April 22, 1891.] 



Garden and Forest. 



181 



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, APRIL 22, 1891. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 



Editorial Articles :— Recent Forest-legislation 181 



Class Vines and Class Trees 181 



Notes on the Distribution of Some Kansas Trees. — II. The Cottonwood 



(Populus monilifera). (With figure.) S. C. Mason. 182 



The Sap and Sugar of the Maple- tree.— II William D. Ely. 183 



Two Studies for House Plantings. (With figure.) Charles Eliot. 184 



Notes on Some Insects and Insect Remedies J. G. Jack. 184 



Foreign Correspondence: — Orchids at Clapton Visitor. 186 



New or Little Known Plants :— New Orchids R. A. Rolfe. 186 



Cultural Department : — Hardy Shrubs for Forcing J. 186 



Hardy Narcissus J. N. Gerard. 188 



How to Make a Wild Garden Mrs. Mary Treat. 188 



A Raspberry Trellis E. P. Powell. 189 



Mildew on Sweet Alyssum and Radish Professor Byron D. Halsted. 189 



Distributing Weeds Professor W. F. Massey. 189 



Primroses, A Taurian Muscari, Arabis alpina J. N. G- 189 



Correspondence : — Colorado Conifers for Eastern Planting. . George H. Parsons. 190 



The Home of Certain Syringas H. Christ. 190 



Recent Publications 191 



Notes 19 1 



Illustrations : — Plans for Planting about Piazzas, Fig. 33 185 



A Cottonwood-tree (Populus monilifera) on the Banks of the Kansas 

 River, Fig. 34 187 



Recent Forest-legislation. 



JUST as the last session of Congress closed, an act "to 

 repeal the timber-culture laws and for other purposes " 

 was passed. Hereafter, then, no settler on public lands 

 will be able to obtain a homestead by the planting of trees, 

 although any person w r ho has already made entry on pub- 

 lic lands under the timber-culture laws, and who has in 

 good faith complied with their provisions, is entitled to 

 make his final proof and acquire his title. There is 

 no doubt that under this timber-culture act there was 

 much fraud, and there was a melancholy waste of labor 

 and energy owing to the ignorance of planters, and even 

 when a settler did secure land by an honest effort to comply 

 with the law it proved a most expensive way of obtaining 

 a homestead. The repeal of this law was, no doubt, proper, 

 although it may be questioned whether the Government 

 should not have offered to settlers some other stimulus to 

 plant groves and forests. Very few forests have been 

 started on a hopeful life under this act, but every tree- 

 covered acre on those wind-swept plains has great value 

 in itself as an example to others. 



This bill contains a great many provisions entirely dis- 

 tinct from the timber-culture repeal, to only one of which 

 we can here invite attention, and of this we have before 

 spoken. Section 24 authorizes the President of the United 

 States from time to time to set apart and reserve any part 

 of the public lands, wholly or in part covered with timber 

 or undergrowth, as public reservations, and the President 

 may by proclamation declare the establishment of such 

 reservation and the limits thereof. The language of this 

 act seems to imply that this proclamation of the President's 

 means more than a mere temporary withholding of the 

 land from entry ; that it establishes such forest as a public 

 reservation forever. The President has already under this 

 law accomplished by proclamation the extension of the 

 Yellowstone Park, which the friends of that reservation 



have been vainly attempting to gain by specific enactment 

 during eight successive sessions of Congress. This procla- 

 mation extends the area of the park eight and a half miles 

 to the southward, and on the east adds a strip of country 

 between twenty-four and twenty-five miles wide and fifty 

 miles in length. This last region includes for the most 

 part the Absaroka range, a rough, unsurveyed and little- 

 known country, rarely crossed except by a few hunters. 

 Within this territory peaks rise from 10,000 to 11,000 feet 

 above the sea-level, and its average elevation is over 8,000 

 feet. In these mountains many of the streams which run 

 into the Yellowstone Lake take their rise. The country to 

 the south is very beautiful, rough, abounding in water, full 

 of game, the favorite breeding-place of the elk ; in it is the 

 source of the Snake River. The Secretary of the Interior 

 will place this reservation under the jurisdiction of the su- 

 perintendent of the park, so that the law and its first-fruits 

 are a matter of universal congratulation. 



As there is no restriction to the President's exercise of 

 power in this matter, it is to be hoped that many more 

 considerable forest-areas can now be placed in permanent 

 forest. One place worthy of immediate consideration is 

 the region north of Flathead Lake, within the limits which 

 were laid down in a bill introduced some years ago by 

 Senator Edmunds. This territory, including the crest of 

 the Continental Divide and the wild mountain-ranges to 

 the west of it, is altogether too rugged for prosperous 

 agriculture, and its forests are of incalculable value at the 

 sources of some branches of the Missouri and one fork of 

 the Columbia River. Snow-clad peaks, scores of cascades 

 plunging from lofty cliffs, forests which seem of limitless 

 extent, unite to give unparalleled grandeur to the scenery. 

 If the President of the United States could be induced to 

 set apart this and other regions which could easily be 

 named, and could place them under the charge of the 

 army of the United States, a long step forward in the 

 solution of the forest-problem on the national domain would 

 be taken. 



On the same day when this act was passed an amend- 

 ment to it was made which permits timber to be cut and 

 removed from the forest-lands of the public domain for 

 mining, manufacturing or domestic purposes under regu- 

 lations prescribed by the Secretary of the Interior. This, 

 so far as we can see, practically opens the .whole tim- 

 ber domain of the country to the axes of trespassers, with 

 no restraint beyond what the Secretary of the Interior may 

 choose to exercise. If the Secretary does this in an 

 indirect way, as has formerly been the case, the restraint is 

 likely to be slight. It is imperative that the Secretary 

 should issue some strict regulations in this regard, for 

 without energetic action on his part there will be a general 

 devastation of the public lands. These laws have hitherto 

 been interpreted so liberally, and the frontiersman has 

 become so accustomed to preying upon timber of the 

 Government as if it was his own, that any check upon this 

 unrestricted privilege is looked upon as an infringement of 

 his personal rights. 



Class Vines and Class Trees. 



IT is the custom in some of our country high-schools for 

 the graduating class to plant a tree in the neighbor- 

 hood of the school-house, and for a long period it has been 

 the time-honored custom of universities to set out a vine 

 in commencement week, to commemorate the class that 

 is about to leave college. 



During a visit last summer to an eastern college our 

 attention was called to the Ampelopsis, each one labeled 

 with the date of the class cut in one of the stones of the 

 foundation of the chapel, by which the plants were set; 

 and it was melancholy to see how forlorn and small many 

 of them were, and how others had died completely for 

 lack of attention. The same may be said of numbers of 

 the pitiful little Maples and Elms that huddle around the 

 unpicturesque and bare high-school buildings in some 



