234 TRANSACTIONS OF THE HORTICULTURAL 



great centre that supplies the market, one of the great props to a 

 successful nursery business is taken away. And to cap all, if the 

 country home generally is not in a successful condition, if the great 

 cities attract more than the country home, if as wealth accumulates 

 people want to spend it in the city, what should be the best customer 

 for a prosperous nurseryman, vanishes. That this state of things is 

 actually upon us, I infer from a recent statement of the Chicago 

 Tribune based on the school census for this year. According to this, 

 fifteen noble agricultural counties of this state had actually decreased 

 in male population since 1880 from 104,662 to 94,209 males. We 

 know as a whole the state is growing, but in what counties? It is 

 Aurora that has pulled Kane county through and not the farm 

 townships, Rockford has done the same for Winnebago, Joliet for 

 Will, and Chicago for Cook county. 



Steam is ready to take us easily and quickly from point to point, 

 to bring food and raiment from the uttermost ends of the earth. 

 Distances are annihilated, cold and heat overcome. The conductor 

 takes his breakfast from mutton from the antipodes, and his dessert 

 from California. New York or Chicago feast upon the fruits of the 

 tropics months and months before winter has left. Why, as the boys 

 say, fruit or vegetables offered to a market in the place where it is 

 grown is an old chestnut, and yet when we first came west, that 

 grower who could gain a few days by ingenuity and skill with his 

 crops took the cake and the money too. What is a few daj^s now to 

 struggle for in his asparagus, rhubarb, lettuce, strawberries, peaches, 

 etc., when the markets mahap have been glutted months before ? The 

 stream will first start from the tropic and follow with the sun, and 

 as I said before, often the flavor is the only thing lacking, as when 

 fresh from the garden. But I must hurry on and leave the nursery- 

 men and home fruit grower for good and all. Just one word. If the 

 time ever does come when the country, on even urban or suburban 

 homes, become the fashion to plant, to decorate, if the garden is the 

 first thought, the building the second, then comes the hope of the 

 nurserymen. We leave him with pleasant memories, as the grand old 

 pioneer of the West. 



Come we for a short time again to the florist, how fares he since 

 1857? Why it is positively magical, the transformation then and 

 now in this department. There were just three green houses at that 

 time of fifty feet each. Now a person is apt to say, so many acres in 

 glass when speaking of many great florists with steam engines of a 

 hundred and fifty horse power to heat them. Then only an old 

 fashioned flue was used. Tens of thousands of finer roses than the 

 Vale of Cashmere or California can produce; the result. If our city 

 is short, they are bundled up in ice if in summer, cotton-batten if 

 in winter and sent off thousands of miles to decorate my ladies' 

 chamber. 



