8o 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 470. 



appropriation of $10,300 was made last week by the Senate of 

 the United States to enable the Secretary of War to study 

 means of freeing our watercourses from this nuisance. 



Steam has shortened the time of ocean transit to such a 

 degree that the perishable fruit on street-stands of almost 

 any city in the world may have come from a remote part of 

 another continent. Good peaches from South Africa are now 

 on sale in the London markets and command $2.50 for a box 

 containing twenty. The first installment of the apple crop 

 from Tasmania will reach London about April 20th, and ship- 

 ments will arrive regularly every week until July. About 

 100,000 cases are expected. 



Mr. C. L. Allen has a good word to say for the old Mada- 

 gascar Periwinkle as one of the most pleasing of plants which 

 can be used for bedding, since it can be had covered from 

 June until frost with flowers which are admirably set off by 

 glossy green foliage. If seeds are sown now they will produce 

 plants that will be of flowering size in June, and the seed- 

 lings will come true to the type of flower, whether pure white, 

 rose-colored, or white with a crimson eye. If the old plants are 

 taken up at the approach of frost and stored in boxes of sand 

 in a warm cellar and left so dry that growth will not be encour- 

 aged they will keep well, and if the stems are cut back at the 

 approach of warm weather they will make much stronger 

 plants the next season and will flower earlier than those grown 

 from seed. 



The North Carolina Experiment Station has had prepared a 

 bulletin entitled "The Home Vegetable Garden," by Professor 

 F. W. Massey, to which a short supplement on Pests of the 

 Garden has been added by Gerald McCarthy, the botanist of 

 the station. Altogether, this little bulletin makes up a pam- 

 phlet of some fifty pages, which is an excellent handbook for 

 the cultivation of vegetables for home use, not only for the 

 latitude of North Carolina, but for a large part of the country. 

 Besides giving a selection of the different varieties of plants, 

 the book contains some first-rate rules for the best methods of 

 selecting, laying out and enclosing a garden, of making and 

 using cold frames and hot-beds, of preparing and enriching 

 the soil and much other information which a novice ought to 

 be grateful to have placed within his reach. 



Mabel Morrison is a Rose that is not often forced, but a few 

 blooms of it in the window of William H. Brower & Sons, on 

 Broadway, near Twenty-third Street, a few days ago showed 

 to good advantage among other brighter blossoms. It lacks 

 the substance of Baroness Rothschild, from which it is a sport, 

 and it is not so full as the flower of the parent plant, but for 

 this very reason it is more delicate, and its pure or flesh-white 

 cup-shaped flowers have a peculiar grace. The foliage is a 

 singularly bright and cheerful green. In the same window was 

 a specimen Acacia cultriformis. Its spikes of flowers, near the 

 end of the branches, stand out in large numbers, making a 

 thyrse-like mass of deep yellow in beautiful contrast with the 

 silvery foliage. These glaucous leaves along the stem resem- 

 ble scales, and are set on in the peculiar edgewise fashion which 

 gives the plant a marked appearance. 



Mr. George H. Hazzard, Commissioner of the Interstate 

 Park of the Dalles of the St. Croix, has submitted his first 

 report to the Governor, and with it a pamphlet of a hundred 

 pages containing much useful matter about this most interest- 

 ing state reservation. When the park is extended so as to 

 include the lower Dalles, as it in all probability will be, it will 

 extend along three and a half miles of shore-line on the St. 

 Croix. The tract is unique in the variety of its geological fea- 

 tures, rich in forms of plant-life, and its scenery is remarkable 

 for wild and picturesque features. In speaking of the advan- 

 tages of public recreation-grounds for people in the country 

 as well as in the city, the Superintendent states that a Grange 

 in Ohio has recently bought a tract of woodland on the banks 

 of a beautiful stream for a park, while a few miles above The 

 Dalles, on Wolf Creek, the farmers have bought a fine grove 

 where they have erected some shelters and other conven- 

 iences for holding Fourth of July celebrations, harvest homes 

 and picnics. 



Glaci? fruits are among the most attractive and satis- 

 factory of the varied offerings of first class fruit stores. They 

 come from France in paper boxes, each containing a quar- 

 ter, a half, or a full pound of inviting preparations, and 

 also in one, two, four and six pound wooden boxes. Some of 

 the larger packages are filled with only one kind of fruit, but 

 these and the smaller ones, with assorted fruits neatly ar- 

 ranged in rows of one kind, are beautiful and make easy 

 buyers of inspecting customers. A two-pound box, for exam- 



ple, holds nearly four dozen fruits in seven rows separated by 

 dainty white lace paper. There are small white pears, tiny 

 limes, alternating yellow and green, large apricots, deep and 

 rich in color, green gages, a showy line of rose-colored pears, 

 one of delicious-looking figs, and by way of novelty and 

 variety, English walnuts, thickly encased in a candied cover- 

 ing. Other combinations are made from meaty cherries, 

 with sweet Bigarreau and the sour fruit to choose from, 

 some arranged with straw stems for convenient handling ; 

 peaches, fresh-looking slices of pineapple, some white and 

 others a wholesome rose-color from being dipped in natural 

 fruit-syrup ; red and white strawberries ; melons, the seeds 

 removed and the whole form retained ; mirabelles, small 

 yellow plums; young green almonds, prepared with the outer 

 and inner shell, the kernel being hardly formed, and slices of 

 oranges. The colors, which are very distinct, make striking 

 contrasts. These colors are always the natural tints of the 

 fruits themselves, or in some instances of the bright juices of 

 other fruits. Limes, which come green and yellow, are the 

 unripe and the ripened fruits. The prices range from fifty to 

 eighty cents a pound. Turkish fig-paste — some white and 

 some pink — is a generally esteemed fruit confection, and 

 apricot paste is more rarely seen. In another class are the 

 candied orange, lemon and Sicily citron, seen in grocers' stocks, 

 and glace Angelique, or stalks of rhubarb, which are used in 

 confectionery. For several years past a high grade of glac6 

 fruits from California have been sold in eastern cities, includ- 

 ing figs, plums, cherries and other sorts. Crystallized ginger 

 is, perhaps, the best known of all these confections, and Brazil 

 nuts and other imported and native nuts are largely used in 

 candied coverings, while fruit bars are popular. Among the 

 most costly delicacies are candied rose petals at $1.50 and 

 violets at $2.50 a pound. Many of the fruits also come crys- 

 tallized, or with an additional coating of granules of sugar. 



As we go to press the announcement is made that Presi- 

 dent Cleveland has set apart by proclamation thirteen new 

 forest reserves, including altogether an area of more than 

 twenty-one million acres. This, added to the reservations 

 previously established by Presidents Harrison and Cleve- 

 land, increases the total area of reserved forest land in the 

 western states and territories to about thirty-nine million 

 acres — that is, the combined area of these reservations, 

 exclusive of the National Parks, is as great as that of the 

 states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts 

 and Rhode Island. The new reserves include all the 

 central portion of the Black Hills of South Dakota, the 

 Big Horn Mountain Range in Wyoming, the Jackson Lake 

 country south of the Yellowstone National Park in Wyom- 

 ing, all the Rocky Mountains of northern Montana, a 

 valuable forest region in northern Idaho, the principal part 

 of the Bitter Root Mountain region in Montana and Idaho, 

 the Cascade Mountains of northern and of southern Wash- 

 ington, the Olympic Mountain region in north-western 

 Washington, the Sierra summits of California north of the 

 Yosemite National Park, the San Jacinto Mountains in 

 southern California, and the Uintah Mountains in northern 

 Utah. The location and boundaries of these forest lands have 

 been carefully studied by the commission appointed by 

 the National Academy of Sciences, who have made it their 

 aim to include as much as possible of the great bodies of 

 timber that are left on unentered land, and wherever it 

 was practicable to secure the continued existence of the 

 forests on high mountain slopes which protect the sources 

 of streams most useful for irrigation and navigation. 

 Much remains to be done before this magnificent domain 

 is rendered safe from spoliation, but the simple act of 

 setting these forest lands apart is enough to justify the 

 creation of the commission. In our next issue we shall 

 publish with some fullness of detail a description of the 

 reservations, and we only add here that it may be doubted 

 whether any act of President Cleveland's administration 

 will have such a beneficent and far-reaching influence 

 upon the welfare of the country as this series of procla- 

 mations. The country is to be congratulated on having a 

 Chief Magistrate who is capable of taking such a broad and 

 statesmanlike view, and the people will be grateful to him 

 for the promptness and decision with which he has acted. 



