184 PRACTICAL GARDENING. 



sake of a little size. We recommend for home use that all 

 the means be taken except thinning the flo'wers and shading 

 them, and that all the best varieties be grown ; but when a 

 man can afford to lay out a piece of ground from which to 

 show, and to leave his other portions in perfection as a flower 

 garden, he should io so. We do not know that we should tie 

 up a pink or a carnation to keep the pod from splitting if we 

 were not going to show, though we might limit a pink, a car- 

 nation, and picotee to three blooms each, because it gives 

 them room to grow in perfection. But picotees, carnations, 

 and tulips, may be grown for show without destroying the 

 general appearance, because they are grown under an awning 

 in a pleasant summer retreat, as it were, and certainly have a 

 noble appearance in collections. 



It is with flowers and plants as it is with farm stock. 

 !N^one but those who take an interest in exhibiting would care 

 to go into the oil-cake and stall-feeding apartments to see 

 over-gorged beasts ; they would delight in seeing the sheep 

 and cattle in the fields. So in flowers, none would care to go 

 among the florist's Httering apparatus and nursed isolated 

 blooms, but those who could appreciate every mark that made 

 a bloom better or worse ; the rest would rather go into the 

 highly kept parterre where roses, dab lias, pinks, ranunculuses, 

 and other beauties were rivalling each other in the natural 

 ground, with no covering but the heavens. 



The chief difference in the culture for our own enjoyment 

 in the garden and the management necessary for exhibitions, 

 is in exciting the show flowers and plants to what we call 

 perfection, by restraint for the convenience of carrying, to 

 size by limiting the numbers, to colour by unnatural means, 

 to compactness by vicious training ; while the natural beauty 

 and habit looks more effective for domestic gratification, and 

 answers every purpose for local enjoyment. It must not, how- 

 ever, be forgotten with regard to out-of-door culture, that the 

 sun shortens the season of bloom : the rain often destroys the 

 beauty. It is only such things as can be grown wholesale 

 under cover that we fairly enjoy in both capacities. The 

 superb bed of tulips under its canvas roof would be an orna- 

 ment to the finest establisliment in the land ; and the house 

 is not less interestingly occupied when the bulbs are in their 

 boxes, and the carnations and picotees occupy their placea 

 under the canvas roo:^ because the same shade and covering 



