POPULAR VARIETIES OF GARDEN VEG- 

 ETABLES. 



WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED EXPRESSLY FOR THE MICHIGAN STATE 

 POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY, BY JAMES VICK OF ROCHESTER, N. Y. 



Gentlemen: — Your Pomological Society includes and has a horticultural 

 department, I understand; that is to say, the lesser has swallowed the greater. 

 But words, like vegetables, grow, and some words mean more than they did a 

 few years ago. The word grange once signified a French hamlet or farm, but 

 I am told that it means a great deal more than that now. So your word po- 

 mology has come to include, by common consent, garden culture and flower 

 culture, and it is for this reason, I suppose, that I am invited to contribute 

 something about vegetables. 



The vegetable department at the state fair, is to many exceedingly interest- 

 ing, and should be to all ; for while we have no sympathy with those who say 

 they " see more beauty in a cabbage or hill of potatoes than in the finest flower 

 that ever grew," we do most heartily agree with those who take pride and 

 pleasure in the culture of choice vegetables, and their improvement, and who 

 are ready to say with Diocletian, "Were you to come into my garden and see 

 the vegetables I raise with my own hands, you would no longer talk to me of 

 empire." As much skill is required to produce an improved vegetable as a new 

 and valuable flower, and perhaps as much as is needed to govern a nation ; and 

 the pleasure of success, we doubt not, is quite as great. The improvement in 

 our vegetables for the past score of years has been great ; indeed, we notice de- 

 sirable progress almost every season, and more particularly in the purity of the 

 seeds. The examinations of oar trial grounds this year have been unusually 

 satisfactory. To keep varieties pure and true to name, requires a constant 

 struggle, about which the nurseryman and florists who propagate by budding 

 and grafting, and by cuttings and divisions of roots, know nothing, and of 

 which gardeners usually have but little appreciation. 



ASPARAGUS. 



This now popular vegetable is so well known that most 

 persons who have had experience in vegetable gardening 

 are pretty well acquainted with its habits. The Asparagus 

 is a salt-water plant, indigenous to various parts of the 

 coast of Europe and Asia, growing in salt-water marshes. 

 It has escaped from our gardens, and is now found in 

 some places on the American coast, and is sometimes ob- 

 served in meadows. The plant is perennial, and grows 



