File:American gardening (1892) (18148758605).jpg

Title: American gardening
Identifier: americangardeni131892newy (find matches)
Year: 1892 (1890s)
Authors:
Subjects: Gardening; Horticulture
Publisher: New York : Rural Pub. Co
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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THE GIFT OF TONGUES IN TREES. 67 in spring—and the springs were milder then—the young and old gathered for all imaginable frolic. The boiling-down was done in the woods, and no one missed the logs and limbs that were burned under the great ten-pail iron kettles. At night the boys went to the bush to keep up the boiling till midnight. Somehow on those days few hen's-eggs reached the house, and nutcakes and mince-pies vanished from the pantries and apples from the cellars. The time came, however, when maple- trees were more scarce, and now it hardly pays the farmer to tap what few trees he has left. The sugar-maples seen in the sketch (page 69) are a delightful group, too valuable for their beauty to be bored. The time has nearly or quite come in which to plant sugar- orchards as we plant apple- orchards. The manufacture of maple-sugar will become a great and profitable business. All along the Oriskany val- ley, which runs northward through New York, there are glens that formerly poured in their contributions to the flood. The solid ridge 1,000 feet above the level was carved through by the contributory springs, and down and down, until the bed-rock is some- times of the Niagara group and sometimes of the Salina. These glens are now exquisite- ly beautiful, and some of them wooded in wildness along their abrupt or easy slopes, while only a whispering rill goes under the ferns and over the shales down to the meadow- life and the sun. Not one of them is more picturesque or woody than Kirkland Glen. The far-sloping and yet rugged and complex banks have kept back the farmer and his plow on both sides. There the squirrel is yet in happy rela- tion to sylvan homes, and the bees have on rocky cliffs a few trees that it will not pay to climb and cut. The brook has some delicious secrets it has never told to many, and, I dare say, not a few tiny trout may be sup- posed to exist in the shaded pools. Blackberries fit for a feast of the gods used to grow thereabout, in great abundance, putting to shame, prospect- ively, the scarcity that should prevail in the region in later years when man had left there the marks of his energy in destroying nature's work. Thimbleberries, too, opened their great white blos- soms, wooing the bees on the steepest bluffs. It is a glen of rare beauty. There remains much to charm
Text Appearing After Image:
LoMBARDY Poplars, Planted in 1806 on College Hill, Clinton, N. Y. the eye, although the depredations of man have impaired its picturesqueness. E. P. Powell.

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