228 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



and he saj'S, "This variety hath been uith us but of late days, and is the 

 goodliest and the greatest." 



It would seem that up to this time no attempts had been made to grow new 

 varieties from seed or from crossing the different kinds. And no mention 

 is made up to this period, so far as I have been able to read, of strawberries 

 being imperfect in their flowers, except when attempts were made to grow 

 them under glass. Then some gardeners used to complain bitterly of tlieir 

 strawberries "running blind," as they called it. 



The first improvement made by growing strawberries from seed was about 

 the year 1660, a variety called at first the Clapperon, and grown by a person 

 by the name of Fressant, a Frenchman. This variety was obtained from the 

 seed of the Wood strawberry. 



But little attention seems to have been paid to growing improved vari- 

 eties by hybridizing until the time of Andrew Knight, about the beginning 

 of the present century. In order to show what confnsed ideas occupied some 

 men's minds with regard to strawberry blossoms, and to show also what progress 

 has been made iu the last forty years in growing new varieties with perfect 

 flowers from hybridized seed, I will give a quotation from the English 

 Gardeners' Chronicle of 1S43. The writer says: "We have observed in 

 almost every variety of strawberry that we have seen in cultivation, that some 

 of its plants occur occasionally bearitig all male blossoms, and others none but 

 female blossoms." "By far the greater number of plants in each variety have 

 separate male and female flowers on the same plant." I will simply remark, 

 with regard to the last quotation, that no such imperfect flowering strawberries 

 have ever been grown by any Canadian in my time, and I question very much 

 if any person has ever seen in America perfect female and male flowers growing 

 separately on the same plant. But it may be just as well to remark that very 

 few if any strawberries of English origin have ever proved perfect or satisfactory 

 in their flowers in this country, and not until 1834, when Hovey of Boston, 

 Massachusetts, introduced his seedling, was any real progress made in growing 

 strawberry seedlings in America. Even this was a pistillate variety, and was 

 very apt to be barren, or bear very imperfect fruit, unless some staminate 

 variety was grown near by. But with a portion of the bed being planted with 

 our wild strawberries, Hovey" s seedling would produce a very fine crop of large 

 and delicious fruit. 



The great improvement of the Hovey over all others of its day caused 

 many intelligent persons to grow seedling strawberries, with a view to getting 

 hermaphrodite varieties (that is, straw^berries bearing flowers with stamens and 

 and pistils in each flower, instead of in separate flowers), and thus prevent 

 barrenness. It will no doubt sound strange to many readers to be told that in 

 this year 1881 there are such things in Canada as barren strawberry beds; and 

 yet there are a great many of these barren beds in every county in Ontario I 

 have no doubt. The only cause of this barrenness tliat I know of is the 

 imperfection of the flowers, that is, purely staminate or purely pistillate flowers. 



In every old strawberry bed there will be sure to be a number of seedlings 

 spring up, and it often happens that many of these plants bear such imperfect 

 flowers as never to bear fruit of any kind ; yet they are very prolific in runners, 

 and these runners are frequently the largest and healthiest plants in the bed. 

 Now it will easily be seen that to plant a new bed from runners grown in such 

 a bed as this will be at the risk of having a barren strawberry bed. Although 

 such plants from an old bed can freciuently be got from some kind neighbor for 



