254 TRANSACTIONS OF THE HORTICULTURAL 



largely on account of which we assemble to-day. No references 

 in regard to material things occur earlier in ancient history than 

 those concerning the lily and the rose; and no one to-day shows 

 a livelier appreciation of their beauty than some of earth's ear- 

 liest poets. The Romans upon festive occasions made profuse 

 use of flowers, some of which were brought in ships from distant 

 places to be strewn on the streets before the returning hero from 

 the bloody fields of battle. Cleopatra gave entertainments with 

 the floors of her palaces covered thick with roses. The gardens 

 and olive groves were sacred places when Christ was upon earth, 

 and in the stretch of ages before Noah planted a vineyard, Cain, 

 the first born, became a tiller of the ground. 



Yet horticulture, as we know it, is a modern art. Especially 

 is it true in our country that great attention has been paid to it 

 only in the last half century. The men are mostly still living 

 who were pioneers in American horticulture as a business, and 

 one whom we all recognize as the father of landscape and decor- 

 ative gardening in our country was born in Newburgh, N. Y., in 

 1815. There was not even a nursery which we would call worthy 

 of being cited before the beginning of the present century. 



James Vick began his seed business in 1855, carrying his little 

 papers to the post-office in a basket upon his arm. 



Peter Henderson came to the United States in 1840 and wrote 

 his first book in 1866 — " Gardening for Profit." 



The Ellwanger and Barry partnership — the real beginning of 

 the great nurseries near Rochester, N. Y., — was formed in 

 1840. 



William Prince's Treatise on Horticulture, published in 

 1798, is said to be the first upon the general subject printed in 

 America. 



The first State Horticultural Society was founded in 1829, and 

 that at the outset for the purpose of purchasing and keeping up 

 Mount Auburn cemetery near Boston. 



Hovey's Magazine, the first distinctively horticultural peri- 

 odical in America, was begun in 1835. Downing's Horticulturist 

 in 1846. The first article in the former is about pears in which 

 twenty-three varieties are named, among them the Bartlett, and 

 of this it is said, "The two trees growing in the garden of E. 

 Bartlett, Esq., Roxbury, from which have originated all the 

 trees in this vicinity were selected in England in 1799. * * * 

 It is very singular that no other person (to my knowledge) has 

 imported and fruited this variety in the country." 



In the first volume of Downing's Horticulturist is a critique 

 by H. W. Beecher, on a controversy between Mr. Longworth of 

 Cincinnati and C. M. Hovey of Boston, running from 1842 to 

 1846 in the magazine of the last named gentleman, upon the 

 question as to whether strawberries were ever sexually distinct, 

 and so whether it was ever worth while to plant two kinds near 



