MU PRACTICAL GARDENING. 



cineraria, auricula, polyanthus, azalea, rhododendron, rose, 

 pink, carnation, dahlia, hollyhock, balsam, and a score other 

 popular subjects. What can supersede them 1 They all 

 possess great properties, but there are ugly plants and flowers 

 of all these, that is to say, ugly by comparison. PJace a 

 single rose, pink, dahlia, hollyhock, or balsam by the side of 

 double ones, and though we are told there is nothing ugly in 

 nature, we should dispute the point. There is, we are free 

 to admit, much to admire in the most simple weed, but by 

 comparison with improved varieties, even of the same weed, 

 they are ugly. In our volume of " The Properties of Flowers" 

 we have given thirty standards of perfection for as many 

 flowers and plants ; of course our own notions of beauty are 

 given there for the objects stated, and they are all stamped 

 with the public approval long since; but a coarse and vulgar 

 taste has sprung up through the encouragement given by the 

 Horticultural Society to coarse, vulgar, and unnatural growth, 

 necessarily supported by hundreds of sticks, and by the 

 employment of people of coarse minds, who, instead of dis- 

 qualifying things unnaturally supported and trained, gave 

 them prizes without remonstrance or objection. We cannot 

 call a geranium with two hundred sticks to hold up the 

 blooms beautiful, although there may be a glare of flowers. 

 We cannot call a rose which is bent down, curled round, 

 and turned up again, beautiful. The torturing of the branches 

 of a rose to make it go into the compass of a dwarf after the 

 fashion of Paul, is absolutely discreditable to the gardener 

 who stoops to such means, the judges who award prizes to 

 such things, and the society that permits it. It may be said 

 that the effect is as good at a distance as if the plants were 

 honestly grown. If so, pay such botchers for the use of their 

 sham dwarf roses, and let them be distant decorations, while 

 creditably grown plants, which exhibit real merit, compete 

 for the prizes. If there must be great plants sustained by 

 so many miniature scaffold-poles, let them be hired, and let 

 objects reaUy natural and beautiful compete for the prizes. 

 It is hard in the face of this perverted taste, but we have a 

 right, nevertheless, to point out objects that we think beau- 

 tiful in contradistinction to the stage monsters at horticultural 

 shows. A rose bush grown naturally without support, able 

 to sustain its flowers in their places, and clean and healthy in 

 the fohage, would be beautiful if it were not eighteen inches 



