5o6 



Garden and Forest. 



[December 



Maine, the remainder from the Berkshire Hills, the Black 

 River country in the Adirondacks, and the Catskills. Good 

 trees in the Catskills are becoming scarce, however, and 

 the woodsmen of those mountains are looking elsewhere 

 for their material. Short jointed, stocky trees with perfect 

 whorls of branches at the base of each annual growth, are 

 the most sought for, and the Maine trees, as a rule, com- 

 mand rather higher prices than any others. The trees 

 come up thickly where hard-wood timber has been cleared 

 away, and if they are cut above the second or third joint, 

 one of the limbs soon turns upward and becomes a leader 

 to furnish another Christmas-tree. In this way the same 

 land is cut over several times. Fortunately the Balsam Fir 

 is about as nearly worthless for any other purpose as any 

 of our native trees, and therefore the waste of cutting so 

 much young timber is not serious. A few Black .Spruces 

 come among the Firs, and Hemlock boughs, which, oddly 

 enough, are made to do duty as Palm branches in some 

 church services, are in growing demand every year. 

 Trees from Maine are shipped as far south as Baltimore; 

 and of late years large quantities of Holly branches, mostly 

 from Maryland, since the limited supply in New Jersey is 

 nearly exhausted, are sent as far north as Boston. Within 

 two or three years the Mistletoe has been sold here in a 

 few shops and even on the streets, but in spite of its asso- 

 ciation with Christmas festivities in Old World traditions, 

 it has filled but a small place here in the regular market ot 

 Christmas green. And yet this parasite is common on the 

 Gum trees of southern New Jersey, and it is never so beau- 

 tiful as at this season with its transparent berries clustered 

 among its evergreen leaves. 



The plan for the Leland Stanford, Jr., University, printed 

 upon another page of this issue, records something 

 more than the ideas of the acknowledged master of landscape 

 art with regard to a great problem. It records the occur- 

 rence in our country of new and vast problems which 

 spring from the wonderful development of commerce and 

 the concentration of enormous wealth in the hands of in- 

 dividuals often willing to use it for the public good. And 

 it records that the time has passed, or is fast passing, when 

 great projects, more or less rural in their character, are to 

 be undertaken blindly or without the counsel of trainedspe- 

 cialists. The fact that an artist is called upon to lo- 

 cate the building and model the grounds of a Univer- 

 sity, to cut up to the best advantage the grounds of a 

 suburban land company, or to suggest the proper 

 approaches to a rural railroad-station, shows that the 

 American people have made noteworthy progress during 

 the last few years in artistic and economic education. 



The value of a thoroughly studied plan, such as Mr. 

 Stanford has secured, can be appreciated only by compar- 

 ing it with the plans of some of the old Universities of this 

 country, which have been built up piecemeal, without 

 reference to any consistent scheme of general utility or con- 

 venience, and just as individual fancy or momentary con- 

 venience dictated. An examination of Mr. Olmsted's plan 

 must show how convenience, to say nothing of appearance, 

 is lost, and how economy of time and space is sacrificed, 

 whenever a scheme of this nature is undertaken without 

 the aid of a carefully-prepared plan. 



The United States is now takinsj the lead among: nations 

 in the revival of the art of landscape-gardening, once al- 

 most lost from the face of the earth, and is adapting it to 

 the solution of some of the greatest economic problems in 

 modern life. The movement is still young, yet it shows 

 itself more or less distinctly in every pubhc improve- 

 ment recently undertaken in this country, and still more 

 unmistakably in the growing interest and appreciation ot 

 the American people for all that is good, and, therefore, 

 beautiful, in Art applied to Nature. 



the purpose of encouraging the general growth of fruit 

 in Great Britain, as a remedy for agricultural depres- 

 sion. Immense quantities of imported fruit, especially 

 apples, are consumed in Great Britain, and many per- 

 sons claim that all this fruit, and a great deal more, can be 

 better grown at home than anywhere else, and the land 

 which cannot be used profitably in growing wheat can be 

 made to pay large returns if covered with orchards, and 

 that fruit-growing will give employment to many persons 

 now idle. The trouble with English agriculture is too 

 deep to be cured or even greatly mended through apple- 

 growing ; but there is no reason why the new college may 

 not prove a useful institution. In it, we are told, "work 

 for the mind will accompany work for the body, and thus 

 the physical and mental faculties will be equally devel- 

 oped ; " and, having settled the somewhat momentous 

 question of "what shall we do with our boys?" it is go- 

 ing, so its founders promise, to provide for the future of 

 the young women of England. The working of the new 

 school will be watched, therefore, with interest and an.xiety 

 by the heads of large families. 



The wood used in the manufacture of spools is an item 

 of no small importance already in the forest-crop of some 

 of the Northern States ; and the demand for it is increas- 

 ing rapidly. The wood of the Canoe Birch is used almost 

 exclusively for this purpose, although the Gray Birch is used 

 also in small quantities. Maine, and especially Piscata- 

 quis County, is now the headquarters of the spool-wood 

 industry ; and a large number of vessels loaded with 

 spool-wood have sailed direct, during the summer, from 

 Bangor to foreign ports. The wood for this purpose must 

 be clear and entirely free of knots and other imperfections; 

 it is sawed into squares, of different dimensions, four 

 feet long, which are delivered to the spool-makers tied 

 into bundles. Several million feet of Birch timber — prob- 

 ably twelve or fifteen — are cut annually in the Maine for- 

 ests alone for this purpose. The amount of Canoe Birch 

 lumber standing in our northern forests is still large, and 

 as the trees grow rapidly up to a certain age, the supply 

 will not be exhausted soon, although the consumption is 

 now increasing much more rapidly than it ever has before. 



A horticultural and technical college has lately been 

 opened at Swanley, near London, under the auspices of the 

 National Fruit-growers' League, an association formed for 



The Story of Shortia. 



OUR illustration upon page 509 represents one of the 

 rarest and most interesting plants of North America. It 

 is interesting from the peculiar structure of its delicate flow- 

 ers, its botanical relationship, and the geographical distribu- 

 tion of the small family to which it belongs, which, as now 

 defined, consists of but half a dozen genera and only nine 

 species, which are all, excepting the two species of Diapen- 

 sia, confined to eastern North America and eastern Asia. 



The great interest of our Shortia, however, is found in the 

 history of this plant during the past century, and in the fact 

 that among all the plants studied and descritied and classi- 

 fied by Asa Gray, this little herb most excited his interest. 

 American botanists never think of the man whom they all 

 delight to look upon as their master and to remember as 

 their friend without thinking, too, of this humble little plant, 

 which properly occupied a conspicuous place upon the gift 

 which a few years before his death they brought to him with 

 words of affection and encouragement. 



Professor Gray was in Europe in 1839, ^''"^' "'' examining 

 the herbarium of the elder Michaux, preserved in the Mu- 

 seum at Paris, found an unnamed specimen of a plant, with 

 the habit of Pyrola and the foliage of Galax, of which only 

 the leaves and a single fruit were preserved, and which had 

 lieen collected, the label stated, in the " Hautes moiitagnes de 

 Carolinie." This specimen at once arrested his attention ; 

 and after his return, two years later, from his first botanical 

 journey into the Carolina mountains, where he had searched 

 in vain for Michaux's plant, he ventured to describe it, and to 

 point out its probable affinities upon the strength of the scanty 

 material in the Michaux herbarium, dedicating it to Dr. C. W. 

 Short, the author of a catalogue of the plants of Kentucky, 

 and fifty years ago an astute observer and capital collector 

 of western plants, which he distriliuted with an unstinted 

 hand among the principal herbaria of the United States and 

 Europe. 



