268 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 172. 



was not done so much for the trees as for the grass, which 

 had been fairly driven out by the encroachments of the Money- 

 wort, which has escaped from the garden and runs riot over 

 the place ; and the pruning was as necessary for the hay-crop 

 as for the fruit, for the great Elm hard by helps to shade all 

 that part of the grounds, and even now the grass, when cut, 

 has to be transported into the open to be cured. 



The year we took possession, three trees at this point — a 

 Baldwin, a Rhode Island Greening and a Russet — furnished 

 us with about a dozen barrels of apples. In addition, there 

 are in other parts of the place more old-fashioned trees, like 

 the Seek-no-Further and Early Sweet, that are extremely use- 

 ful and fairly productive in spite of their years and infirmities. 

 One of the latter trees is quite a curiosity, for half of it is 

 wholly denuded of bark, as if it had been struck by lightning, 

 and the trunk is perfectly hollow, but the grafted stem still 

 sends out very strong and healthy-looking shoots that yield an 

 abundance of fine rosy-cheeked fruit every other year. 



The Canker-worm has meddled very little with these trees, 

 but the Web-caterpillar has to be waged constant war upon, 

 both in spring and fall, and last summer, owing to the pre- 

 ceding mild winter, this pest was particularly active and 

 ubiquitous. 



A row of Plum-trees against the east foundation-wall of the 

 old house, which still stands and makes a good shelter for 

 our Raspberry-bushes, seem as if they would do well if we 

 could only cope successfully with the murderous black knot, 

 with which we found them perfectly covered. In 1889 all the 

 diseased portions were cut away, and last summer they sent 

 out a quantity of tall, healthy branches, but no blossoms, 

 from their closely polled stems ; we purpose this spring to try 

 the effect of salt bags in the crotches of the limbs, which, we 

 have been told, is a successful way of keeping off the C'ur- 

 culio. But from what we read of the necessary efforts to 

 get rid of this pest, we fear that the plums would hardly be 

 worth the trouble, for it seems as if nothing less than a 

 Salvation Army would suffice to combat this persistent beetle 

 sinner. 



In our orchard are Iron Pears of the good old kind that 

 would serve for ammunition in a field-piece, in case of war, 

 and some rickety-looking Lawrences, that bear excellent 

 fruit in generous quantities ; and there is a picturesque Crab- 

 apple-tree which grows quite too near the great Elm to furnish 

 any decent fruit, though it does its best, and strews the ground 

 beneath it with its stony red and yellow fruit. The old Cherry- 

 trees were too worthless, so we cut them down. Peaches we 

 have none, though we are told they would thrive against the 

 hill, as they like a northern exposure. We are now preparing 

 to plant a fresh Apple-orchard, which ought to be ready to 

 bear by the time the old trees quite give out, and we should 

 be grateful for suggestions as to the best kinds for domestic 

 uses, and whether the trees will be more likely to thrive in the 

 moist or in the dry part of the grounds. 



But there is a charm about this unproductive old orchard, 

 with its wilderness of venerable shrubs along the fence, that 

 no thrifty modern row of fruitful trees will ever possess. As 

 one sits there in the shade on a sunny day, with the white 

 petals drifting down from t'heir lofty summits, there is a 

 murmur of bees among the foliage, of robins chattering 

 among the twigs, a rustle of leaves and flowers in the gentle 

 breeze, that seems the essence of the many summers gone 

 that have helped to swell their great boles, and to increase 

 their majestic height. From under the arch of branches the 

 green meadow is visible, with wooded hills rising from its 

 margin, among which nestle cottages, white and red, with the 

 faint smoke curling lazily from their chimneys up to the blue 

 sky, flecked with round white clouds. How many years the 

 old trees have looked out upon the quiet meadow, and 

 for how many generations have they dropped their rosy 

 fruit ! 



In this new country of ours we yearn for stability, for tradi- 

 tion, for something to link us with that past which goes back 

 so little way behind us here. Perhaps the grafts on these old 

 limbs were brought from England by the early settlers who 

 peopled the old colony. Under their shade the sturdy Puritan 

 has leaned upon his spade and remembered the orchards of 

 his native land, which he was never to see again ; and now, as 

 the vision grows before our dreaming eyes, we climb the 

 ladder of the past, and are again in Lincolnshire, and the 

 choir-boys are chanting softly in the distance, and the bells 

 are ringing from St. Andrew's Church, of the other Hingham, 

 the gray towers of which we see afar off, instead of the quaint 

 spire of our old meeting-house, whose ten-score years of life 

 seem so little in the older world, where they reckon time by 

 centuries instead of decades. 



But the boom of the bells resolves itself once more into the 

 humming of bees, the venerable towers are but the shaggy 

 trunks around us, and we are awake once more, under the 

 bending boughs of the old orchard, with only a robin for a 

 chorister. 



Hingham, Mass. M. C. RobbitlS. 



New or Little Known Plants. 



Alnus maritima. 



THIS very rare tree, which is still little known in gar- 

 dens, differs from other Alders in that its flowers are 

 produced in the autumn. Alders usually flower very early 

 in the spring, either some time before the leaves appear, or 

 with or just after their appearance. Alnus maritima, how- 

 ever, flowers in August and September, the flowers being 

 produced on shoots formed during the previous spring. 

 The female catkins do not enlarge very much after ferti- 

 lization until the spring, and do not mature until the follow- 

 ing September or until the flowering period comes round 

 again. On this tree, therefore, flowers and ripe fruit appear 

 simultaneously. This fact, which is the most remarkable 

 thing about this tree, was entirely overlooked in the last 

 monographs of the Alders published in Europe, although 

 it has been known here for a hundred years, or ever since 

 the Seaside Alder was first noticed. 



Alnus maritima (see page 269) is a slender glabrous tree, 

 rising occasionally to the height of twenty-five or thirty 

 feet, with a trunk sometimes three or four inches in diam- 

 eter covered with smooth pale brown bark, stout obtuse 

 glabrous winter-buds, and glabrous zigzag branchlets 

 marked with small white lenticels. The leaves are oblong 

 or obovate, two and a half to three inches long, acuminate 

 or rounded at the apex, wedge-shaped at the base, sharply 

 and remotely glandular-serrate ; they are borne on slender 

 petioles an inch or an inch and a half long, and are bright 

 green above and rusty brown on the lower surface. The 

 stipules are thick, oblong-pointed, an eighth of an inch 

 long, dark reddish brown and early deciduous. The fer- 

 tile catkins are usually solitary from the axils of upper 

 leaves ; they are an eighth of an inch long, and are borne 

 on stout stems three or four times their length ; at maturity 

 they are obtuse, an inch long, half an inch broad, and dark 

 brown or nearly black, with thickened conspicuously lobed 

 scales and wingless fruit. The sterile catkins, which are 

 usually racemose-clustered, are long-stalked and vary from 

 an inch and a half to more than two inches in length ; they 

 are developed from the axils of the upper leaves and droop 

 gracefully from the ends of the branches. 



Alnus maritima* was known to Humphrey Marshall, who 

 described in the " Arbustum Americanum " its peculiarity of 

 flowering in the autumn. Muehlenberg and Charles Pick- 

 ering, the distinguished naturalist of the Wilkes' Exploring 

 Expedition, were familiar with it, and, in later days, Mr. 

 William M. Canby found it in a number of places on the 

 coast of the lower peninsula of Delaware and of Maryland, 

 where it grows on the edges of streams, although not 

 directly on the sea-shore as its name would seem to imply. 

 This Alder abounds on the banks of the Nanticoke River at 

 Seaford, Maryland, near the high-tide mark and lower 

 down. Here it mingles with the common southern Alder 

 (Alnus serrulala), the Sour Gum, the Taxodium, the Red 

 Maple, the White Cedar, and other swamp and muddy- 

 shore trees. Mr. Canby found it also growing plentifully 

 along the shore of Wicomico River at Salisbury in Maryland, 

 both above and below tide-water, and along mill-ponds 

 and head-water streams in the same locality. What ap- 

 pears to be the same plant was collected by Hall on the 

 banks of the Red River in the Indian territory. Of the 

 w r estern tree and of its distribution, however, more infor- 



* Alnus maritima, Muehlenberg ; Nutiall, "Sylva," i., 14, 1. 10. — Gray, "Hall's PI. 

 Texas," 21. — Canby, Bat. Gazette, vi.,270. — Sargent, "Forest Trees N. Am., 10th Cen- 

 sus, U. S.," ix., 162. — Watson & Coulter, "Gray's Man.," Ed. 6, 373. 



Betula Alnus maritima, Marshall, "Arbust. Am.," 20 



