234 . BOTANY. 
Erudite and complex recipes relative to proper mixtures of soils, 
and common management may well be left to the knowledge and 
judgment of those who believe in them. With such a wealth of 
sunlight and heat above as falls to the lot of California, and no 
lack of the commercial medium, moisture, below, I see no reason 
why we may not allow Nature, under human hands, to grow her 
fragrant white Lady Washington lily six or seven feet high, with 
ten to thirty or more flowers, just as we see it wild. Z. Bloomeri- 
anum, too, is a perfect giant among lilies, when at-its best — a 
right super-royal display — the Divine Teacher himself being 
judge. Nor why L. superbum in a southern bog should be eight 
feet high, with the best part of a hundred flowers, as we have seen 
it there, and still the marvellous beauty is ever new as we retrospect. 
Even our little orange L. parvum, I found at the Sierra summit over 
five feet high and fifty flowers — carefully counted —but the plant 
was sheltered and shaded by an old emigrant water-tank stilted 
up, now dry and long ago abandoned, but its roots found a fair 
supply of water from beneath.—Dr. A. KELLOGG, in the California 
Horticulturist. 
On Drovcat IN rts RELATION TO WINTER-KILLED TREES.—I was 
pleased to note how near Prof. Shaler, by a single season’s observa- 
tion (see Vol. vi, p. 671), came to a correct theory of arborescent de- 
struction in winter, which it took me some years to discover after 
a comparison of numerous facts, — namely, that trees commonly 
hardy, when they are killed in winter, are destroyed by evaporation, 
in the same way that they are by drought in a dry summer. 
In my younger horticultural days, if any one had given thought 
at all to the process of destruction, it was to believe that frost 
expanded the sap in the cells which consequently became ruptured, 
just as frozen liquid splits a bottle. It fell to my lot to combat 
this view, and to show that it was evaporation and not expansion. 
I need not. here detail the facts on which this law has been founded. 
The readers of the ‘‘ Gardener’s Monthly ” are familiar with them, 
and a reference to the Index of the past twelve volumes will 
readily direct others who have been outside of the horticultural 
pale, for it is essentially a field for the observing horticulturist to 
cultivate. 
Poe Shaler was quite right in doubting whether it was the in- 
of the 
m Ooy wain anpa eno e 
