November 14, 1888.] 



Garden and Forest. 



447 



are quite as ugly in their own way as the shed-encircled 

 boxes which preceded them. And they are, perhaps, even 

 more distressing to the eye ; for the old house had at least 

 the merit of frank simplicity, while the new one has often 

 the great demerit of seeming a labored effort after as much 

 eccentricity as possible. Yet, taking good and bad to- 

 gether, the general improvement which has marked our 

 architecture in recent years can nowhere be more clearly 

 read than in our country homes. And it is a most signifi- 

 cant proof of the genuine, vital and promising character of 

 our progress that these homes should have been so greatly 

 improved, not through the direct imitation of foreign mod- 

 els, but through the development of indigenous fashions, 

 and the incorporation — despite difficulties which might 

 easily have been thought insuperable — of the "vernacular" 

 piazza. 



A Glimpse of Nantucket. 



FOR many years the population of Nantucket has been 

 steadily declining. Counting nearly 10,000 souls in 1840, 

 it does not count 4,000 now. And these may be held to rep- 

 resent a "selection of the unfittest," for year by year the more 

 energetic and intelligent youths of the community have gone 

 to seek their fortunes in the outer world. Meanwhile, until 

 quite lately, the island has been scarcely thought of in the 

 outer world save in connection with bygone whales, and has 

 generally been described as a featureless expanse, inter- 

 esting simply as a bit of sandy wilderness isolated in a wilder- 

 ness of waves. 



Now, however, a change has come — not, indeed, over the 

 numbers or the spirit of the natives, but over the minds of 

 those whom they call "off-islanders." Summer tourists have 

 discovered the cool, bracing equanimity of the Nantucket 

 climate, the homely picturesqueness of its quiet town, and its 

 rich facilities for bathing, boating and fishing ; and they Hock 

 to its shores in increasing thousands summer after summer. 

 How the islanders lived before this intlu.x began, some twelve 

 years ago, it is hard to imagine, for I have never seen a place 

 more destitute of signs of an attempt to earn a living. There 

 is now no whaling, which is largely the fault of external circum- 

 stances; but there is scarcely any sheep-raising, and this must 

 be the fault of the islanders themselves. Great flocks once 

 pastured over the island. Wool was then the main concern 

 and was chiefly used at home. But now, with improved means 

 of transport and the summer immigration, it seems as though 

 a little energy might make the raising of mutton profitable. 

 Agriculture is almost as non-existent as sheep-raising. 

 Nearly the whole population lives in the town and a few dis- 

 tant villages. Farm-houses are few and widely scattered, and 

 the cultivated fields which surround them are rough and very 

 scanty. In the town and along the edges of the shore the 

 sunnner colonists are likewise gathered, so that a mile away 

 from this shore one can fancy one's self a hundred miles 

 away from anything that approaches to human activity, 

 wealth or progress. 



More negatives must still be used before I can begin to tell 

 what does exist in the central regions of Nantucket. In the 

 first place, there are no stones. Knowing that the island was 

 formed during and after the glacial epoch, and is a mere mass 

 of " drift," one does not look for the bed-rock of the main- 

 land to which, for a time, it was attached. But it seems more 

 reasonable to expect those boulders which are strewn over 

 the whole siu'face of New England, and nowhere more thickly 

 than along the coasts nearest to Nantucket. Yet they do not 

 exist. Broadly speaking, the island is divided into a higher 

 eastern and a lower western portion of almost equal areas. 

 The latter I had no time to visit during a brief two days' so- 

 journ; but many hours of diligent driving showed me the 

 whole of the eastern portion, and I could count on my fingers 

 the stones I saw. Of course, this means that there were none 

 of the picturesque walls which I had left behind in Plymouth 

 County, and which are to be foimd again on Block Island a 

 little to the westward. But, from a practical point of view at 

 least, the lack of such walls does not greatly matter. Where 

 there is so little to fence in, only the lover of beauty need re- 

 gret the lack of good fencing material. 



Finally, there are no trees on Nantucket, except those which 

 have been planted in the streets of the town, and some scat- 

 tering plantations of Pitch Pine which were made about forty 

 years ago midway between the northern and the southern shores. 

 The farm-houses stand naked and alone, and even along the 

 many little lakes and ponds one sees neither groves of trees nor 



thickets of shrubs. The so-called Pine woods, moreover, are 

 almost caricatures of the term. There is no more dauntless 

 and long-suffering tree than the Pitch Pine, but it can seldom 

 have struggled with greater difficulties than on Nantucket. 

 No individual rises more than ten or twelve feet above the 

 soil ; all are grotesquely distorted by the fierce sea winds ; 

 many are scarred and embrowned by the touch of fire, which 

 starts readily and runs persistently in the dry matted grass ; 

 and they look, in consequence, like a collection of ancient 

 dwarfs, not like young woods with possibilities of further 

 growth. Yet from even a little distance these woods actually 

 seem to deserve their name, for everything vertical "tells" 

 with extraordinary force in this landscape, where vertical 

 things are very few, and where slight inequalities of surface, 

 therefore, give the look of far horizons to spots quite near at 

 hand. The eye is so entirely deprived of help in its calcula- 

 tions, that even experience does not soon teach it how to com- 

 pute distances or dimensions. The first mistake I made was 

 to exclaim at the presence of a great hotel in the middle of a 

 moorland wilderness, the building being, in fact, but a farm- 

 house of moderate size. And after several such mistakes, 

 with a full sense of the likelihood of error, I pronounced a 

 pair of isolated objects to be tall chimneys al)Out five miles 

 off and found them merely tombstones not a mile away. 



These groves of gaunt yet dwarfish Pines, then, are the 

 only trees which meet us outside the town, although we are 

 told that White Oaks once grew in certain places large enough 

 to be used for building purposes. The earliest local records 

 speak of "meadows, woods and uplands," and one district 

 bore the name of the " Long Woods ; " but a full century ago 

 the island was represented as "wholly destitute of firewood,'' 

 and dependent, as it is to-day, on Cape Cod for its supply. In 

 the town a great deal of planting was done in former years. 

 When we stand on one of the railed "roof walks " that are so 

 characteristic of a community which perpetually went down to 

 the sea in ships, the panorama of gray roofs is interspersed with 

 an almost equal quantity of foliage. The Elms have stood their 

 long battle with the sea wind fairly well, but more interesting 

 are the Ailanthus trees, wliich quite as frequently appear. 

 One-sided, as a rule, and often naked of foliage save towards 

 the extremity of their branches, their gray bark and pictur- 

 esque structure harmonize admirably with the gray pic- 

 turesqueness of the old unpainted houses ; and their foreign 

 air seems appropriate in a place which once was filled with 

 trophies of every kind from many a distant shore. 



But the real interest of Nantucket lies in those wide tracts 

 away from the high sandy cliffs where, as far as the eye can 

 reach, no tree is in sight. The prospect is peculiar even to 

 eyes familiar with Block Island and the eastern portions of 

 Long Island. At Block Island the surface undulates per- 

 petually and abruptly, is thickly bestrewn with boulders and 

 shows scarcely any vegetable covering save a close, yellowish 

 grass. At Montauk there are also wide, boldly rolling 

 stretches of such grass ; but others where white sand is 

 spotted with great tufts of Hudsonia, and others again where 

 moisture has produced beautiful thickets of shrubs and veri- 

 table little forests filled with many species of trees. But at 

 Nantucket the surface is either quite flat for miles or gently 

 rolling in long swells ; the ponds are encircled merely l)y a 

 border of sedges and tall grass, and seem to have no effect 

 upon the soib beyond ; there are no reaches of naked sand, 

 and few where the grass is not thickly beset with flowering- 

 plants. Where it grew most abundantly it was filled in Sep- 

 tember with Asters and Golden Asters and Golden Rods and 

 Everlastings — all stunted by the wind to a few inches in 

 height, but vigorously blooming' — and with purple Gerardias, 

 showing larger and more deeply colored flowers than I had 

 ever seen elsewhere. But the most characteristic and charm- 

 ing tracts were those which bore no grass, but were covered 

 by a close growth of low undershrubs and trailers — Hudsonia 

 of both species, Bearberry and the Broom Crowberry. Acres 

 upon acres in one direction were covered with the last two 

 alone, alternating in large patches and growing with splendid 

 luxuriance, the Bearberry clothing even the sides of the road 

 with a thick mat of glossy leaves and dark red fruit, and the 

 Heath-like Crowberry rising in dense miniature evergreen 

 thickets, and contrasting exquisitely with its neighbor. A 

 prettier combination I have never seen, and it is hereby 

 recommended to the owners of sandy sea-shore places as an 

 excellent substitute for a turfed lawn. It is as deliglitful to 

 walk upon as to look at, owing to the springy, Heath-like 

 quality of the Crowberry stems. Hudsonia did not grow with 

 as much luxuriance as at Montauk, yet it was often beautifully 

 effective here and there. I was told that the true Heather 

 {Calluna vulgaris) could be found in a few spots on the island, 



