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IX. — On Spring-tenderness in Plants. By George Lovell, 



Bagshot. 



(Communicated March 4, 1852.) 



That many plants, which pass uninjured through the ordinary 

 severity of our winters, are often seriously damaged by a few 

 degrees of frost in spring is a fact well known to all who pay the 

 least attention to the cultivation of hardy plants ; and the causes, 

 too, are equally well understood. In winter the plant is at rest ; 

 its vegetative powers are in a comparatively dormant state. 

 The tissues are solidified and more deficient in tluids than at any 

 other season, and a combination of circumstances, not now neces- 

 sary to be discussed, render it both physically and mechanically 

 less susceptible to the influence of external agency. In a word, 

 a plant is then less organic, or approaches nearer the condition of 

 an inorganised mass, than when its vegetative and vital prin- 

 ciples are in active operation, and exhibits a corresponding inert 

 condition. 



It is, I am aware, a prevailing opinion that this spring-tender- 

 ness, of which I am speaking, arises wholly from constitutional 

 peculiarity — an hereditary quality, induced by the nature of the 

 seasons in the country or district from whence any given plant 

 may be a native, and which still continues to evince itself under 

 adverse circumstances. But I believe that such peculiarities 

 arise, not so much from a natural tendency in the individual to 

 put forth its buds at a particular season, as from its being in- 

 duced to do so from the influence of local circumstances attending 

 the situation in which it may be placed. A change of country, 

 with a corresponding relative alteration of season, would lui- 

 doubtedly aflfect in a material degree any plant removed from 

 one part of the globe to another, even though the seasons were in 

 both identical in point of temperature, but diflferent in time of 

 occurrence. Yet careful attention to the peculiarity evinced 

 would in a few seasons induce the plant to adapt itself in some 

 degree to its altered conditions, or rather I should say circum- 

 stances may be suited to the plant, to enable it to take advantage 

 of them. 



Now I cannot believe that the most enthusiastic disciple of the 

 doctrine of the hereditary transmission of qualities would venture 

 to assert that, even admitting such peculiarity to cling to an 

 originally introduced plant, it would show itself so decidedly in 

 its descendants, removed perhaps some half-a-dozen generations 

 from the ancestor. All gardeners know very well, that a plant 

 may be made to change its periods of growth by artificial means. 

 Take the vine as an example. Under ordinary out-door tivat- 



