232 TRANSACTIONS OF THE HORTICULTURAL 



against flowers. It has been, substantially, my life's business. 

 Quoting from the same poet : 



"The spleen is seldom felt where Flora reigns ; 

 The lowering eye, the petulance, the frown. 

 And sullen sadness, that o'ershade, distort. 

 And mar the face of beauty, when no cause 

 For such immeasurable woe appears. 

 These Flora banishes, and gives the fair, 

 Sweet smile and bloom, less transient than her own." 



A word about our fruit and vegetable supplies. They are cer- 

 tainly plenty of all kinds, at least in our great central markets, but 

 are they as general as they should be around the country homes? 

 Does not even the raising of fruit and vegetables take on a sort of 

 machine style? Twenty years or so ago a strawberry patch of good 

 dimensions, was no rarity, even around Chicago. I have actually 

 seen such crops that would glut the home market for a spell. Now 

 I don't believe an^-body grows them hereabouts. But the iron horse 

 will bring them. It has begun, strawberries quoted at Christmas, 

 only §4 per Cjuart, not many ear-loads, I opine. But from now on 

 they will keep coming. If the strawberries coming yet were placed 

 equidistant apart from where they came from, they would be some 

 miles apart: but every week one will fill in the space, however, until 

 long before they would be ripe here, thev will come in a thick stream 

 — by car-loads. Think of eight months of a strawberry season each 

 year, reported rather light strawberry crop, gave Chicago 755,000 

 cases, averaging, so goes the report, $2.25 per case. Here are a few 

 items of that insatiate maw, Chicago, in the fruit line the past year. 

 1,200 cars California fruit, against 800 in 1887, at estimated value of 

 $360,000. From Florida, that other extreme, 300,000 boxes of 

 oranges, out of a total output from that neck of land of 2,225,000 

 packages; common grapes, 7,500,000 pounds, average two cents, and a 

 million bananas — 250,000 bunches — from the topics, average 75 

 cents a bunch. Of vegetables, potatoes, 3,750,000 bushels, some of 

 these last year from Scotland; of cabbage to the number of 320 car- 

 loads, at a cost of $250,000, with the curious spectacle last year, of 

 cabbage, from Holland in the Water Street market. 



The peach crop. What does not that term suggest during thirty- 

 two years? Why peaches used to grow, it would seem, almost any- 

 where. I saw myself, the last of a lot of stumps of a glorious old 

 peach orchard in 1857, at the farm of Wm. Kennicotts, of a thousand 

 trees. Whether these old settlers would still keep trying, if alive, I 

 know not. But I copy from an extract of the old Doctor's in 1858, 

 he says: "I have had three peach orchards killed within the past 

 eighteen years, the last one of 1,000 trees." 



Memory here takes me back twenty years ago; it was 1868, 

 with the Ad -interim Committee of Illinois Horticultural Societv. 



