THE FLOEAL WOELD AND GAEDEN GUIDE. 243 



of dishonest seedsmen. Suppose a noted house sends out for the first time 

 a new cauliflower, cabbage, or kale. It is, perhaps, ah-eady notorious 

 through having been cxliibited at shows and reported on in the journals. 

 The price of course is high, buyers are plentiful,, and every seedsman is 

 asked for it. The original house Avill send out the real thing, and 

 numbers of seedsmen will sell it again precisely as they had it in the first 

 instance ; but others obtain a little and make much of it, by mixing 

 it with a seed of similar shape and coloi;r, and out of every hundred seeds 

 so sown the grower may not get a dozen plants, perhaps none at all, so 

 large is sometimes the pi-oportion of dead seed added to the bulk. Good 

 rape mixed with a new kale or cabbage would inform against the vender 

 as soon as it sprouted ; therefore the rape is killed by heat, and dead seeds 

 tell no tales. 



As to the giving new names to old sorts, and selling old sorts for bond 

 fide novelties, the system is carried on to a far greater extent than we 

 could well expect the public to believe. We have heard of a house that 



. sends out the British Queen pea, one of the best tall peas for a late crop, 

 every year under a new name. As British Queen it is worth 2s. per 

 quart, but with a new name it realizes 5s. a quart, and so produces a fair 

 reward for ingenuity in cheating. In peas, and annuals for the flower 

 garden, the substitution of okl sorts for novelties is carried on to perhaps 

 a greater extent than in any other classes of seeds. Packets labelled 

 " Californian sunflower. Is.,"' produce the old sunflower, of which the 

 grower has at least a bushel by him to feed his poultry with ; and the 

 Emperor pea does duty for hundreds of sorts, each one, according to the 

 seedman's description, earlier and better than all the rest. 



That this nefarious system does harm to the honest dealer v>"ho can 

 doubt ? What chance has a man who honestly puts but a dozen seeds in 

 a packet, and charges a shilling or half-a-crown, against another who offers 

 a handful similarly labelled for sixpence ? His only chance is, that ha'S'ing 

 been found true to his word, and having supplied, though at a compara- 

 tively high price, that which the grower wanted, he Avill keep what trade 

 he has and extend his connection, through the fair fame his dealings 

 secure for him. Now and then it happens that the best houses in the 

 trade send out sorts that are not triie, because a good deal of mixing is 

 done on the Continent ; but as a rule, the mixing, the re-naming, and the 

 scooping of a dozen sorts out of one sack are confined to a certain class of 

 men who would cheat, no matter what line of life their lot were cast in. 

 The purchaser of seeds must expect to be cheated if he yields to the 

 temptation of low prices. He must expect to be cheated if he puts im- 

 l^licit faith in names and descriptions pasted on bulky packets ; but he 

 will not be cheated if he trusts himself to men who have a name that 

 must be kept sweet, and a fame that their own conscientiousness would 

 not allow them to tarnish. Though the trickeries extend far and wide, 

 and number their victims among gardeners and farmers all over the 

 country, the leading London houses would sooner put up their shutters at 

 once than descend to nefarious practices knowingly ; and there is, perhaps, 

 not a second or third-class town ui the kingdom but in Avhich a reliable 

 seed-merchant may be found to sell what he has true to name, and 

 what he has not to refrain from pretending to supply by surreptitious 

 practices. There are difficulties enough between the sowing and reaping. 

 It is hard, indeed, if we have all the while been labouring with a wortii- 



