January 3, 1894.] 



Garden and Forest. 



It would cost more to prune a thousand trees if only three cuts 

 were to be made to the tree than it would cost to plant five 

 thousand trees. All this I have learned by experience in 

 Kansas. 



Your correspondent compares the growth of the tree at the 

 ground with the growth of those planted closely, but he does 

 not seem to consider that the closely set trees attain twice the 

 height of his cultivated and fertilized tree in ten years, and hold 

 their diameter well up while his own tree tapers quickly toward 

 the top. I have had little experience in thinning out young 

 forest plantations. When I delivered a plantation in Kansas it 

 was my advice to leave it alone for eight or ten years, except 

 to plow roads around every forty acres which were left six- 

 teen feet wide for fire-breaks. I went through one large plan- 

 tation, which had stood ten years in 1891, with the superinten- 

 dent, and we adopted a rule that every tree whose leader was 

 overshadowed by adjoining trees should be cut down. I spent 

 two days with some handy workmen marking the trees to be 

 cut out and explaining to them my method, and I estimated 

 that at that time the thinning would cost seventy cents an 

 acre. It was actually done for a little less. We might have 

 thinned the woods by taking out the heaviest trees for posts, 

 but this would have been vandalism. We left the thriftiest to 

 grow, to the number of about fourteen hundred to the acre. 



Mannville, Fla. Robert Douglas. 



Recent Publications. 



Customs and Fashions in Old New England. By Alice 

 Morse Earle. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1893. 



Appealing chiefly to students of history and of human 

 nature, Mrs. Earle's book, nevertheless, contains much that 

 is specially interesting to the lovers of what we may call 

 plant-history. This is particularly true of the chapters en- 

 titled "Supplies of the Larder," "Old Colonial Drinks and 

 Drinkers," and "Doctors and Patients." In the first-named 

 a good deal of space is naturally given to Indian corn and 

 the various forms in which it was prepared for eating ; but 

 this, as well as the biography of the pumpkin, then gen- 

 erally called the pompion, is more or less familiar to most 

 Americans. Fresher is the information that squashes were 

 called by such cumbersome names as squontersquoshes 

 and askutasquashes, and that Governor Winthrop was so 

 impressed by the sight of popping corn that he carefully 

 wrote of the way in which it "turns inside out." Who has 

 not wondered why corn-bread is often called Johnny-cake? 

 Here we read that it was first dubbed jonne-cake, or jour- 

 ney-cake, because it was an excellent article with which to 

 fill the traveler's knapsack. Potatoes, says Mrs. Earle, 

 " were on the list of seeds, fruits and vegetables that were 

 furnished to the Massachusetts Bay colonists in 1628, and 

 fifteen tons (which were probably sweet-potatoes) were 

 imported from Bermuda in 1636 and sold in Boston at two- 

 pence the pound. Winthrop wrote of ' potatose ' in 1683. 

 Their cultivation was rare. There is a tradition that the 

 Irish settlers at Londonderry, New Hampshire, began the 

 first systematic planting of Potatoes. At the Harvard Com- 

 mencement dinner in 1708 potatoes were on the list of sup- 

 plies. A crop of eight bushels which one Hadley farmer 

 raised in 1763 was large — too large, since ' if a man ate 

 them every day he could not live beyond seven years.' 

 Indeed, the 'gallant root of potatoes' was regarded as a 

 sort of forbidden fruit — a root more than suspected of being 

 an overactive aphrodisiac, and withal so wholly abandoned 

 as not to have been mentioned in the Bible ; and when 

 Parson Jonathan Hubbard, of Sheffield, raised twenty bush- 

 els in one year, it is said he came very near being dealt 

 with by his church for his wicked hardihood. In more 

 than one town the settlers fancied the balls were the edible 

 portion, and 'did not much desire them.' . . . Other vege- 

 tables were produced in New England in abundance. Hig- 

 ginson speaks of green peas, turnips, parsnips, carrots and 

 cucumbers, and a dozen fruits and berries. Cranberries 

 were plentiful, and soon were exported to England. Josse- 

 lyn gives a very full list of fruits and vegetables and pot- 

 herbs, including beans, which were baked by the Indians 

 in earthen pots, as they now are in Boston bake-shops. . . . 

 By Johnson's time New Englanders had ' apple, pear and 



quince tarts instead of their former pumpkin pics.' . . . 

 Josselyn said the ' quinces, cherries and damsins set the 

 dames a-work. Marmalct and preserved damsins were to be 

 met with in every house.' Skill in preserving was ever an 

 English woman's pride, and New-English women did not 

 forget the lesson they had learned in their ' faire English 

 homes.' They made preserves and conserves, marmalets 

 and quiddonies, hypocras and household wines, usque- 

 barbs and cordials. They candied fruits and made syrups. 

 They preserved everything that could bear preserving. I 

 have seen old-time receipts for preserving quinces, 'res- 

 passe,' pippins, ' apricocks,' plums, 'damsins,' peaches, 

 oranges, lemons, artichokes, green walnuts, elecampane- 

 roots, eringo-roots, grapes, barberries, cherries ; receipts 

 for syrup of clove, gilliflower, wormwood, mint, aniseed, 

 elder, lemons, marigolds, citron, hyssop, liquorice ; re- 

 ceipts for conserves of roses, violets, borage-flowers, rose- 

 mary, betony, sage, mint, lavender, marjoram and 'piony ' ; 

 rules for candying fruit, berries and flowers, for poppy- 

 water, cordial, cherry-water, lemon-water, thyme-water, 

 Angelica-water, Aqua mirabilis, Aqua Coeleslis, clary- 

 water, mint-water. No wonder a profession of preserving 

 sprung up." 



Cider, we are told, " was made at first by pounding the 

 apples by hand in wooden mortars ; sometimes the pomace 

 was pressed in baskets. Rude mills were then formed with 

 a hollow log, and a heavy weight or maul on a spring- 

 board. Cider soon became the common drink of the peo- 

 ple, and it was made in vast quantities. In 1671 five hun- 

 dred hogsheads were made of one orchard's produce. One 

 village of forty families made three thousand barrels in 

 1721. ... It was freely used even by the children at 

 breakfast, as well as at dinner, up to the first quarter of the 

 present century, when many zealous followers so eagerly 

 embraced the new temperance reform that they cut down 

 whole orchards of thriving Apple-trees, conceiving no pos- 

 sibility of the general use of the fruit for food instead of 

 drink." Spruce and birch beer, says Mrs. Earle, were 

 brewed by mixing a decoction of sassafras, birch or spruce 

 bark with molasses and water, or by boiling the twigs in 

 maple-sap, or by boiling together pumpkin and apple- 

 parings, water, malt and roots. 



Tea was a rarity until after the opening of the eighteenth 

 century. Some queer mistakes were made in early days 

 " through the employment of the herb as food," the liquor 

 being thrown away after boiling and the leaves eaten with 

 butter and salt. Some called the "new China drink" "rank 

 poison, far-fetched and dear-bought," while others ascribed 

 much virtue to its use. When the dawning Revolution 

 excited the minds of colonial dames against it, many native 

 substitutes were tried, " the most esteemed being Liberty 

 tea, which was thus made : "The four-leaved loose-strife 

 was pulled up like flax, its stalks were stripped of leaves 

 and boiled ; the leaves were put in an iron kettle and basted 

 with the liquor from the stalks. Then the leaves were put 

 in an oven and dried. Liberty tea sold for sixpence a 

 pound. Ribwort was also used to make a so-called tea — 

 Strawberry and Currant leaves, sage, and even strong me- 

 dicinal herbs likewise. Hyperion tea was made from Rasp- 

 berry leaves." But when, to explain its nature, Mrs. Earle 

 cites a contemporary writer as saying that Hyperion and 

 Labrador teas are the same, we feel she must be mistaken, 

 and that the beverage in question was manufactured from 

 Ledum latifolium, that familiar plant of the Heath family 

 whose common name is still Labrador Tea ; especially as 

 her authority goes on to say : "The virtues of the plant or 

 shrub from which this delicate tea is gathered were first 

 discovered by the aborigines, and from them the Canadians 

 learned them. Before the cession of Canada to (heat 

 Britain we knew little or nothing of this most excellent 

 herb, but since that we have been taught to find it growing 

 all over hill and dale between latitude forty and sixty. It is 

 found all over New England in great plenty, and that of 

 best quality, particularly on the banks of the Penobscot, 

 Kennebeck, Nichewannock and Merrimac. " 



