HORTICULTURAL EXHIBITIONS. 



suit alluded to is in a great measure to be attributed. Our advice to pear amateurs is, 

 rather to aim at confining themselves to such varieties as, upon a fair trial, are found to 

 afford satisfactor}' results, first and principall}', ns regards flavor and qualit)^ and second- 

 ly as regards the average crop, than to increase numerically the varieties they grow. In 

 our opinion, the rapid advances now making in horticultural chemistry, may, at no very 

 distant period, open to us an arcana in the laws immediately applied to the texture and 

 the flavoring of fruits, which may enable us bj'-and-bye to influence these particulars to a 

 degree at present perceptible but dimly, if at all, only in that vista of the scientific future, 

 which those alone who are laboring silently but nevertheless ardently upon the subject, 

 at present dare glance into. 



Those who remember what our hot-house and green-house plants were ten j^ears ago, 

 must have gazed with unfeigned pleasure upon tlie many fine specimens which have this 

 year decked the tables of our exhibitions in all parts. The improvement in the beauties 

 of the courts of Flora, have been as marked as have those in the domains of Pomona. 

 Of the rival queens, however, we think the latter has the greater number of successful 

 votaries, as respects the quality, although not perhaps as regards the number of them. 

 For though much indeed has been done, and most worthily, in floriculture, yet much re- 

 mains to be done. 



The time was, and is not yet so far left behind as to be out of our remembrance, when the 

 laws of vegetable physiology were so little known, and the principles on which successful 

 pot culture depends, had been so imperfectly studied, that it was considered an impossi- 

 bility to grow an exotic plant in a pot, Avith any approach to the perfection which the 

 same species attains in its natural habitat. At present, although it may be too much to 

 affirm that under the management of a first rate cultivator, exotics can be grown in great- 

 er perfection than they arrive at in the place assigned to each particular species b}' nature, 

 yet may it, with great truth, be asserted that we do see, under the best cultivation, a 

 degree of beauty and vigor, imparted to many species which, owing to adventitious cir- 

 cumstances, (as the extremes of meteorological changes and other contingencies,) we sel- 

 dom see in the same species when found in its native wilds. This consideration deserves 

 to be often made the subject of our recurring thoughts; because, while in one point of 

 view, it should operate as a stimulus to prosecute our experiments in the perfection of 

 such species as hitherto have been but indifferently cultivated; in another, it should re- 

 mind us that we must not seek bj' an undue measure of those stimulants, on which, fre- 

 quentl}', our success depends, to push the constitutional habits of a plant beyond its legi- 

 timate development. For although we cannot agree with the pure botanist who condemns 

 our development of the beauties of double flowers on the ground of interference with his 

 systematic arrangements; 3'et we have seen the injudicious persistence in a mode of cul- 

 ture, which to a given point was most successful, continued until the heterogeneous re- 

 sults produced, led from a misconception of their cause, to the abandonment of that 

 which, legitimately practiced, was the correct course of culture. 



As connected with horticultural displays one of the greatest advantages, which the im- 

 proved culture of the last few years has imparted to them, is the more natural mode of 

 training and pruning hot-house and green-house plants. Formerly, every exotic climbing 

 plant was seen tied down and cramped by a frame work, so as to leave the mind of the 

 unscientific spectator in doubt whether the frame was a part of the plant or not. Well 

 do we call to mind some time back, being at an exhibition with a friend, who was a skil- 

 ful landscape painter, and conscqucnily possessed a ready- perception of the beautiful in 

 nature, who, when admiring a fine plant of Maurandia Barclayana which had been tortur- 



