246 
PARK AND CEMETERY. 
N. J., and produced fruit at that point during 1896 
— for the first time within my knowledge. It will 
be noticed in the photograph that the berries are 
smaller than in the deciduous kind, and that for the 
most part but one has matured in a capsule, the 
other being abortive. Another thing that is noticed 
about these euonymus is that they never retain 
their variegation, but revert to the green type. It 
must be said, however, that the best forms have not 
been tried, but only two out of nine or ten. 
Euonymus radicans in all its varieties is a capi- 
tal wall plant of smaller growth, clinging to stone 
work, etc., like ivy when once well started. The 
finest examples are on the stone gateposts at Mr. 
Hunnewell’s, Wellesley, Mass. 
Rhamnus alaternus and its varieties is something 
I have not met with in America, but it seems as 
though they ought to stand as far north as Balti- 
more and St. Louis, if protected by walls as sug- 
gested. 
Cytisus scoparius is naturalized in quantity on 
the Reading Railway embankment about twenty 
miles north of Philadelphia. Both it and its varie- 
ties, Andreanus, sulphureus, etc., are worth plant- 
ing, for they keep green all winter and flower full 
in early June. I have but little faith in the laurels 
of the broad-leaved type, for I remember their be- 
BERBERIS NEPALENSIS. 
ing killed not only in Washington, D. C., but in 
England. I may remark, too, that the Portugal 
laurels proved the hardier in the severe English 
wjnter of 1860-61. Crataegus Pyracantha is hardy 
to Long Island without a wall, but it is an excellent 
wall plant, if fastened, growing to fifteen or twenty 
feet sometimes, and bearing abundance of its hand- 
some orange scarlet fruit. The variety, Lalandi, is 
reckoned an improvement. Cotoneasters are a good 
deal used as wall plants in England, but rarely 
made use of here, although they are sometimes 
starved in nursery rows. 
I will end this paper with the Ivies. They do 
splendidly south, and well on walls to Yonkers, 
N. Y. There are a great many handsome kinds, 
but little used, and they may be had in gold and 
silver variegated forms, with large and small foli- 
age, and in bush form. J. MacP. 
The song of “The Mistletoe Bough,” familiar to all, 
has doubtless done much to keep alive the old customs 
connected with mistletoe. At the present time, how- 
ever, the mistletoe is rarely found on the oak in Eng- 
land, and is so scarce that the “kissing bunch” — a bunch 
of evergreens, ornamented with oranges and ribbons — 
has taken its place. In this country, on the contrary, 
the plant, with its dainty white berries, is a menace to 
the life of thousands of oaks used for shade and orna- 
mental purposes, and hundreds of dollars are spent yearly 
for its destruction in order to preserve the life of the 
tree from which it gets its own life and nourishment. 
When this is going on in a Southern town, in passing 
along an avenue of oaks one literally walks on a carpet 
of mistletoe, and as the dainty berries crack under the 
feet there comes a feeling — is it inherited? — that one is 
almost committing an act of sacrilege to thus tread upon 
the “curer of all ills .” — New York Evening Post. 
* * * 
The custom of the Massachusetts Horticultural So- 
ciety of giving prizes for school gardens and herbariums 
has led to considerable competition by school children 
in many towns of the state. Forty prizes are offered, 
the amount of money prizes reaching $200. The high- 
est prize, #15, is given for a school garden; the highest 
individual prize is $7, and this ranges down to 50 cents. 
Besides these incentives, several interested individuals 
now swell the list, and altogether it has become quite a 
feature of Boston exhibitions. The age of the exhibi- 
tors must be under 18, but many admirable collections 
are made by much younger children. The work of the 
competitors must be confined to native American plants 
in their wild state, in which work of course the assis- 
tance of the schoolteachers or parents is necessarily 
more or less invoked. But the effect of the undertaking 
tends unquestionably to inculcate in children the habit 
of studying nature as they go along. This side-line of 
the Massachusetts Horticultural Society might be ad- 
vantageously imitated in every other state in the Union. 
To initiate the young in the knowledge of trees and 
plants, the love for which naturally follows, will lead to 
the consummation so often poetically expressed as mak- 
ing the country “blossom as the rose,” and will tend to 
more quickly offset the crude blundering which has dis- 
figured the landscape in so many places, and made the 
dooryard a place to turn one’s back upon. 
