Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/212

206 made to this part of the garden are ponds for the cultivation of the Royal Lilies (Victoria Regia and V. Cruziana) and other water plants—a group which is a particular favorite of the head gardener, Mr. James Gurney, who has originated several beautiful and remarkable hybrids and seedlings in it.

The arboretum, which for some reason was planted with the trees in rows, as in a nursery, has always been kept in a less polished condition than the flower garden, affording opportunity for the spontaneous growth of many of the wild plants of the region—indeed, a portion of it has never been plowed, and its prairie vegetation is left undisturbed by the scythe until after the year's growth is finished. It contains a varied collection of trees, many of them now of mature growth, though the tornado which devastated St. Louis in 1896 destroyed some of the choicest of them and mutilated others. In its parklike character, the arboretum affords a restful change from the more formal flower garden, and its studied air of neglect is not the least of its charms. With the growth of the manufacturing interests that have necessarily followed the lines of the great railroads passing not far from the northern and western limits of the garden, has come a considerable change in the possibility of growing perennial plants, and particularly coniferous evergreens, which, intolerant of smoke to a degree scarcely surpassed except among the lichens—which I have never seen growing in the garden—have gradually succumbed, until, notwithstanding constant efforts to replace them, they have all but dropped out of cultivation.

In the so-called fruticetum, which, from the nature of its present use, is kept closed to the ordinary sight-seer though always opened to those to whom its contents are of real interest, is growing, in addition to the shrubbery properly constituting a fruticetum, a small collection of the fruits best adapted to the climate of St. Louis, replacing