314 



Garden and Forest. 



[August 29, 18 



than such designs usually are. One or two of them 

 showed taste and knowledge. 



But the e.xhibition, after all, iwas not the essential part 

 of the convention, and the fact that it was not a representa- 

 tive of horticultural progress in the United States, takes 

 away but little from the general success of the convention, 

 which showed that the florists of the United States are not 

 behind any other class of business men in this country 

 in eirterprise and in intelligence, and that they realize the 

 responsibility of their position toward the public as edu- 

 cators in many matters of decoration and taste. 



The manufacture of cypress shingles has become, of 

 late )'ears, an important nidustry in the south and south- 

 western States. According to statistics collected by the 

 Southern Shingle Association, the product of the present 

 year exceeds that of 1887 by about forty per cent., reach- 

 ing a total of 520,000,000. These figures include, proba- 

 bly, a part of the shingles manufactured by hand, as well 

 as most of those produced in the mills, but not all. The 

 domestic manufacture, on a small scale, of cypress shin- 

 gles, has long been a favorite occupation of the negroes 

 and poor white people living in the neighborhood of the 

 Cypress swamps, and the total number made in this way 

 is large, although it is practically impossible to collect 

 anything like complete statistics of the product of indus- 

 tries carried on in homes. It would be safe, probably, 

 to add, hdwever, several millions to the figures published by 

 the Southern Shingle Association. No statistics, unfortu- 

 nately, of the amount of cypress lumber manufactured, are 

 now available, but that it has greatly increased of late years 

 there can be no doubt. Each year makes the value of 

 this remarkable wood better known and more generally 

 appreciated, and as white pine of the highest grades be- 

 comes more difficult to obtain, cypress must replace it at 

 the north in many emplojmients where a light, resinous, 

 straight-grained and verjr durable wood is demanded. The 

 supply of cypress is by no means inexhaustible. The 

 swamps of the south and south-west still contain very 

 considerable bodies of this tree {Taxodwni dis/ichui/i), al- 

 though those in the most available positions and of the 

 most convenient size for the mills, have already been cut 

 along the principal streams and from the neighborhood of 

 centres of population. It is true, too, that while the 

 Cypress only grows in deep swamps, incapable of drain- 

 age, and therefore destined to be covered always with 

 trees, that it is not reproducing itself very extensively any- 

 where, and that the Liquidambar and the Cotton-Gum are 

 gradually replacing it. The value of the Cypress, too, as 

 a timber tree, is seriously affected by a dry-rot, a species of 

 Dcedalia, which is especially destructive in the great bod- 

 ies of this timber, which occupy the river-swamps of 

 western Louisiana and the adjacent parts of Texas. It is 

 evident, therefore, that the Cypress forests are not des- 

 tined to take a prominent and lasting position in the 

 timber supply of the Continent, and that they cannot be 

 depended upon to furnish indefinitely, or even for any 

 considerable time, their present output. The best substitute 

 for southern cypress to be found in any considerable 

 quantity in the. American forests, is the wood of the so- 

 called Red Cedar of the North-West Coast {Tliuya giganlea). 

 It is an enormous tree, widely distributed, generally near 

 the coast, from northern California to Alaska, where, 

 fortunately, it reproduces itself freely, and grows, while 

 young, with astonishing rapidity in the moist climate of 

 the region to which it is confined. 



Avenue and in the Public Gardens and Common are lit- 

 erally covered with the white hairy cocoons of this in- 

 sect. Late in the present month or early in September 

 the mature insects will emerge and the females will de- 

 posit their eggs upon the cocoons. Next season the cater- 

 pillar will hatch, and from present appearances, unless active 

 measures are taken now to destro)' them, there will be enough 

 to devour every leaf upon every tree in the city. Now is the 

 time to prevent this by destroying the cocoons, which can be 

 done easily and quickly with a brush made of stiff wires 

 or with a sharp-pointed stick. An industrious man or bo}^ 

 can destroy the cocoons upon the trunks of a large 

 number of trees in a day, and the sooner industrious men 

 and boys are set about it, the better. 



A 



The trees in Boston, especially the Lindens upon the 

 Common, were greatly disfigured during several years by 

 the hairy caterpillar of the Tussock Moth {Orgyia leucos- 

 tigrna). It has done less injury during the past two or three 

 years, although the leaves of some Horse-Chestnut trees in 

 the Public Garden have been destroyed by it this season, but 

 now the trunks of many of the trees on Commonwealth 



House at Honmokii in Japan. 



THE photograph from which our illustration (see page 

 319) was drawn seemed to us of especial interest 

 as displaying a Japanese solution of a problem very 

 similar to that which often confronts a builder on the rocky 

 shores of New England, especially north of Cape Cod, 

 and on the borders of many of our inland , lakes. This 

 problem is to place a country-house on a rugged 

 shore to the best advantage, while preserving, as far as 

 possible, the natural character of the spot. It is only of 

 very recent years that it has been so much as considered 

 in this country. We have been much too anxious to imi- 

 tate, under wholly different conditions, the country homes 

 of Europe, and, in particular, of England. We have 

 wanted to surround our houses with green lawns, well- 

 kept flower-beds and trees symmetrical in shape and 

 planted in accordance with the supposed laws of land- 

 scape gardening as practiced in countries all parts of 

 which have long been subjected to cultivation. And we 

 have too often tried to secure all this in actual defiance of 

 natural conditions, and at the sacrifice of natural beauties 

 which, to a really cultivated eye, would have seemed of 

 priceless value. We have too often sacrificed the chance 

 for a beautiful, wide outlook over the water by placing 

 the house so far from the brink that lawns and drives 

 could encircle it ; have cut away the native growth of 

 tree and shrubs — rough and straggling, perhaps, but pic- 

 turesque and precious for that \ery reason — and replaced 

 them by nursery specimens ; have planted gardeners' 

 flowers in the stead of nature's beautiful wild products, 

 and in the end, after a vast expenditure of time, pains and 

 money, have succeeded in producing merely a bad imi- 

 tation of an English villa, unattractive in itself, and utterly 

 out of keeping with the landscape environing it. 



Fortunately, tastes are changing, and one of the chief 

 facts to he placed to the credit of the architectural profes- 

 sion in America to-day is the fact that it has developed a 

 keen sense for the diverse natural beauties of our countrjr, 

 and an admirable power of adapting its constructions to 

 the site and the surroundings at the moment in question. 

 It is getting to be recognized as a binding eesthetic rule 

 that a house shall conform itself to site and surroundings, 

 and that these shall not be defaced to suit the character of 

 a design abstractly evolved on paper, or tortured into the 

 semblance of something which foreign hands had created 

 under very different conditions. Many American homes 

 exist, built within the last ten years, which are as worthy 

 of praise from the point of view of appropriateness and 

 picturesque charm as the Japanese house in our present 

 picture. Some of them we hope to illustrate at a later 

 day : but the Japanese house is meanwhile shown as evi- 

 dence that the most thoroughly artistic nation of the mod- 

 ern world endorses the idea we are tr)nng to explain. It 

 will be noted that this house is placed quite at the edge 

 of the cliff, so that the most extended possible view is ob- 

 tained ; that every tree which could be preserved in build- 

 ing it has been preserved ; that the wild aspect of the spot 

 has not been interfered with, -and that the constructions of 

 man, alike in the house itself and in the fences, steps and 



