NUVEMBER 2S, 1894.] 



Garden and Forest. 



471 



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-UFFICE AT NEW YORK:, N. Y. 



NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 1894. 

 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles: — A Lesson in Forestry 471 



Selection for Autumn Planting 472 



Accumulation without Disposition M. C. R. 472 



Foreign Correspondence: — London Letter W. Watson. 473 



Plant Notes: — The Wax Myrtles of the Sea-coast of Eastern North America. 



(With figures.) C.S.S. 474 



Cultural Department :— Lily-of-the- valley for Outdoor Planting.. .E. O. Orpet. 475 



Acliimenes. — I W. E. Endicotl. 477 



Preserving Celery in Winter IV N. Craig. 478 



Forcing Vegetables William Scott. 473 



Dendrobium Phakenopsis E. O. Orpet. 478 



Anemone Japonica, Whirlwind Plantsman. 47S 



Correspondence: — How Plants Behave in a Mild Autumn S. 47S 



Plant Houses in Summit, New Jersey J. N. Gerard. 479 



Recent Publications 479 



Notes 480 



Illustrations : — Myrica cerifera, Fig. 75 476 



Myrica Carolinensis, Fig. 76 477 



A Lesson in Forestry. 



MR. FERNOW'S Report of the Division of Forestry of 

 the Department of Agriculture for last year, which 

 has been published in pamphlet form, makes seventy 

 pages of instructive matter for American readers who 

 wish to form intelligent opinions on questions relating to 

 forestry in this country. Mr. Fernow's account of the varied 

 work of the Division during the year, together with the 

 statistics of the consumption and supply of forest-products 

 in the United States, with the lessons drawn from them, are 

 all interesting, but we wish specially to call attention to 

 the section which describes the forest exhibit of the German 

 Government, which was installed in the Forestry Building 

 at the Chicago Fair. The usefulness of this collection, as 

 we glean from its description, and as we remember the 

 exhibit itself, was not primarily to illustrate the degree 

 of perfection to which forestry as a science and an art had 

 reached in that country. Its chief value was rather to 

 familiarize the people who saw it and the people who will 

 read this description of it, with the fact that there is such a 

 science and such an art, and that if our forests are ever to 

 occupy their appropriate place in the economy of the 

 nation they must be managed on some system which is 

 based on experimental knowledge of the kind which has 

 been gained in Germany. 



It is often said that European forestry methods can never 

 be adopted here, because (i) the spirit of personal indepen- 

 dence fostered by our institutions would never tolerate such 

 assumptions by any central power as are common in Ger- 

 many ; and (2) because our climate and soil are so dif- 

 ferent, and the trees we grow here vary so much in habit 

 from those of the Old World that German experience would 

 be of no benefit. There is some truth in both these state- 

 ments, but, after all, the popular idea of the amount 

 of control exercised by the various governments in 

 Europe over the wooded parts of the country is an 

 exaggerated one, and it is also true that whenever the 

 American people fully realize the need of some compre- 

 hensive system of forest-management they will take 

 practical steps, toward the inauguration of such a system 

 without any fear of surrendering their liberties. In the 

 second place, it is perfectly true that our profitable forests 



will consist of species different from those which make up 

 European forests, and those forests will be subject to dif- 

 ferent conditions of soil and climate, but the general laws 

 of plant-growth are the same on every continent, and it is 

 absurd to say that we cannot profit by what has been 

 learned in other countries. Sir Dietrich Brandis established 

 a successful system of forestry in British India, because he 

 had learned the reasons why it was necessary to mingle 

 trees of different habits and requirements in regard to light 

 and shade. He had no experience in planting Teak and 

 Bamboo in Germany, but he used them as he had used trees 

 which answered a similar purpose at home. Of course, we 

 must acquire an experimental knowledge of the habits of 

 our native timber-trees, so that we can give intelligent 

 reasons for planting a given species in a given place and 

 in given company. But, after all, our knowledge of our 

 native trees will be valuable, because it will enable us to 

 know what place they are to fill in a system of forestry 

 based on principles which have been already established 

 as sound in practice. 



But, as we said at the outset, the value of this exhibition 

 was not primarily to show us a model to be copied in practice 

 here, but to show how much study and investigation it has 

 cost to establish the principles and elaborate the plans 

 upon which the best practice rests, and how thorough must 

 be the preparation and equipment for carrying on the work 

 with intelligence and accuracy in every detail. How the 

 survey of each forest-district is carried out to its minutiae is 

 seen not only in the compartment maps in which the dis- 

 trict is parceled out, but in relief models and contour 

 maps, and even in such refinements as soil-maps, 

 which indicate in colors the kinds of surface soil 

 in the different compartments of the forest, with their 

 quality and depth, together with the character of the 

 subsoil, the distance to ground-water and other de- 

 tails. Since a second forest-crop is to be produced as 

 soon as one forest-crop is harvested, the natural forces 

 and conditions of thrifty forest-growth must be husbanded 

 and the manager must have an intimate knowledge of the 

 actual conditions of the forest at any given time, so that, 

 in addition to the maps we have already spoken of, there 

 are others which give a complete description of the various 

 forests, of their condition, and the proposed manner of using 

 and reproducing them — maps showing at a glance not only 

 the quality of the soil, .etc., but showing the kinds of tim- 

 bers and their admixture in each compartment ; how old 

 the trees are, how they have been treated, at what period 

 they are to be cut, and much besides. 



All this occupies but a few paragraphs in a chapter which 

 contains a great deal more of equal interest in regard to 

 the valuation of the growing timber, calculating the forest 

 yield, and determining the methods of harvesting and 

 transportation, besides condensed descriptions of the prac- 

 tice of regenerating the forest, of underplanting and thin- 

 ning, with an appendix on Forest-education and Forest- 

 literature. The lesson of it all is, that while our state and 

 national governments allow the public forests to be preyed 

 upon by timber thieves and burned up by incendiaries, 

 and while the owners of private woodlands are making no 

 provision for future supplies, there are countries in the 

 world where it has been proved that an enlightened forest 

 policy will insure a continually increasing supply of 

 forest- products. We cannot expect at once to organize a 

 system of equal efficiency, but we can, at least, begin to 

 feel that there are better ways of managing our forest- 

 property than our own plan of cutting more timber every 

 year than the forests produce, and of recklessly removing 

 the tree-cover from the sources of our great streams with- 

 out a single thought of what will be its effect upon their 

 flow. It seems almost impossible for any thoughtful man 

 to read this illustrative sketch of German forest-methods 

 without concluding that since some system of forest- 

 management must in the end be carefully wrought out, 

 the sooner we begin to lay a broad-set foundation for it the 

 better. And inasmuch as the system must ultimately be 



