JVotcs and Gleanings. 99 



I have headed this note " Downing's Seedling Gooseberry," because that is the 

 name under which you have described it, but I notice that the author of the re- 

 vised edition of the Fruits and Fruit Trees of America calls it simply the Downing 

 Gooseberry ; and surely he should be good authority for the name of a fruit which 

 he himself originated. Perhaps you will think me hypercritical on this point ; 

 but I deem it highly important not only to adhere to some authority, but to avoid 

 lengthening names. 



Your remarks on training and pruning the plants especially interested me, and 

 I shall certainly carry the system proposed into practice. 



Market Orchards in the IVcst. — Thirty-three hundred apple trees, two 

 thousand pears, and twenty-five hundred peach trees, from one hundred to four 

 hundred trees of a kind, is rather startling to our ideas of orchard planting here 

 in New England. And even this is nothing to what we hear of; for Mr. Barry, 

 at the meeting of the Illinois Horticultural Society, said he knew of one orchard, 

 of pears alone, of sixteen thousand trees, and Dr. Houghton says he has upwards 

 of twenty-five thousand. What Mr. Flagg has to say of fruits for market orchards 

 in the West, is, as usual, well said, and goes right straight to the point. His state- 

 ments of the merits and defects of the varieties he has selected are models of 

 terseness and incisiveness. 



The Campanula. — Mr. Breck's articles on Floriculture will always find 

 readers. For one, they afford me a degree of pleasure I rarely find in any other 

 writer on the subject. Half a century among flowers ! Making these his con- 

 stant care and study during so many years, one might almost imagine they have 

 imparted to the man a measure of their own sweetness and purity. For the in- 

 troduction and dissemination of many of our most beautiful as well as most use- 

 ful plants, we are indebted to him ; and we are also under equal obligation for 

 the free promulgation of all the details of culture and management which so long an 

 experience had enabled him to gather. A devotion so constant, blended with a 

 generous heart and strict integrity of purpose, must everywhere command respect 

 — from me it wins a degree of reverence. The ripening into such a manhood is 

 the full consummation of existence. Such a spirit, like the perfume of the flow- 

 ers he has labored to rear, will ascend as sweet incense to the Eternal Presence. 



As I have before said in these random notes, I thought Mr. Underhill's article 

 on the treatment of the American grape vine an unusually valuable contribution 

 to our knowledge of this subject, and so did every one else who read it ; but it is 

 difficult for any one man to get all the elements of a wide question into a single 

 article, and so I am glad to see Mr. Seely coming in to supplement Mr. Under- 

 hill's statements and conclusions. 



Deiving's Early Ttirnip Beet. — I have had this variety under cultivation, 

 and consider it one of the best. Planted side by side with the common Turnip- 

 rooted, there was a marked difference in favor of Dewing's Early. The bulbs 

 were more uniform in size, smoother and handsomer, and the flesh was quite as 

 rich in color, and I am inclined to think fully as tender and sweet. Further than 

 this, there are few, if any, table beets more productive. It will meet the require- 

 ments of market-men, and it is certainly one of the very best lor the home 

 garden. 



