CHAPTER XVII. 



FERTILIZERS FOR CARNATIONS— FORMULAS— EFFECT OF 



CARNATION NUTRIENTS-EXACT ELEMENTS IN A GIVEN 



QUALITY OF CARNATION STEMS, ROOTS AND 



LEAVES. 



EXCESS of assimilated nutriment unbalances the vegetative 

 and reproductive forces in both animals and plants. A fat 

 animal looses its desire to cohabit, and its power to con- 

 ceive. A potato will yield no tubers on a dung hill, nor will a 

 rapidly growing tree produce any fruit. An abnormall}^ robust 

 carnation plant will produce no flowers. When nature extrava- 

 gantly expends on one side, it economizes on the other. A 

 blossom is the heat of a plant's passion, as love is the ardor of an 

 animal's desire. The number of flowers that a plant will yield 

 is in the inverse ratio to its abnormal foliage. A carnation plant 

 whose vegetative force has over-balanced its reproductive 

 energies, cannot be equalized during its brief existence. It maj- be 

 fed up, but never dieted down. It is a disease, a destruction of 

 the equilibrium between the assimilating and excretory forces of 

 the organism. 



The drift is toward chemical combinations for fertilizing car- 

 nations; but I think the uncompounded nutriments, such as 

 gound bone, lime, wood ashes, cow and sheep manure, are safer 

 and better. Nature would not have constructed a laboratory of 

 vital synthetical chemistry in the penetralia of a plant system if 

 it had designed man to operate its nutrient pharmacy. 



Soil favorable to the growth of the primal Dianthus family 

 contained but little humus, and all vestiges of ancestr}^ in plants 

 or animals are never completely obliterated in their progeny. A 

 carnation grower asks through a recent trade journal, "What is 

 the matter with my carnation plants? I made the bench soil out of 



