SPECIMEN PLANTS. 335 



most discreditable manner, and some of the publications of 

 the day have at length joined in the complaint ; but although 

 geraniums are, from their habit, more conspicuous under their 

 torture, other plants are, in many cases, as much deteriorated, 

 and by similar, or worse means. It is, as we have before ob- 

 served, the perfection of gardening to produce finely grown 

 specimens of plants in their most elegant and graceful habit ; 

 but it is a prostitution of the science to produce them as too 

 many are shown at our metropolitan exhibitions, and we hope 

 those who happen to be judges will, out of pure regard to the 

 skill of the gardener who can grow specimens naturally, reject 

 at once all those collections in which plants are unnaturally 

 trained. If the gardeners will not of themselves cure the 

 evil, the owners ought to interfere, unless they wish to be iden- 

 tified with such ungardener-like practices. How would it read 

 in a report of a show — First Prize for collections, Mr. A. B., 

 or Mr. C. D., with Eriostemon buxifolius on a frame, with 

 forty yards of iron wire and eighty-one props, the plant being 

 too weak to stand without them? Pimelia decussata, with 

 seventy-six props and ninety ties, and so on through the list 

 of plants, showing that a prize had been awarded to a collec- 

 tion of plants that, without these props and wire-work, dared 

 not have been shown at all 1 It is quite time to interfere with 

 this matter before British gardening is utterly disgraced. It 

 is quite time the owners forbade it for the sake of their own 

 taste : it is quite time the judges and societies repudiated it 

 for the sake of the interests of Horticulture and Floriculture, 

 which they profess, and are bound to encourage. Half the 

 gardeners who grow these drawn up plants are incapable of 

 growing them properly ; some of those who grow geraniums, 

 others who grow roses, and still more who grow general collec- 

 tions, would, if they were forbidden to use these unnatural 

 auxiliaries, be at the bottom instead of the top of the prize lists. 

 Young and skilful gardeners, who have never degraded their 

 own scientific acquirements by condescending to such tricks, 

 would beat them until they learned their business, for they 

 have to learn it before they earn reward. 



The growing of specimen plants requires first that we should 

 study the habit of the subject, and to aid in producing it in 

 the best possible style. If a plant is naturally of pyramidal 

 growth, it needs little else than rubbing off the buds wherever 

 Jiey are going to shoot and are not wanted, to throw the 



