138 
THE NATIONAL NURSERYMAN 
QUESTION AND ANSWER COLUMN 
Will you please give me the name of the inclosed speci¬ 
men? I found it growing in the woods. It is a bush 
about five feet high. Z. 
The branch you sent is the leatherwood or moosewood, 
Dirca palustris. Perhaps you noticed how tough it was, 
hence its name leatherwood. The wood is very brittle, 
but the bark is remarkably tough and was used by the 
Indians for tying purposes. It bears small light yellow 
flowers which come out before the leaves. An interest¬ 
ing native plant but rarely met with in nurseries. 
What form of lime would you recommend using for 
sour ground? A. L. 
All commercial limes are good and it usually is a ques¬ 
tion of costs which decides preference. The chemists 
tell us that ground limestone is better than slaked lime 
because it is insoluble except when in contact with the 
carbonic acid in the ground which is the cause of it be¬ 
ing sour. When ground limestone is put on sour ground 
the carbonic acid reacts with it forming a soluble lime¬ 
stone and removing the acid from it, thus there is no 
danger of the plants being burnt as they will only get the 
lime as long as the ground is sour. 
If slaked lime is used, which is always soluble, it over¬ 
powers the weak acids, making the soil sweet again, but 
the plants still get it after it is no longer needed, some¬ 
times burning them. 
What is the proper time to sow evergreen seeds? 
G. B. H. 
As a rule most seeds of evergreens should be sown in 
the spring. It is however very important to keep them 
in proper condition during the winter. A good plan is 
to mix them with dry sand and keep them in a cool room 
until they can be sown. 
Mice and other vermin are especially fond of them and 
steps will have to be taken to prevent these pests getting 
at them even while in storage or after they are sown. A 
good plan is to make the seed beds three feet wide and 
if your ground is heavy and apt to bake and dry lighten 
it up with leaf soil, sand, humus or such material. It is 
also very important to shade the beds while the seed are 
germinating and until the young plants get strong 
enough to stand full sunshine. 
EOREIGN PLANTS INTRODUCED 
More than thirty countries are represented as sources 
in a recently published list of seeds and plants introduced 
by the United States Department of Agriculture from 
July 1 to September 30, 1917. This inventory, No. 52, 
contains descriptions of 285 plants, a comparatively small 
number, as at that time—during the war—the shipping 
of seeds and plants was almost at a standstill. 
In this list of plants introduced by a number of agricul¬ 
tural explorers are many that may prove to be of great 
value to American farmers and stockmen. In view of the 
success of such former introductions as Rhodes grass and 
Sudan grass, four new forage grasses from New South 
Wales and a collection from the Belgian Kongo should be 
of special interest. Tropical horticulturists may find 
something of value in various fruits introduced from 
Guatemala, especially a large form of avocado known in 
that country as coye. Although flavoring plants are not 
much used in most parts of this country, people in sec¬ 
tions where it may be grown may be interested in a tropi¬ 
cal vine that imparts the flavor of oysters to milk or po¬ 
tato soup. 
Other plants in the new list are house palms that take 
on a graceful form while very small, hardy palms with 
showy edible fruits from Argentina, a tropical black wal¬ 
nut from Porto Rico that may have possibilities for tim¬ 
ber production, a flowering cherry from Japan that may 
be grown in the Adirondack region, a tree from Java 
that has nodules embedded in the leaves that collect and 
fix nitrogen from the air just as is done by the nodules 
on the roots of legumes. 
$9,000,000 EOR FREE SEEDS 
In 1839 Congress gave $1000 to the Patent Office for 
the purpose of procuring and distributing seeds of “rare 
and improved varieties” and for gathering agricultural 
statistics. From this innocent beginning has been built 
up the great annual free distribution of seeds by Con¬ 
gressmen, which is a monstrous and notorious graft. In 
the last forty-five years it has cost the taxpayers nearly 
$9,000,000. 
What it amounts to is a privilege accorded to Con¬ 
gressmen of distributing prize packages among their 
constituents free of cost to themselves. This, of course, 
is valuable from an electioneering point of view, each 
representative being thus enabled to indicate a remem¬ 
brance of his constituents individually without spending 
a cent. He does not even pay the postage, but merely 
furnishes the requisite addresses bearing his frank. 
Uncle Sam does the rest. The sincerity of Congressmen 
in their remarks favoring economy will meet with a 
crucial test when this item comes up for consideration 
in the agricultural bill. 
Secretaries of the Department of Agriculture, one af¬ 
ter another, have protested against this graft; but in 
vain. From year to year the appropriation for the pur¬ 
pose has been made larger. In 1896 it rose to $80,000. In 
1911 it was $289,690. Secretary Meredith, a year ago, 
urged that it be cut out. The response of Congress was a 
further increase to $360,000, which is the amount spent 
during the present year for free seeds. There is no pre¬ 
tense that the seeds are of any real use to anybody. How 
could they be? The individual recipient gets five little 
packets, the contents weighing altogether about two- 
thirds of an ounce. They are common vegetable or flow¬ 
er seeds—cabbage, cucumber, squash, turnip, tomato, 
or nasturtium, mignonette, etc. 
Each Congressman is entitled to his “quota” of so 
many thousand packages. If he comes from an urban 
constituency he may, and often does, exchange his seeds 
for public documents which an agricultural member 
hands over to him as a “swap.” Brokers have done a 
profitable business in Government seeds, buying up 
quotas entire, and, with cellars full of them, selling 
them to Representatives at one-fourth their cost to Uncle 
Sam. 
