THE POSSIBILITIES OF FLORICULTURE. 447 



canna and was delighted to find many of very superior merit — much 

 finer than many that have been on the market for years. I keep 

 about fifty kinds of mixed columbines, and their product gives an 

 almost endless permutation of beauty, and I note many vastly su- 

 perior to any of the old sorts. There is this about the family : they 

 use all the prismatic rays in making their garments. 



Take the phloxes developed from our own wild prairie flowers. 

 I know one American florist who has 250 named varieties. They 

 have pushed ahead and branched out into so many charming varie- 

 ties their mother would not know them. By the merest accident I 

 have found the key to their improvement and have met with aston 

 ishing success. Among the imported ones there is the Crepiscule, 

 with compact head and flowers as large as a silver dollar. I found 

 that it impressed its size on all its neighbors, so that seeds from 

 them produced splendid results. A florist visited them and lay- 

 ing a dollar on a single flower, said, "It will take just about a 

 dollar and thirty-five cents to cover it." I secured twenty kinds of 

 superior merit far ahead of many of the imported ones. Remem- 

 ber, these gems are not like the precious jewels that never mul- 

 tiply. You can increase them rapidly, and you can have a garden 

 of delight all your own, and can have many things they could 

 not have in the Persian jewel garden. And standing there, like 

 a god, among your new creations, you can understand the petition, 

 "Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us." 



Prof. N. E. Hansen (S. D.) : In illustration of the point that 



Mr. Harrison made: There is a minister in England who for ten 



years worked with poppies, and I read a very entertaining account 



of his work in one of the English horticultural magazines. The 



writer states that he used to get up at four o'clock in the morning 



to pull up the poppies that opened with a black center. The idea 



was to get the black out of the center of the poppy flower. He 



succeeded and named it after Shirley instead of after himself. 



Shirley poppies are famous, although thousands who plant poppies 



do not know that it was the work of a minister in England who 



used to get up at four o'clock in the morning to pull up the inferior 



plants. The earliest sweet pea we have in America is the work 



of a farmer's wife in Pennsylvania. For a number of years she 



saved the seed from the very earliest flower, and after some years 



of careful effort along this line the seedsmen got hold of it and 



got the entire stock and put out the earliest type of sweet pea, and 



from those have been developed still earlier varieties. But it 



can all be traced to the work of the farmer's wife in Pennsylvania. 



So some of the best work in Europe and America in flower and 



fruit culture has been done by amateurs. In visiting one of the 



largest flower seed firms in the world in 1894 I saw an eighty-acre 



farm • of old-fashioned China asters, having been developed by 



selection until we have hundreds of different varieties. Many men 



