362 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 342. 



be made on the national domain. Thoughtful people are 

 more and more impressed with the necessity of protecting 

 our forests, and the more widely their manifold uses are 

 realized the stronger will be the desire of all the people to 

 foster them. The spectacle of a great forest yielding out 

 of its abundance nothing except a thin layer of fertility to 

 the soil every year is not an improving one. Letting it out 

 in five-acre patches to campers who can pay for such priv- 

 ileges is not using it to the highest general advantage. The 

 spectacle of wasted timber is as demoralizing as the spec- 

 tacle of any other public property destroyed. The North 

 Woods, managed by competent foresters, would do much 

 more than yield a little revenue to the state. They would 

 serve as an object-lesson of incalculable value and do more 

 to correct the opinions and direct the purpose and practice 

 of the people at large in matters pertaining to forest 

 economy than volumes of essays on the subject by 

 amateurs. True, we cannot hope that such a manage- 

 ment will be organized at once ; but we ought not to 

 lose faith in its possible coming. At all events, it is not 

 the part of wisdom to try -to prevent or delay its coming by 

 constitutional enactment. 



Irrigation in City Parks. 



THE visitor to Central Park in these days will hardly 

 be surprised to see, after the long period of drought, 

 that the leaves are dropping from shrubs and trees, and 

 that many of the open spaces show no trace of that pecu- 

 liarly refreshing green which a stretch of well-kept turf 

 alone presents. Most of the trees and shrubs will recover, 

 although the foliage of some of the trees which stand on 

 a thin layer of soil spread over solid rock has more than a 

 merely ripened and dried appearance, and looks as if it 

 had been actually scorched by a fire. But even if the fall 

 rains suffice to revive the grass, and if every tree and shrub 

 should push forth its leaves next spring as vigorously as if 

 it had not gone through the fiery trial of such a July and 

 August as we have j ust passed, the fact remains that the park 

 for something like two months has been far from furnish- 

 ing its full possible measure of delight to the eye and to 

 the imagination. That is, the park has lost a great part of 

 its attractiveness for one-third of the growing season of the 

 year. 



Now, all this could have been prevented by irrigation. 

 The simple application of water in sufficient quantities 

 would have kept every lawn smiling and every thicket and 

 wood-border in full verdure the whole summer through, 

 and in such a season as this, when all the country is parched 

 brown, this stretch of greenery in the midst of the city 

 would have been doubly refreshing. Spaces of smooth 

 green turf are essential elements in every pastoral picture ; 

 and since the city has gone to the enormous expense of blast- 

 ing down rocky ridges and covering them over with mold 

 to make these green fields, it is a shameful waste to allow 

 their beauty to fade away just when it is most needed. Of 

 course, few summers have ever been as trying as the one we 

 have just passed, but almost every year the park meadows 

 are dead and brown when they should be clothed in living 

 green. For some unknown reason, park commissioners 

 and apportionment boards can never be made to realize 

 the necessity of watering and fertilizing in a park. They will 

 vote money for building new entrances or new bridges, or 

 for any amount of construction, but they are seized with a 

 fit of economy whenever it is suggested that the health and 

 vigor of the vegetable life in a park must be provided for ; 

 and yet upon the richness of this life the beauty and use- 

 fulness of a park primarily depends. 



The lower portion of Central Park, which was con- 

 structed first, was partially provided with facilities for 

 watering, and here are many irrigated spots and strips 

 which show how delightful the whole park now might be 

 if it had all been similarly treated. Liberal apportionments 

 have been made for park maintenance in some directions. 

 The newly graveled roads seem as good as roads can be 



made. The borders have been freshly turfed, their edges 

 trimly cut, and the carts which sprinkle the roadways have 

 also moistened them until they are nearly perfect. But the 

 little patches and streaks of green, where water has been 

 applied, only serve to emphasize the dreariness and death 

 by which they are surrounded. In the northern part of the 

 park, where there are no facilities for watering, except im- 

 mediately along the roadways, there are whole acres where 

 no grass can be seen, and on the lawn-tennis ground, in 

 spite of the fact that it is watered by carts as much as pos- 

 sible, the players actually raise a dust in running over the 

 so-called turf. Of course, the trampling here helps to kill 

 the grass, but on the baseball ground, where games are 

 played twice a week, the sward is green, because there are 

 facilities for watering it partially. As an evidence of the 

 beneficent effects of irrigation one has only to glance at 

 the chain of small parks in Fourth Avenue, where the 

 shrubs are holding all their leaves and the grass is a vivid 

 green even on the thin soil over the tunnel. On the o'her 

 hand, Morningside Park is a picture of desolation which it 

 is painful to behold. A feeble attempt at watering the lower 

 portions of this park has been made by attaching hose to 

 one of the city hydrants far beyond the limits of the park, 

 and last week we saw several men doing the best they could 

 with a reach of hose a thousand feet long. But this is 

 slow and ineffectual work, and it is a wonder that any of 

 the shrubs on the rocky slope are alive. 



Now, the lesson of all this is that no city park ought 

 to be called finished until adequate provision is made for 

 watering every inch of it. Central Park needs from thirty 

 to forty thousand feet of piping under the ground to supply 

 its present deficiencies, besides fifteen to twenty thousand 

 feet of rubber hose. With such a plant a very small force, 

 working systematically, could do effectively what four 

 times as many men are now trying to do and making an 

 utter failure. It is easy to see how large an area one 

 man could attend to regularly and systematically if he had 

 the proper machinery, and how in this way a perfect 

 record could be kept showing just when a given space had 

 been watered, and just how much was given to it. There 

 may have been some excuse for dribbling out an inade- 

 quate water-supply to the parks when water was said to 

 be scarce, although there seems no reason why the city 

 should not deal with the parks in this respect as liberally 

 as with any similar area in its thickly populated portions. 

 There is no lack of water now, however, and there is no 

 one thing that Central Park and Morningside need so much 

 as proper facilities for applying it. 



The Minnesota Forest Fires of September First. 



INASMUCH as I have been moving about through the 

 forest here all summer, and especially on the 1st of 

 September, when the disasters culminated in the general 

 outburst, it seems my duty to make a statement of the con- 

 ditions under which it occurred. 



Ever since fires would first run through the woods last 

 spring settlers have been starting fires to clear land, par- 

 ties camping in the woods have permitted fires to escape 

 them, cinders from locomotives have been kindling fires 

 along the railroads. Owing to the prolonged drought, but 

 few of these fires had become entirely extinct, but had lin- 

 gered in stumps, logs, muck and peat, creeping slowly 

 through the forest, killing trees over wide areas, and ex- 

 tending their frontage until there was hardly a district in 

 the wooded and the inhabited region that did not have a 

 fire burning somewhere within it. All the dead material 

 in the forest had become so dry that when pulverized and 

 sprinkled over a flame it would ignite with an explosive 

 flash like gunpowder. 



Besides the dry material in the unburned forest there was 

 a vast amount of charred and tinder-like matter, scorched 

 by previous fires. To this add the dry leaves of the trees 

 that had been killed, and conditions were at hand for the 

 general outburst that occurred soon after noon of September 



