214 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



an impression that they are difficult to grow and thus discourage any 

 one from their culture, for the fact is, there is no class of flowering 

 plants — not one — that is so certain, so quick and so generous in its 

 response to the care bestowed; and second, to adduce reasons not so 

 commonly presented, why they should be more generally growu. 



The subject naturally divides itself into three parts — why, what 

 and how to plant. 



First, why to plant hardy bulbs. I pass by all considerations 

 founded on testhetics, sentiment and psychology, not because they are 

 irrelevant or unimportant, but because they are the ones most gener- 

 ally adduced and hence less need to be repeated now ; and so, in open- 

 ing my subject, I urge, first, because it pays. Mankind instinctively 

 attaches value to that which he esteems beautiful, and no matter how 

 much a man inveighs against what he calls the foolishness of pretty 

 things, that very man will pay a greater price on account of it. If he 

 attends a sale of second-hand furniture, he will bid a dollar more on a 

 bureau or bedstead shining with new varnish than on a precisely sim- 

 ilar one dull and scratched, although he knows that ten cents and fif- 

 teen minutes' work is the only difference between them. He will pay 

 one hundred dollars more for a piece of property because the ten 

 square rods constituting the front yard has had the ash-hopper, the 

 wood-pile and a few bushels of tin cans, old boots and otber debris 

 removed, and replaced with one day's work and two dollars' worth of 

 shrubbery, etc.; and the poor fellow doesn't know why he did it, 

 either. On no other principle can the sale of the Ben Davis apple be 

 accounted for, and I have no doubt that if a basket containing Golden 

 Russet, Grimes, Romanite, JSewton and Ben Davis was passed among 

 the pomologists here to-day, a large majority, probably about three- 

 thirds, would instinctively reach for the beautifully striped, large Ben- 

 jamins, although perfectly familiar with the quality of each that I have 

 named. A man pays a price in money for a picture only because he 

 values the owning and seeing the picture more than he does the money 

 he pays for it — unless, indeed, he be a fool, and buys it because it is 

 the " fad'' to do so. 



But I mean it pays in money. When you buy an apple or a pic- 

 ture, you can't get your money again without parting with them ; but 

 you can keep the bulbs you buy, and they increase in beauty every 

 year, and return hundreds of per cent in value besides. I have been 

 for six years collecting flowers as economically as possible. I have 

 tried about 150 varieties of hardy bulbs, and out of that number have 

 rejected only about ten, that for various reasons didn't suit me. I 

 have expended about twenty dollars, and this fall, as many varieties 



