July ii, 1894.] 



Garden and Forest. 



271 



GARDEN AND FOREST. 



PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY 



THE GARDEN AND FOREST PUBLISHING CO. 



Office : Tribune Building, New York. 



Conducted by Professor C. S. Sargent. 



ENTERED AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER AT THE POST OFFICE AT NEW YORK. N. Y. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JULY u, 1894. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles: — Horticulture in England and America 271 



Practical Work for Forestry Associations 272 



The /Esthetic Value of Roads and Walks H. A. Caparn. 272 



The Tupelo, Nyssa sylvatlca. {With figure.) 273 



Foreign Correspondence: — London Letter IV. Watson. 273 



Plant Notes : 274 



Cultural Department: — Notes on Trees and Shrubs J. G. Jack. 276 



Fertilizers for Orchards and Vineyards .S". 277 



Forming the Heads of Fruit-trees" T. H. Hoskins, M.D. 2jy 



The Flower Garden J. N. Gerard. 277 



Gooseberries E. P. P. 278 



Correspondence: — Bulbous Plants in North Carolina. ..Professor W. F. Massey. 278 



Our Native Persimmons S. Miller. 278 



Woodlands of New England T. H. Hoskins, M.D. 279 



Recent Publications 27Q 



Notes -•• 280 



Illustration: — A Tupelo (Nvssa sylvatica) in Chester County. Pennsylvania, 



Fig. 46 =75 



Horticulture in England and America. 



IN some correspondence which we published a fort- 

 night ago a few of the essential points of difference be- 

 tween the principal flower shows of England and of this 

 country were pointed out. More striking, however, than 

 any difference in the material collected for exhibition, or 

 its variety or quality, or arrangement, is the difference in 

 the people, taken in a mass, who visit a flower show in 

 London and those who visit one in New York or Philadel- 

 phia. Of course, the real value of any given exhibition can- 

 not be properly gauged by the number or the appreciative 

 interest of those who come to see it, but in the long run the 

 character and quality of a series of exhibitions will depend 

 more upon those who come to see the flowers than upon 

 any other influence. That is, the demand in this case as in 

 others will create and control the supply. An exhibition 

 which is made for the inspection of a thousand persons 

 who have a fairly good general knowledge of plants, who 

 have gardens in which they take a personal interest, who 

 have become specialists in some direction and have de- 

 voted themselves to the study and improvement of certain 

 plants or certain families of plants, will be constituted and 

 conducted in quite a different way from one which is meant 

 to please, a thousand persons who imagine in a vague 

 way that they love flowers, but who have little accurate 

 knowledge of them and take no personal interest in their 

 cultivation. 



In the first instance, the grower and exhibitor knows that 

 any triumph of horticultural skill will be appreciated, and 

 this will insure greater care in producing perfect speci- 

 mens ; collections of different varieties of certain plants 

 will be displayed for the delight of those who can appre- 

 ciate slight modifications in structure and delicate varia- 

 tions of form and color; and novelties will be shown for 

 those who wish to make complete collections of any class 

 of plants. The exhibition will cover a wide range, because 

 in the broad domain of horticulture there will be hardly a re- 

 gion which has not special attractions for the taste and fancy 

 of many visitors, whose interest must be arrested and held. 



Altogether different will be an exhibition prepared for per- 

 sons who lack this precise horticultural knowledge, al- 

 though their natural taste and appreciation of what is beau- 

 tiful may be quite as good. Under such conditions more 

 thought will be given to arrangement for general effect. If it 

 is a spring exhibition, for example, we should not look so 

 much for "a complete collection of Narcissi as for masses of 

 some of the more showy kinds effectively grouped. Alto- 

 gether, we should expect an exhibition which would be less 

 instructive from a horticultural standpoint, although it 

 might be more impressive as a spectacle when viewed as a 

 whole. All this means that a typical flower show in any 

 community will indicate pretty accurately how large a 

 place in the life of that community horticulture fills. 



The best exhibitions in England are, no doubt, capable of 

 great improvement, but they are better, from a purely hor- 

 ticultural point of view, than ours are, because our people 

 generally know less about flowers and plants, and there- 

 fore are less intelligent judges. It is true that an American 

 visitor at an English flower-show is apt to overestimate the 

 general knowledge of the great British public on this sub- 

 ject, even when he remembers that in a small and densely 

 populated country it is much easier to bring together a 

 large assemblage of intelligent plant-lovers than it is in 

 America. In such a place, where every other man one meets 

 is a horticultural expert in some direction, one is apt to 

 think that a knowledge of floriculture and horticulture is 

 universal. A little investigation will soon show that it is 

 really but a small fraction of the English people who have 

 any knowledge of plants worth speaking of, but yet the 

 ratio of intelligent plant-lovers and plant-growers to the 

 entire population is much larger than it is here. This does 

 not mean that the general taste of the English people and 

 their ability to appreciate natural beauty is any higher than 

 it is with us, but that the proportion of the people in the 

 British Islands who take an interest in growing plants of 

 their own is larger than it is in America. 



There is no need to state the reasons for this state of 

 things. That America is a newer country ; that our 

 population is less fixed, and therefore without such strong 

 local attachments ; that we are generally more in a hurry 

 and spend less of our leisure at home ; that we have 

 shorter seasons and more trying summers, — reasons 

 like these will suffice without enumerating any of the 

 more subtle influences which help to separate us from our 

 mother country in our habits of life. But, after all, there is 

 nothing which ought to cause discouragement to those 

 who feel that a more general interest in horticulture here 

 would make American life fuller and American homes hap- 

 pier. At the outset our fathers made the natural mistake 

 of copying English methods of planting, which were un- 

 suited to our soil and climate. We have just begun to 

 unlearn our errors of this nature, and the observant eye 

 can plainly detect an encouraging tendency to adapt our 

 horticultural methods to our surroundings and to develop an 

 American horticulture for Americans. There is a great 

 deal to criticise in the gardens of our fashionable watering- 

 places, and in the country estates which some of our men of 

 wealth are making, and their sins against every canon of 

 fitness and refinement are not mitigated by the fact that 

 many of the show places of aristocratic England are quite 

 as offensive. 



On the other hand, no part of the world has ever, in the 

 same time, shown such an enormous growth in the business 

 of nurservmen and florists as has taken place in this country 

 during the past ten or twenty years. Much of our horticul- 

 tural literature, periodical and other, will compare favor- 

 ably in quality with any in the world. From all parts of 

 the country we hear of projects for arboreta and botanic 

 gardens, and although many of these are crude they are 

 all evidences of a prevalent desire among people to do 

 something in the interest of scientific horticulture. Oppor- 

 tunities for studying the theory and practice of gardening 

 are offered in several of our agricultural colle I (here 



is an increasing effort among" young people to acquire a 



