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have mentioned the phenomenal abundance of flowers this year 
on almost all trees and shrubs, but I should also have noticed the 
abnormal growth of this year’s branches. Iam sure that in many 
cases the growth of the branches on our trees and shrubs with 
corresponding abundant foliage, has been quite three or four times 
the usual annual growth ;* and for this we have to thank not the 
wet weather of this year nor the bright summer of last year, but 
the two combined; this year’s wet would not by itself have 
produced the unusual growth, but it has largely helped it ; and 
last year’s heat would not have been sufficient to produce the 
effect if it had not been followed by this year’s dripping summer. 
And Iam sure also that we may go back much farther, and 
trace something, however little, in every year of the life of the 
tree or shrub that has helped to produce what we have seen this 
year. The vigour of an old tree or shrub is as much dependent 
on its vigour when it was young, as the vigour of our manhood 
and old age depends largely on the vigour of our childhood and 
boyhood. This may seem a truism not worth notice ; but though 
I am not one of those who think that every plant and animal was 
created for the use or pleasure of man, yet I do think that it adds 
something, perhaps much, to the pleasure of our gardens to think 
how the beauty of our gardens has been slowly growing up for 
our delight year after year, ‘man knoweth not how’; and it 
surely adds to the pleasure we may have, in planting and carefully 
tending young trees and shrubs, to think that what we are doing 
now is to give pleasure or profit in many distant years to those who 
will then be looking at them when we ourselves are passed away. 
Perhaps one or two instances of the way in which the vegetation 
* I may mention as instances of the luxuriance of the foliage this 
year, that on the Paulownia grown as a shrub, I had leaves twenty-two 
inches in length and twenty-six inches in breadth ; and that on the 
hardy Japanese Banana, Musa Basjoo, I had leaves more than four 
feet long, and nearly two feet broad. 
