, 

 of Boston, about twenty-five )'ears ago. with the first 

 bulbs of Lilium auruhiin and the first plants of the golden 

 Retiiiospora and of Tlunopsis dolobrata which ever came 

 to the United States, These plants found a home in ^Ir. 



when grouped in great masses. They flower profusely 

 when verv small, grow rapidly -find continue to improve 

 for years. They thrive in all soils, and neither intense cold, 

 great heat nor drought atfectthem. No foreign ornamental 

 tree introduced into this country adapts itself more readily 

 to its peculiar climatic conditions. 



.\s Mr. Dawson has shown in some remarkable seedlings 

 which he has raised at the Arnold Arboretum, the Japanese 

 Apple, like the rest of the fann'ly, varies considerably from 

 seed, andean be still furtherimproved b)'' careful selection 

 — a fact of which enterprising nurserymen should not be 

 slow to take advantage. C. S. S. 



Heuchera sanguinea in Mexico. — .Accustomed during several 

 years to meet with tliis plant 011 the mountains of Arizona 

 and Me.xico, and always admiring its mottled leaves and 

 striking flowers,! feel grateful to Mr. Hatfield for recommend- 

 ing it for cultivation, and am prompted to tell of a visit made 

 last September to the station (or, at least, the vicinity) of its 

 original discovery, whence Wislizcnus in 1846 Ijrought dried 

 specimens to Dr. Engelmann, who praised it as "beautiful 



