4.56 REPORT OF THE CONFERENCE ON GENETICS. 
LECTURE ON HYBRID PHLARGONIUM GRANDIFLORUM 
NANUM 
By Max Biramr, of Halberstadt, Germany. 
My predilection for Pelargonium grandiflorum, generally called ‘ English ’ 
or ‘ Odier, commenced in my childhood. At that time these plants were 
more favoured by the amateur than by the professional horticulturist, 
and were only occasionally to be found in nursery gardens. Precisely for 
that reason, the impression made on me—a gardener’s son—was at that 
time so great that even now I am charmed by the vivid recollection of 
those sitting-room windows, which were yearly filled with a wealth of 
bloom by these pelargoniums. 
The striking luxuriance of pelargoniums, even without the care of a 
gardener, and in small overcrowded dwellings, particularly in rural cottages 
in the vicinity of dung-heaps &c., can be explained by the fact that pelar- 
goniums are to a great extent capable of absorbing large quantities of 
nitrogen from the atmosphere * by means of their fine, small glandular 
hairs. A better explanation of this lies, however, in the fact that the 
pelargonium, being a native of the Cape, thrives better in winter in the 
dry atmosphere of a room than in the humid one of a greenhouse. 
As a young gardener, I found later, that is about thirty years ago, in 
some nursery gardens, a rich assortment of these pelargoniums. Their 
names showed that they were of a French and English strain. 
I was greatly impressed by their splendid range of colour, but not at 
all by the beauty of the plants, which were mostly long and straggling, 
each individual branch having to be supported by a stick. After the 
short blooming season, it was a leafless, weak, undesirable-looking 
skeleton. 
Twenty years ago, I greatly admired the large variety of colour, 
which had been derived from the original type-colour (white with 
pinkish-lilac pencillings), but at the same time I regretted that it had 
then been impossible to give to the plants a finer, more vigorous growth, 
and a more robust constitution. By degrees many gardeners took up the 
culture of pelargoniums, and many novelties were obtained in England, 
France, and Austria, but only a few were perceptibly better in the above 
respect. 
Some of the best varieties were ‘ Mabel,’ ‘ Mme. Thibaut,’ and ‘ Viennese 
Pearl,’ which soon became widely known and distributed everywhere. 
They were propagated in many nurseries, particularly in Vienna and 
Zittau, in large quantities, and in the springtime became more and more 
popular market plants. 
The rapidly increasing popularity of these plants with the public © 
* Herr Biirger’s opinion that his pets are capable of absorbing free nitrogen from 
the atmosphere must be accepted with caution as at least ‘‘ not proven,” indeed the 
present state of our knowledge on the subject would seem to make it improbable.— 
Epriror. 
