164 THE CARNATION MANUAL. 



out the heat they used to do when they were boys ; 

 nor, on the other hand, shall I run into the opposite 

 extreme and praise everything because it is new. 



My earliest recollections of these flowers were 

 connected with the City of Dublin, where, sixty 

 years ago, there was a little band of florists, whose 

 names have long since faded from the memory of 

 most, although I remember them as if they were 

 of 3^esterday. By some of these, Carnations and 

 Picotees were assiduously cultivated. The canons 

 of taste were, with these Dublin florists, much more 

 rigid than with those who lived around the great 

 metropolis of London. It Avas on those lines my 

 own taste was formed, and my assertion of them 

 has often brought me into opposition with those 

 who derided them as priggish and strait-laced; 

 but to those lines the Dublin florists rigidly 

 adhered. At that time the flowers were mostly 

 grow^n in beds, and a cultivator who grew them as 

 they are mostly now grown — in pots — w^as an 

 exception. 



That there was a good deal of enthusiasm 

 amongst them may be gathered from the fact that 

 one amateur, who I recollect had his garden at the 

 Meath Hospital, paid tAVO guineas for a pair of 

 Twitchett's " Don John," which was to beat all the 

 world in crimson bizarres. What earnest pil- 

 grimages there were to see it when it bloomed ! 

 but somehow or other it did not come up to reputa- 



