54 NEBRASKA STATE H(»KTU TLTrUAL SOCIETY 



easy to understand the value of beauty. You build a house like a barn and 

 nobody wants it. Make a poem in architecture and everybody wants it. I 

 saw a beautiful team of chestnut horses at Bennington, Vermont, which 

 cost $40,000. Of course $39,000 was for beauty and style. Perhaps for 

 $300 you could have gotten a team of plugs which could go as far in a day 

 as they could. Your Shorthorns, beautiful and symmetrical in form as if 

 laid out with square and compass, are worth ten times as much as scrubs 

 of the same weight. 



A farm, beautifully adorned with an ideal front yard, is worth far 

 more than one the yard of which is a hospital for sick pigs and disabled 

 maehinery. 



Horticulture is in a transition state. Nurserymen find themselves 

 stocked up with millions of apple trees they can not sell. The great 

 Stark company have dissolved, and one ot the members is going into 

 ornamentals on a large scale. Sooner or later you must come to it. 

 The country is being rlooded with attractive and beautifully illustrated 

 literature, and millions of dollars are going east that you ought to have 

 if you would wake up to your possibilities. 



You people of the northern states do not realize your condition. There 

 are compensations for your long, cold winter. Spring comes and the 

 whole land awakes to a l>eanty unknown elsewhere. California can not 

 compare with Minnesota in the beauty and fragrance of her flowers. 

 Peonies can not grow there, and what marvelous displays they give you 

 at your summer meetings. We must hammer along the lines of the 

 development of our perennials. I repeat, if there are no calls, then make 

 them. 



A few years ago we had a splendid lot of peonies. Nc call for them. 

 They are the old, ill-smelling "pinys" our grandmothers raised. Your 

 speaker was the first to publish a peony manual, the first in any lan- 

 guage. The first edition cost $75. A man in Minneapolis borrowed a 

 copy and bought $150 worth of peonies. A lady in Topeka read one and 

 bought $25 worth. We were just closing business in the fall when an 

 order came for $200 worth. The first edition went and we issued an- 

 other. We raise a good many but this year we had to buy about $1,500 

 worth. One year we purchased $1,600 worth besides what we could 

 raise. You must enter on a campaign of publicity. 



Here is the coming flower, the iris. You speak of it and you are met 

 with the objection, "Oh, it is nothing but the flag which grew in the 

 swamp down east." People know norhing about this resplendent flower, 

 named from the goddess Iris, the rainbow personfied. She took all the 

 prismatic tints of the rainbow and wove them in garments of splendor 

 for her child. 



I have been to California, the land of flowers, to Hochester, the gar- 

 den of America. 1 have visited the estates of the rich in the cast, and 

 have been in the flncLU parks in the land, but 1 never saw anywhere so 



