INDlAlsrA IlOHTlCULTURAL SOCIETY, 535 



tie was not a careful ganleiu'r. but nt'ver failed to keep his tomato plants 

 well cultivatoci. 



Sixty-tive years a.^o I iilantetl my tirst bed of strawberries in Fair- 

 field, Ohio, with wild plants taken from the banks of Mad River. The 

 sight of a basket of wild strawberries in the hands of a neighbor— the first 

 I ever saw— filled mo witl'. admiration, and induced me to cultivate them. 

 I was a boy, then, and cliangcd my home too soon to see my plants fruit. 

 The first bed of cultivated strawberries I ever saw was in Rushville, 

 Ind., about the year 1844. It was a small one and owned by W. D. M. 

 Wickham, printer. I believe some of his neighbors regarded him as de- 

 cidedly eccentric, if not a "'little otf," for engaging in such work. When 

 29 years old I planted my first garden in a suburb of Washington, D. C. 

 My strawberries were of foreign varieties only. British Queen, Victoria 

 and Alice Maude were the best of them and were very large, delicious 

 and beautiful. Some of their best berries would range from five to six 

 inches in circumference. William Cammack, a noted horticulturist of 

 Georgetown, D. C, grew the first strawberi'ies I ever saw in market. 

 They wei'e of the varieties I have named, and were remarkably fine, and 

 often sold in the Washington and Baltimore markets for 75 cents per 

 quart, while wild strawberries brought only I2V2 cents per quart. All of 

 the foreign varieties I ever cultivated were self-fertilizing kinds, and 

 when transplanted to Indiana soil required too much petting to be profita- 

 ble. In 1852* A. J. Downing, the greatest landscape gardener this coun- 

 trj- had yet produced, came to AVashington to superintend the planting of 

 some new grounds near the White House. Verbenas, phlox, petunias and 

 portulacca were all then comparatively new fiowers, and beds of them 

 planted by him in Lafayette S(iuare, near tlie White House, were novel 

 and very beautiful, and admired by thousands. The sight of those beds 

 gave me a new conception of the beauty of flowers, and I expended much 

 pleasant labor the next year in growing some fine beds of the varieties I 

 have named. One circular bed of verbenas, ten feet in diameter, and 

 thickly planted with Robinson's Defiance, was covered with the intense 

 scarlet flowers of that variety for fully four months, and was the finest 

 bed of verbenas I have ever seen. 



In 1853 the wonderfid vegetable productions of California began to be 

 known and appreciated in the Eastern States, and specimens of them were 

 occasionally sent to D. Jay Browne, who then superintended the distri- 

 bution of Government seeds. I was in his office one day when I saw him 

 take from a drawer a single Irish potato, recently brought from California, 

 which was round and veiy smootli, and Avhich weighed six pounds. I 

 asked him what disiiosition he itilended to make of it. He replied that he 

 intended to send it to the Soldiers' Home, near Washington, and have it 



*T)owiiin(r porislieil in the Hames on the stoiiiner Henry Clav, <^\\ the Hudson, in 1852, 

 as he was returning from Wasliington to his home in Newark, N. V. 



