334 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 339. 



flower-garden as extensively as its merits warrant. In 

 different parts of the country it is known variously as 

 Crimson Balm, Oswego Tea, Bee Balm, and sometimes 

 Crimson Bergamot. It is not generally abundant, although 

 it is a very familiar wild flower in some parts of West Vir- 

 ginia, where in damp shady ground and on the margins 

 of small streams it often covers areas of considerable ex- 

 tent. Its glowing color and mint-like fragrance make it 

 interesting anywhere, and with good cultivation it will 

 grow much taller than it does in its native home. It ordi- 

 narily attains a height of some two feet in its wild state, 

 but it grows more than twice as tall when well cared for, 

 and its conspicuous scarlet heads continue to appear in 

 succession for a long time. Occasionally wild plants are 

 found with pure purple flowers, which are hardly less strik- 

 ing than the crimson form, and well deserve to be perpet- 

 uated in gardens. Mr. Jackson Dawson writes that a bed 

 of this plant, some ten feet square, which he recently saw 

 on the grounds of Mr. N. T. Kidder, Milton, Massachusetts, 

 was quite as interesting as anything else in Mr. Kidder's 

 very large collection of hardy herbaceous perennials. 

 Other native species of the Horse Mint, like M. fistulosa, 

 with purple flowers, and M. punctata, with bracts tinged 

 yellow and purple, also make desirable garden-plants. 



Tamarix Indica. — This shrub is much more desirable than 

 those belonging to that section of the genus which bloom 

 in the spring on wood made the year before. The late- 

 flowering type has just come into bloom in this lati- 

 tude, and plants which have been cut hard back every 

 year after flowering throw up slender flexible branches six 

 feet in length and more, making a mass of delicate fern-like 

 foliage, and bearing at the summit of each branch great 

 masses of light pink flowers. Nothing can be more exqui- 

 sitely graceful than the entire habit of this plant, and it is 

 especially attractive in early morning now, when its 

 branches droop under the weight of silvery dew. The 

 Tamarisks are all good seaside shrubs, as they endure salt 

 spray well. 



Viburnum Lantana. — We have more than once called 

 attention to the value of the European Wayfaring-tree as 

 an ornamental plant in this country, where it grows more 

 satisfactorily than many other European trees and shrubs. 

 It is a tall, shapely, many-branched shrub, with attractive 

 healthy foliage and dense clusters of white flowers, which 

 open here earlier in the spring than those of any other 

 Viburnum except V. lantanoides, the American Hobble- 

 bush, one of the most difficult of all American plants to 

 establish in gardens. The flowers of the Wayfaring-tree 

 are followed by the handsome oblong fruits borne in dense 

 compact clusters, which in the autumn turn blue-black, but 

 just now are bright vermilion-red and exceedingly hand- 

 some and showy. It is this midsummer color of the fruit 

 of the Wayfaring-tree which makes it most valuable as an 

 ornamental plant here, as it is most showy at the season 

 of the year when few shrubs are in bloom and before the 

 fruits of most of them have assumed bright autumnal 

 colors, and at a season, therefore, when bright colors in the 

 shrubbery are most in demand and most valued. 



Vitex Agn'us-castus. — In our issue last week Mrs. Danske 

 Dandridge spoke of this plant as having bluish purple 

 flowers, but we have received three flower-bearing branches 

 from Mr. Joseph Meehan, each of which bears flowers of 

 quite distinct colors. The one most common is a pale 

 lilac ; another is a clear white, with perhaps a tint of laven- 

 der, while the third is a true blue. This last is doubtless the 

 most showy of all and the most desirable, since blue flower- 

 ing shrubs are rare at any season. Unfortunately, this Chaste- 

 tree, which is a native of the country around the Mediter- 

 ranean, is not hardy much north of Philadelphia, but Vitex 

 incisa, a native of northern China, has proved compara- 

 tively hardy in the Arnold Arboretum. The stems are 

 killed back in the severest winters, but since the spike-like 

 clusters of blue flowers appear on the new wood, the slight 

 winter-killing does not interfere with the flowering of this 

 really desirable plant, which is a tall shrub or small tree. 



New or Little-known Plants. 



Cereus Pecten-aboriginum. 



NO more strange or remarkable plants can be found in 

 any part of the world than the great arborescent 

 Cacti of the deserts of Sonora, the neighboring borders of 

 Arizona and Lower California. Three of these Sonora 

 giants are known, and a fourth arborescent Cactus inhabits 

 the arid region of the Peruvian lowlands. 



The tallest of these plants is the Suwarro, or Cereus 

 giganteus, which dots in countless thousands the low, 

 rolling, stony foot-hills and mesas of southern Arizona 

 with its tall columnar shafts, and is now familiar to trav- 

 elers on the line of the Southern Pacific Railroad, who see 

 it in perfection near the ancient city of Tucson. The fruit 

 of this remarkable tree, which sometimes grows to the 

 height of sixty feet, is dried and eaten by the Arizona In- 

 dians and half-breeds, who also press them to obtain their 

 thick molasses-like juice, which they preserve for winter 

 use. The stout woody ribs which form the trunk, and 

 which practically never decay, furnish rafters for the adobe 

 houses of southern Arizona and fencing for Arizona gardens. 



The second species, Cereus Thurberi, the largest, although 

 not the tallest, of the group, which sometimes forms forests 

 of considerable extent, has already been described and 

 figured in this journal (vol. ii., p. 64, fig. 93). The third 

 species, Cereus Pecten-aboriginum, is less known than the 

 others, and we are glad of the opportunity to publish in this 

 issue (see page 335) an illustration of this plant made from 

 a photograph taken by its discoverer, Dr. Edward Palmer, 

 whose indefatigable explorations of the Mexican flora have 

 brought to light many interesting and undescribed plants 



Cereus Pecten-aboriginum* is a tree twenty to thirty feet 

 in height, with a trunk a foot or more in diameter, dividing 

 into numerous erect ten or eleven ribbed branches armed 

 with stout, straight, ash-colored spines tipped with black. 

 The flowers, which are produced at the top of the branches, 

 are two or three inches long, with purple succulent sepals, 

 fleshy white petals and a hirsute ovary. The fruit is dry 

 and globose, two and a half to three inches in diameter 

 and covered with "pulvinate densely hairy areola?, which 

 are for the most part beset with stiff setaceous unequal 

 yellowish spines." 



The Indians of Sonora grind the seeds (as they do those 

 of many other species of Cactus) and mix them with their 

 meal, and use the bristly covering of the fruit as hair- 

 brushes. 



The existence of this species was first made known by 

 Dr. Palmer's discovery in 1869 of these brushes in the 

 hands of the Papago Indians at Hermosillo, in Sonora, 

 although it was not until 1868 that he found the plant that 

 had produced them. So far as we have been able to learn, 

 this interesting plant is not in cultivation, although Mr. 

 Watson, the author of the species, suggested that it may 

 be identical with the Cereus macrogonus of Salm-Dyck, of 

 unknown origin, which has been in gardens since before 1850. 



Cultural Department. 



Some RaspbeiTy Crosses. 



DURING the summer of 1890 I spent considerable time in 

 hybridizing Raspberries. As the result of this work there 

 are quite a number of plants of bearing age now growing 

 on the grounds of the horticultural department ot Cornell Uni- 

 versity. The following brief account will serve to give a 

 general idea of their character : 



Gregg x Shaffer (Rubus occidentalis X neglectus): Five 

 plants from seeds of the Gregg fertilized with pollen of the 

 Shaffer are now growing and truiting. Four of them resem- 

 ble the Gregg in character of plant, and one approaches the 

 Shaffer more closely. In character of fruit-cluster three are 

 more or less elongated like Shaffer, and two are aggregated 

 like the Gregg. The fruit varies in character between that of 



* Watson, Proc. Am. Acad., xxi., 429 ,1886). — Brandegee. Proc. Cal. Acad., ser. 2, 

 iii., 141. — Vasey & Rose, Contrib. U. S. Aar. Herb., i., 39. — Sargent, Sllva, ii., 52. 



