22fi NEP.RASKA STATE HORllCLLTURAL SOCIETY. 



Encourage the cultivation of flowers by the children. Provide them 

 with a plot of ground, seeds, and a few bulbs and bedding plants. See to 

 it that their efforts are successful and they will learn lessons that they 

 will never forget. The different colors of flowers are always interesting 

 to study and there seems to be one flxed rule or law to which there are 

 no known exceptions. It is this: You will not find in the flowers of one 

 family or species, the three colors, blue, yellow and scarlet. Why this is 

 true I do not believe any one can explain except to say that it is one of 

 the laws of nature. But why will she have a blue and scarlet verbana and 

 no yellow, a blue and a yellow hyacinth and no scarlet, a scarlet and a 

 yellow carnation and no blue? And it is so with the roses, the pansies, 

 the dahlias, the salvias, and all the rest. Often two but never all three of 

 the colors. 



There is much true pleasure to be gotten out of the cultivation of 

 flowers in your own garden. Take a little time each day to work with and 

 study them and see if you do not feel better for it. It will make you 

 forget your other troubles if nothing else. 



While you will of course get better and surer results from procuring 

 the best varieties of seeds, bulbs, and plants from some one who makes 

 it his business to supply the same, this is not absolutely necessary as 

 nature herself will supply them. Our prairies and the timber along our 

 creeks and rivers support at times during the spring, summer and au- 

 tumn a wealth of wild flowers. Many of these are really very beautiful 

 and if you will examine some of the smallest and most insignificant look 

 ing of them through a microscope, you will find that they rival in beauty 

 any of the gorgeous greenhouse productions. 



Dig up some of them and plant them in your yard. You will find that 

 they usually respond readily to good care and show marked improvement 

 in size and abundance of bloom. Save a few seed pods and plant them. 

 Perhaps you may get an improvement on the parent plant. Once you get 

 interested in hybridizing, it is very fascinating. Variation from type is 

 not uncommon. And it is due entirely to cultivation and to the patient 

 and systematic efforts by hybridizers that the fruits as well as the flow- 

 ers of today, have reached their high standard of excellence. Not by 

 creating fruits or flowers. Man has never, nor will he ever, create a 

 fruit or a flower. 



We may take the wild or natural types and by proper selection, care- 

 ful encouragement of the desirable qualities and as careful discarding of 

 the undesirable ones from generation to generation, lead a fruit or flower 

 so far away from its original form that it will appear to be entirely dif- 

 ferent. It is in this way that from the Pyrus malus. or wild crabapple, 

 found growing naturally in most parts of Europe and the United States, 

 have come all the magnificent varieties of apples grown today. From the 

 Dianthus Caryophyllus or Divine flower comes not only all the different 

 sorts of carnation grown by florists of today, but the clove pinks, the 

 sweet Williams, the Marguerite pinks, the garden pinks, etc. 



