)9° 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 502 



sion of flowers from the first snowdrops until the last 

 Christmas Rose is past. After a day spent here one goes 

 back to the grimy city, with the lungs lull of fresh country 

 air, and the mind of memories of the great house standing 

 in quiet dignity in the old park with its glades where the 

 dun deer lie anion? the bracken. 



Emboldened by the action of Congress in practically 

 revoking Mr. Cleveland's Forest Reservation proclamations 

 and by the attitude of the administration toward the whole 

 subject of our western forests, the lumbermen nowcontrol- 

 ing a large block of Big Tree forest on the western slope of 

 the Sierra Nevada in California are making a determined 

 effort to obtain from Congress authority to cut the Sequoia 

 timber in the General Grant National Park. This particular 

 portion of the Sierra Reservation includes about fifteen 

 hundred acres, and is covered with an exceptionally fine 

 growth of Sequoias and Sugar Pines, numbering among its 

 vegetable wonders the great tree known as "the General 

 Grant." This scheme of Californian lumbermen to get pos- 

 session of this body of timber has been incidentally com- 

 mented on in several of the papers of the Pacific states, but 

 it is likely to remain generally unnoticed or to be forgotten 

 until the country discovers some day that by a skillfully 

 worded amendment to some appropriation bill it has been 

 again robbed of a great possession for the benefit of a few 

 speculators. 



It is unnecessary to remind our readers that these Sierra 

 Sequoias are marvels of the vegetable kingdom, unsur- 

 passed in grandeur, and probably the oldest living organ- 

 isms on the face of the globe. Every individual is a 

 monument which should be sacredly preserved for the 

 benefit of future generations. To cut down one of these 

 trees is a crime, and it should be a matter of national 

 humiliation that a considerable part of the Sequoia forest 

 has been allowed to pass from Government control into 

 the hands of lumbermen. There was no excuse for this ; 

 there would be less excuse in allowing those portions of 

 the Sierra forest which have already been reserved for 

 the benefit of the people to be opened to entry. The 

 lumber, even, is not needed by the community, which 

 can be abundantly supplied from the Redwood forests, and 

 no one but a little group of men who expect to make money 

 by this transaction has any interest in the success of this 

 movement. 



Notes on Cultivated Conifers. — I. 



THE climate of the north-eastern portion of the United 

 States is not favorable to the best development of 

 coniferous plants, and only a comparatively small number 

 of them can be satisfactorily grown in this part of the 

 country. It is not always that our winter cold is too 

 severe, for many of these trees flourish in mountain re- 

 gions where the temperature sinks many degrees below 

 the extremes of even the New England winter, but they 

 cannot bear our dry summers and the drying winds of 

 early spring, which draw moisture from the leaves faster 

 than it can be supplied by the roots often fast frozen 

 in the ground when evaporation is most active. Some 

 beautiful and interesting conifers, however, flourish here, 

 and in the following notes we shall publish the re- 

 sults of our observations on cultivated conifers in the 

 northern and eastern states ; and as the members of the 

 Yew family are still popularly regarded as conifers they 

 will be included with them. 



In the Yew family (Taxaceae) eleven genera, and in the 

 Coniferse twenty-seven genera, are now recognized. Of 

 these, however, we need not consider Pherospha?ra, Phyllo- 

 cladus, Dacrydium, Podocarpus, Stachycarpus, Saxegothaea 

 and Microcachrys, all Taxids of the southern hemisphere 

 except Podocarpus, which comes north of the equator into 

 tropical and subtropical regions of the two hemispheres, as 

 none of them can be grown here except as pot-plants 

 under glass. Of the true conifers we can pass by Tetra- 



clinis, a monotypic north African genus, Callitris of 

 Australia and New Caledonia, Actinostrobus with its 

 west Australian species, the African Widdringtonia, Fitz- 

 roya of Chili, Patagonia and Tasmania, Athrotaxis of Tas- 

 mania, Cunninghamia with its single south China species. 

 Agathis of New Zealand, Australia, the Pacific islands, Brazil 

 and Chili, Araucaria. a pretty widely distributed genus of 

 the southern hemisphere, and in Abietinese Keteleeria, 

 another monotypic south China genus. Representatives 

 of many of these genera flourish in the gardens of southern 

 California, and several of them will probably thrive in the 

 south Atlantic and Gulf state-, but their cultivation at the 

 north except under glass is hopeless. 



The genera of Taxacea? which are available for our 

 northern gardens are Ginkgo, Cephalotaxus, Tumion and 

 Taxus. Ginkgo contains now a single species, although 

 during the Tertiary period it was very generally distributed 

 through the colder and temperate parts of the northern 

 hemisphere with numerous species or varieties of which 

 more than sixty have been described by paleobotanists. It 

 is distinguished by the character of its lateral branchlets, 

 which are sometimes elongated and more often short and 

 spur-like, by its fan-shaped, two-lobed, many-ribbed, de- 

 ciduous, pale green, clustered leaves, dioecious flowers, the 

 males in umbels at the ends of the branches, the females 

 in pairs on the sides of slender stalks. The female flower, 

 which consists of a single naked ovule, becomes in ripen- 

 ing a sort of plum-like fruit, the outer layer of the seed-coat 

 growing succulent, and the inner hard and woody. Ginkgo 

 was first made known by the German botanist, Kcempher, 

 who discovered it in Japan in 1690, and in 171 2 published 

 a description, with an excellent figure of the foliage and 

 fruit, in his work on that empire. He had found the tree 

 in temple gardens, and believed that it was Japanese, for 

 early European botanists in Japan had to do most of their 

 botanizing in gardens, and did not realize that many of the 

 most popular Japanese garden plants had been brought 

 from China with the Buddhist religion. Among these intro- 

 ductions was the Ginkgo, which grows nowhere indige- 

 nously in Japan, although it is now found in most temple 

 gardens, both in China and Japan ; and it is possible that 

 this once widely distributed type has only been preserved 

 by cultivation, for if we are not mistaken the Ginkgo is 

 nowhere known in a wild state. The unusual power of 

 this tree to bear cold and drought would indicate that it 

 had long inhabited some region with a severe continental 

 climate, and if it exists now at all outside of gardens it is 

 probably in some of the elevated districts of western China 

 or of Mongolia, or on the still unexplored mountains of 

 northern Corea. 



In old Japanese temple gardens the Ginkgo is frequently 

 one hundred and twenty feet high, with a tall massive 

 trunk six or seven feet in diameter and large drooping 

 limbs sweeping out in wide-spreading graceful curves, and 

 furnished with elongated, leafy lateral branches. Such trees 

 are splendid and impressive objects, especially in autumn, 

 when the leaves which flutter on their long stems become 

 the color of gold. Ginkgo biloba, which is also sometimes 

 called Salisburia,and by English-speaking people the Maiden- 

 hair Tree, from the resemblance in the shape of its leaves 

 to the pinnee of the common Maidenhair Fern, was intro- 

 duced into the Botanic Garden at Utrecht about 1730. 

 Twenty years later it found its way to England, and in 17S4 

 was introduced into the United States by Mr. William Ham- 

 ilton, who brought many exotic trees, including the Lom- 

 bardy Poplar, intothis country, planting them in his garden 

 at VVoodlawn, near Philadelphia, which, a century ago, 

 contained the richest and most famous collection of plants 

 in America. A male tree flowered in England as early as 

 1795, but it was nearly twenty years later before female 

 flowers were seen, DeCandolle discovering them in iS 14 

 on a tree at Bourdigny, near Geneva. Scions from this 

 tree grafted on a staminate plant produced in 1835 perfect 

 fruits in the Botanic Garden at Montpelier; and fruit-bear- 

 ing trees are now comparatively common in Europe ; in 



