28 



THE GARDEN MAGAZINE 



August, 1907 



Farm and Garden News 



Since it has been demonstrated that rice 

 can be successfully grown in Arkansas the 

 industry has developed very rapidly. A 

 $50,000 rice mill is to be built. 



The Department of Agriculture recom- 

 mends the following species of fish as being 

 the most efficient exterminators of the mos- 

 quito larva;. Top minnows, sunfish, gold- 

 fish, sticklebacks and shiners. 

 .^ 



Secretary Hitchcock has made public an 

 order that all illegal fencing of public lands 

 and any obstructions on the public domain 

 will be summarily removed without notice, 

 and that criminal prosecutions will be insti- 

 tuted against those who violate the laws. 



The statistician who has figured that the 

 annual peanut crop amounts to about ten 

 million dollars should go further and tell us 

 how much of this phenomenal popularity 

 of the humble peanut is due to the country 

 circus which has been its most active press 

 agent. In i860 the crop only amounted to 

 fifty thousand bushels. 



The Massachusetts legislature has passed 

 a law limiting the work of all the employees 

 of the state to eight hours a day. This has 

 put the Massachusetts Agricultural College 

 in a quandary because of the helpers they 

 employ in their work. It is manifestly im- 

 possible to conduct farm work and keep 

 within the eight-hour requirement. 



Colorado heads the list in the beet sugar 

 industry. Fifteen of the thirty-two sugar 

 factories in the United States are located 

 there. We consume annually about six 

 billion five hundred thousand pounds of 

 sugar, and more than nine-tenths of it is 

 imported from foreign countries, less than 

 one-tenth being made from beets. In Europe 

 by far the largest proportion of sugar is beet 

 sugar. 



Coal tar is said to be a great improvement 

 over crude oil for roads. It has been exten- 

 sively used in France, and unlike oil, when 

 exposed in a thin layer to the action of the 

 air, it hardens and covers the surface of the 

 road with a thin skin which is practically air 

 and water-tight, not only holding in the dust 

 in dry weather, but preventing water from 

 soaking into the roadway during rainfalls. 

 It is applied at the rate of about one gallon 

 for every three square yards. 



By the death of Dr. Maxwell T. Masters, 

 the most renowned horticultural editor of 

 the world passes away. For forty-one 

 years, Dr. Masters was editor of the English 

 Gardeners' Chronicle, which was founded 

 by Lindley and Paxton. Dr. Masters was a 

 botanist of repute and published monographs 

 of many groups of garden plants, and he was 

 also able to look at his subjects as much from 

 a horticultural point of view as from that 

 of the botanist. He was especially identified 



with studies of the Coniferae but was first 

 brought into association with horticultural 

 matters through his studies into the abnormal 

 growths of plants. He was the son of a 

 famous old-time nurseryman who in his day 

 had the largest collection of cultivated plants 

 in the trade. Dr. Masters was the origin- 

 ator of the system of naming bigeneric 

 hybrids by a word composed of a part of 

 each parent's name. In 1872 he thus named 

 Philageria from Philesia and Lapageria. The 

 pollen parent's name is taken first in all 

 these cases. 



The peony bids fair to become the typical 

 garden plant of the American amateur. It 

 is so far the only decorative garden plant 

 that has been so seriously put under study 

 in one of our experiment stations, and this 

 act alone shows a tendency of the times: to 

 devote more attention to the aesthetics of 

 life than has been done in the past. Quite 

 naturally, various farm and food crops receive 

 the first attention, but the interests of orna- 

 mental horticulture are clamoring for atten- 

 tion and are likely to get more of it in the 

 future. 



The Society of American Florists and 

 Ornamental Horticulturists holds its twenty- 

 third annual convention at Philadelphia, Pa., 

 August 20th to 23d. This is, in all regards, 

 the most important gathering of the florist 

 trade that takes place each year. While the 

 purposes of the association are avowedly to 

 protect the trade interests, still the organiza- 

 tion is on broad lines and there is nothing of 

 a close nature about its deliberations as is 

 the case with some other of the trade 

 organizations and the amateur is welcomed 

 at its councils. The society publishes an 

 annual report which lists the new plant intro- 

 ductions of the year. 



However people managed to get along 

 before they knew the potato is surely one of 

 the wonders to-day. It is a staple crop over 

 a vast portion of the Northern Hemisphere, 

 and how important a feature it is of the diet 

 of the average man need not be enlarged 

 upon. It is grown largely for its starch, in 

 some parts of Europe for the distillation 

 of spirits, and now the consul at Magde- 

 burg in Germany reports that lead pencils 

 are being made of potatoes. The potato 

 pulp in this case is used as a substitute 

 for cedar, which is getting rare and expensive. 

 The material for the new style of pencil 

 could, of course, be grown as the necessity 

 arose. 



Two billion trees to be planted for the 

 protection of Pittsburg! A great outcry 

 arose in consequence of the spring floods, 

 and the Pittsburg Chamber of Commerce 

 became very active. The proposition to 

 plant trees on the watershed and at the head 

 waters, and rear immense forests in order to 

 prevent the spring flooding, has been talked 

 about and preached about year after year, 

 but nothing of much importance ever seems 

 to be done. On the other hand, the sum 



total of the small, heretofore disconnected 

 efforts must have a beneficent effect. The 

 sum of twenty-five thousand dollars was 

 appropriated by Congress last year for the 

 specific purpose of fighting these serious 

 floods of Western Pennsylvania which, it is 

 estimated, were directly responsible for 

 property losses worth twenty million dollars. 



Bouquet-making has always been con- 

 sidered an art, but it has remained for the 

 Parisians to discover that it is really a science. 

 We are told that "a bouquet is symphony 

 of odors" and that to properly "construct" 

 the bouquet it must consist of a foundation 

 odor placed in the centre around which is 

 placed a complementary odor, then a number 

 of other odors to give character to the basic 

 odor. This is perhaps the reason why the 

 old-style French bouquet was a mass of 

 lesser bunches of different flowers, and like 

 a parti-colored cauliflower. Let us discard 

 the idea and stick to Art! 



A peony check-list has been issued from 

 Cornell University, and represents the work 

 which has been done by the State of New 

 York in conjunction with the Committee 

 on Nomenclature of The American Peony 

 Society in the united effort to introduce some 

 light into the great muddle of peony names. 

 The confusion heretofore has been great, 

 because the same variety not only appeared 

 under different names, but worse still, differ- 

 ent varieties appeared under the one name. 

 This check-list has been prepared by Mr. J. 

 E. Coit, who wrote on peonies in The Gar- 

 den Magazine for September, 1905. The 

 names cited in this check-list number 2706 

 and include all varieties of which authentic 

 descriptions can be found in horticultural 

 literature. 



The practical man who has tried the com- 

 mercial cultures of legume bacteria for the 

 inoculation of the soil has not, as a rule, 

 been at all satisfied with his results, and 

 felt that good dressings of stable manure 

 in the old-fashioned way gave beter results. 

 That this has been so must not be taken 

 as proof that the principle involved was 

 wrong, nor that the special field or crop 

 treated would not respond to this method 

 of procuring cheap nitrogen. Not at all' 

 For it appears to be pretty well p oven now 

 that in the great majority of cases, where 

 the effort was made to use the bacteria dried 

 upon cotton, there was no life to begin with,, 

 and so nothing ever could happen. The 

 trouble then has rested with the mode of 

 preparing the bacteria for sending out to- 

 the farmer, and therefore we will all look 

 with interested attention on the newer pro- 

 cess of sending them out in concentrated, 

 form in a pure culture medium. A crop of 

 clover, according to conditions, forms 50- 

 to 150 pounds of nitrogen from the air, and 

 the effect is to some degree cumulative. A 

 ton of stable manure contains about ten 

 pounds of nitrogen, so ten tons of the manure- 

 may be regarded as being generally equal 

 to an acre crop of clover in regard to the 

 nitrogen alone. 



