488 



HORTICULTURE 



April 14. 1906 



horticulture: 



AN ILLUSTRATED JOURNAL 



DEVOTED TO THE 



FLORIST, PLANTSMAN, LANDSCAPE 



GARDENER AND KINDRED 



INTERESTS 



HORTICULTURE PUBLISHING CO. 



II HAMILTON PLACE, BOSTON, MASS. 



Tel«ph»n., Oxford 292 



WM. J. STEWART. Editor and Manager. 



Easter week is a hustling time for 



Ready for t ] u . plant grower to whom the duty of 



the next crop refilling the vacant space after the 



Easter material has been marketed is 

 second in importance only to the disposal of the Easter 

 stock. What crop shall be selected to follow is a ques- 

 tion dependent largely upon local circumstances, but 

 the course, whatever it may be, must have been mapped 

 out well in advance and there is no more convincing 

 evidence of the intelligent and prudent grower than 

 that he be fully prepared to put his houses at work 

 again without a day's delay, as soon as they shall have 

 been emptied. 



Of interest 



\\i- confess in having a certain 

 aversion to retrospective addresses 

 to rose growers ,„, trade and professional topics. 

 It is usually an indication of 

 decadence and of waning interest in living issues when 

 a man or an organization or a paper gets into the habit 

 of this sort of literature, unless the rehearsal is made 

 use of to illustrate a timely argument or point the way 

 for present and future enterprise. The paper <n\ roses 

 by Benjamin Dorranee which appears on another page 

 of this issue is admirable in possessing the latter quality. 

 It is well calculated In set people a thinking, which 

 should lie the primary aim of such a paper. We hope 

 our rose-growing readers will peruse it and shall wel- 

 come am communications which the} may -end to us 

 touching on the questions propounded by Mr. Dorranee. 



While the fever is on for teaching 



Spare the 1 1 it • public school children what they 



native flowers s l lou ld do, hortieulturally, it will not 



be out of place to teach them also 

 sonic things they should not do. Many of the beautiful 

 wild plant- once 30 abundant are fast becoming extinct 

 and one of tip. causes of their disappearance is the 

 wholesale gathering of the flowers, which puts an end 

 lo their reproduction from seed, and as a species thus 



I scarcer the craze to pick every one in sight be- 



comes more am entless. It has been esl imated 



that there are now about six hundred foreign wild 

 plants which have been brought to this country in va- 

 riolic ways and the coarse and unattractive ones are 

 rapiillv spreading and usurping the place of the pretty 

 species that have been so ruthlessly destroyed. Chil- 

 dren — and grown people, too — should be instructed as 

 to such things as Cypripedium aeaule. fringed gentian, 

 etc.. that the persistent gathering of all the flowers that 

 appear will soon exterminate the species in a given lo- 

 cality. 



The nursery business in hardy orna- 

 Back to the mental trees, shrubs and border peren- 

 country life nulls is enjoying a period of unprece- 

 dented prosperity and the signs of the 

 times are that this is only a beginning. Never before 

 has there been a spring when the attention of the peo- 

 ple has been so concentrated on the pleasures of rural 

 and suburban lite and the comforts of a home with 

 grounds tastefully adorned. The awakening, for a time 

 localized in the extreme eastern section of our country, 

 has now spread over the entire land. Communities are 

 demanding public parks; men of wealth and leisure are 

 taking up large tracts, erecting villas and stately con- 

 servatories; less conspicuous but equally enthusiastic is 

 the sentiment among the humbler classes; on all sides 

 the people are calling for a better knowledge regarding 

 selection, planting and care of the things that go to 

 make beautiful home surroundings. Paralleling the 

 impulse thus given to the ornamental nursery trade the 

 landscape gardeners' profession has already developed 

 into one of the most promising and lucrative a young 

 man can take up, and its future magnitude ean hardly 

 be over-estimated. 



The communication from one of 



The right spirit our correspondents in this issue 



in emulation criticising the work of the judges in 



1 he late exhibition of the Massaehu- 

 setts Horticultural Society and the American Rose So- 

 ciety, opens up an old subject upon which very decided 

 opinion- have often been expressed. Mr. McFarland 

 voices an admirable sentiment when he says that he 

 prefers some award which carries with it a recognition 

 of cultural excellence above any sum of money that may 

 be given an exhibitor. This is the true competitive 

 quality which, we believe, is much more general among 

 gardeners and florist- than is realized. On one point, 

 however, we take issue with the complainant. We do 

 not like to see "a bad loser." All societies confer on 

 their exhibition judges the right to withhold first, sec- 

 ond or any other prize from any exhibit not deemed 

 worthy thereof, and this is just as it should be. We 

 think that when an exhibitor, knowing who the judges 

 are to be, submits his product to those gentlemen, in 

 competition for their verdict, he should accept their de- 

 cision with equal good grace whether it be an honor or 

 r-e. And this applies without distinction to the 

 large and the small exhibitor alike. 



