8 PRACTICAL GARDENING. 



is illustrative of the impropriety of quoting different authors 

 without being able to do justice to their motives. 



The great object of all teachers should be to inform men 

 how to accomphsh the most with the least trouble and ex- 

 pense ; to inculcate as much as possible simple rules, and 

 general principles, and, so far as may be necessary, to explain 

 why certain operations produce certain results ; but we have 

 no notion that persons entirely unacquainted with botany and 

 the physiology of plants, but desirous of cultivating a garden, 

 should be forced to study the former before they are per- 

 mitted to grow their own cabbages, or furnish a garden out 

 with a few flowers. Much as may be said in behalf of botany, 

 and of science in general as connected with gardening, facts 

 indisputable prove that it has flourished greatly among the 

 most ignorant and humble classes, who were not only without 

 information, but were so destitute of means, that they pursued 

 their fancy under numerous disadvantages, which called forth 

 their inventive faculties to make all sorts of shifts, to accom- 

 plish what professional gardeners have done to their hands. 

 In the department of gardening devoted to florists' flowers, 

 which has advanced much more rapidly than any other branch, 

 nearly all the extraordinary advances in the quality of flowers 

 have been made by poor men, uninformed men, men who did 

 not even know the meaning of botany, and were as strange to 

 the physiology of plants as to the "south-west passage" or the 

 north pole. In such hands the most extraordinary improve- 

 ments have been made in the races of flowers ; and, to this 

 day, the best raisers and cultivators may be found among men 

 who have the utmost contempt for science, however useful 

 and amusing, and even profitable it may be to those who have 

 sufficient garden to make it worth studying, and time to study 

 it. It is not our object to make the study of botany or 

 chemistry the only road to gardening ; it would be for the 

 most part useless to a poor man, and a round-about way to 

 the object in a rich one. Learn, in as easy a way as may be, 

 to manage your garden ; this can be done in a short time ; 

 botany, chemistry, the physiology of plants, and such-like 

 studies, have but little to do with the general operations, as 

 we have already shown. Kature gives us all the lessons that 

 are rec|uii"ed beyond those that may be conveyed in a very 

 plain system of gardening. 



The cultivator of a first-rate collection of plants may render 



