160 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
cided character, and yielding its fruit long 
after the Hovey has disappeared. The 
Willey, as a market fruit, has hitherto en¬ 
joyed but little character to which its great 
productiveness entitle it, especially when 
connected with its cluster habits—its stalks, 
when loaded, resembling bouquets of uni¬ 
form sized, deep scarlet and dry berries— 
not unfrequently numbering sixty or seventy 
on a single foot stalk. This cluster form, 
combined with its dry, solid character, more 
than atones for its loss of flavor, for a mar¬ 
ket berry. 
PLANT-LICE. 
Of all the insects which arc injurious to 
vegetables, none have attracted more atten¬ 
tion than the green fly, or plant-lice, not only 
from the amount of injury which they inflict 
upon the trees of our orchards, and plants of 
the garden, but the peculiarly anomalous 
manner in which the greater number of them 
are produced. The species are extremely 
numerous, almost every plant having a differ¬ 
ent kind, and the habits of many have been 
thoroughly investigated by naturalists ; the 
effects which they produce upon vegetables 
are to a great extent mechanical, exhausting 
the vitality of the plant by the constant drain 
of sap. 
As they pass most of their time in one 
place, with the rostrum inserted into the 
cellular tissue of the leaf, young stem, branch 
or root, pumping its life-blood, and as their 
name is legion, the quantity thus drawn from 
its natural channel is very considerable, pro¬ 
ducing a gradual decay and often, finally, the 
the death of the plant; some species, how¬ 
ever, have apparently a poisonous effect. The 
changes undergone by the insect have been 
minutely described by Reaumer, Bounet, 
Kouber, &c. In the spring and summer the 
different generations are of one sex, the fe¬ 
male ; no male appearing until the autumn. 
The eggs are laid at this time, and the pres¬ 
ent insects die. Next spring they are hatched, 
producing, without a single exception, fe¬ 
males-; these, without fecundation, give 
birth to a number of living young ones of 
their own sex, who in turn produce young, 
repeating the same thing through seven to 
eleven generations, until the cold weather 
setting in, puts a stop to it; the last genera¬ 
tion, however, consists of males and females, 
and eggs are again laid. 
These summer broods are wingless, but 
the males of the last brood have well-devel¬ 
oped wings. (For an interesting description 
of the embryonic development of these lice, 
see a paper of Dr. Burnett, read before the 
American Association, at the Cleveland 
meeting.) 
The ants use the green fly as milk cows, 
protecting th,em from their enemies, and 
taking great care of them, and may be seen 
busily engaged among them, drinking the 
sweet honey dew discharged by the fly from 
its anal tubercles. Their enemies are the 
small insectivorous birds ; the larva of the 
lace-winged fly, who devours them by hun¬ 
dreds, and the larva of the little lady-bird 
beetles; the cocinella, known to every 
school boy, “ Lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away 
home,” &c. 
The lace-winged flies are not so well 
known, are four-winged, of a green color, 
about three-fourths of an inch in length, 
may be seen flying in the warm summer 
evenings, and when handled emit a most in¬ 
tolerable stench.—Ohio Farmer. 
LAYING OUT A GARDEN. 
From pretty extensive observation, we 
have come to the conclusion that one of the 
most serious and prevalent errors in the 
management of small gardens, is attempting 
too much. This grows very naturally out 
of the desire that almost every man feels to 
gather round his residence the greatest pos¬ 
sible variety of interesting scenes and ob¬ 
jects ; in other words, to make the most of 
his limited space. In laying out a garden, 
the design may be good, and it may, in the 
first place, be properly executed; but no soon¬ 
er is this done than new trees or plants are 
fancied, and probably a neighbor’s garden 
suggests some new walk or divisions, and 
thus one alteration after another is intro¬ 
duced, and the original plan is effaced, and 
the whole becomes a piece of patchwork. 
We have seen many charming little front 
gardens utterly ruined in this way. Now, 
the beauty of a small garden, and the pleas¬ 
ure it may afford, lies not in a great variety 
of embellishments, but in simplicity and 
high keeping—few walks and few trees. 
Numerous walks destroy the unity and 
extent of a small piece of ground, and add 
very materially to the cost of keeping ; and 
as a regular gardener is seldom employed 
in such places, the walks become neglected, 
and grown over with grass and weeds, re¬ 
sembling more a cattle path than anything 
else. The principle, therefore, should be rig¬ 
idly adhered to, of having only such walks as 
are absolutely indispensable, and these to 
be kept in the best order. A good, well-kept 
walk, is not only a great beauty, but a great 
comfort, whereas nothing is so useless and 
ill-looking as a bad or neglected one. In 
mpst cases a single walk, and that a foot 
walk, six or eight feet wide, in proportion to 
the extent of the ground, will be quite 
enough. 
The position of the entrance gate, and the 
course of the walk, must be determined by 
the shape of the grounds, and the situation 
of the front door of the dwelling. If the 
space between the house and street be 
narrow—say twenty or thirty feet—and the 
front door be in the center of the building, 
the most convenient, and probably the best, 
arrangement is the common one—having the 
gate opposite the door, and the walk straight. 
It would be much better if houses of this 
kind were so constructed as to have the main 
entrance at one side, so that the ground in 
front of the principal rooms might be kept 
in a lawn, embellished with a few appropri¬ 
ate trees. This would be a more agreeable 
sight from the windows than a gravel walk, 
and persons approaching the house would 
not be directly in front of the windows. 
When the house stands back a sufficient 
distance, even if the front door be in the cen¬ 
ter facing the street, the walk should ap¬ 
proach it by as easy curves as possible from 
one side, leaving the ground in front un¬ 
broken. A curved walk, however, is not 
only inconvenient, but obviously inconsist¬ 
ent, in a very limited space. 
Box, and all other kinds of edgings, to 
walks that run through grass plots, are not 
only out of place, but add greatly to the ex¬ 
pense of planting and keeping. Such things 
are only appropriate to flower gardens, to 
make the outlines of walks and beds. Hedges 
of privet, red cedar, or arbor vitse, are occa¬ 
sionally planted along the edges of walks, 
but are entirely superfluous, and have a bad 
effect, unless to screen a wagon road to out¬ 
buildings, or to separate a front garden or 
lawn from the kitchen garden, or such ob¬ 
ject as it may be desirable to conceal. Such 
hedges have also a very good effect when 
placed immediately behind a low, open, front 
lawn, when viewed from the dwelling. 
Planting, in most of our small gardens, is 
carried to such an excess as to convert them 
into miniature forests. There must be the 
universal row of Horse Chesnuts, or some¬ 
thing else within the fence ; and then the in¬ 
terior is dotted over closely with all manner 
of shrubs and plants. A corner is probably 
cut up into something like a child’s flower 
garden; small beds, filled with tall, strag¬ 
gling plants, lying over the box edgings, 
covering the walks, and giving to the whole 
a neglected and confused appearance. Such 
management displays no taste, and gives no 
satisfaction. 
We would discard these straight rows of 
trees, and convert the whole surface into as 
perfect a piece of lawn as could be made. 
This we would embellish with a few, very 
few, appropriate trees, mostly evergreens, 
having as great variety among them as pos¬ 
sible, both in regard to habit of growth and 
that of foliage. The smallest plot, managed 
on this principle, may be made beautiful.— 
A single tree, such as a Norway Spruce, a 
Deodar Cedar, a Hemlock Spruce, or any 
other fine evergreen, or even a deciduous 
tree, such as Magnolia, a Tulip tree, a Lin¬ 
den, Horse Chesnut or Mountain Ash, stand¬ 
ing on a lawn, having ample space on all 
sides to develop its fair natural habits and 
proportions, is always a beautiful object, and 
cannot fail, though a common tree, to attract 
attention and admiration ; but plant three or 
four, or half a dozen such trees, where one 
should be, you crowd each tree into too little 
space, and you at once destroy the charac¬ 
ter and expression of the tree, and produce 
a confused mass, that cannot fail to be disa¬ 
greeable to every one whose taste has been 
even slightly cultivated. 
Few people seem to appreciate fully the 
beauty of a piece of lawn—a beauty which 
is at once cheap and permanent. Most of 
us desire to be economical, but what econo¬ 
my is there in cutting up small gardens into 
walks, flower borders and beds, and in plant¬ 
ing them all over with trees and plants 1 
These walks and borders need constant care, 
or they soon become unsightly ; they need 
a constant succession of flowering plants to 
