126 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



and the sights of those beautiful flowers. Upon all sides they are offered 

 to you to buy — the most beautiful flowers, flowers imported from France, 

 ,as well as flowers raised in England, and sold at the most marvelously 

 cheap rates. 



What is the result of all this? You cannot enter a home in London, 

 among the rich or poor, where the table is not daily adorned with flowers. 

 They can afford to buy these flowers, and they do so, and the beautiful 

 blossoms stand there, teaching their sweet lessons to all. 



Horticulture thrives, then, in London, as may be seen from the hun- 

 dreds of flower venders moving up and down the streets. Floriculture 

 has become a capital industry in this great capital of the world. Horti- 

 culture exhibits its merits as you come to any opening in London. 



The wonderful London common council, which is carrying forward 

 such wonderful reforms for London, has been opening up place after place 

 in the city on every side, and wherever there is a square, wherever there 

 is a nook or corner, there you will discover that shrubs have been ar- 

 ranged, well diversified, and flowers made to bloom in their proper seasons. 

 Why, it is a fact that the very churchyards up and down that city, church- 

 yards which even Ruskin said were the places for moss, are being turned 

 into flower gardens, and thrown open to the people. (Applause.) 



Horticulture and floriculture! they are seen in every window in Lon- 

 don. Even in dusty old Drury Lane, you will discover the very windows 

 full of flowers. The idea of floriculture has become well nigh universal 

 in the city of London. We used to think that the Germans had kept the 

 flowers for their own use, but the English have now followed after them, 

 and as you push out from London now, into the parks and suburbs, there 

 you will find immense beds of flowers on every side. 



One of the signs quoted by a great writer upon England, in 1884, to 

 show the wonderful advance of this wonderful people, and their rising 

 above materialism, is this: — that they have lined the entire walk from 

 the marble arch in Hyde Park down to the old gate where the statue of 

 Nelson is, with flowers. We know that old Kensington has been changed 

 into a flower garden, and in the newer parts of the city these gardens are 

 upon every side also. 



What has been seen in London is only a culmination of the general love 

 of flowers which has been maintained so long in the country in England. 

 I went into many a cottage in my travels there— a little hovel, where 

 some farmer lived — and I never saw one where there were not the shelves 

 with the flower pots carefully secured upon them. There was never a 

 home so humble in the country of England but that I found flowers 

 there. 



So, we see that our Teutonic ancestors in Germany and England have 

 been partial from the beginning to flowers, and that England to-day is 

 progressing out of materialism to that which is spiritual by the cultiva- 

 tion of the many attractive flowers. The cultivation of them is an art as 

 well as an industry. 



This, in conclusion, I will say— that the first thing I noticed when I 

 landed in England, and had succeeded after a great deal of difficulty in 

 persuading President Northrop to go to a temperance hotel, was the 

 plants in the windows of a temperance hotel; and the last day, as we 



