290 HOW TO GROW SPECIMEN PLANTS. 



The great difference between growing plants for home 

 decoration and for exhibition will hardly be realized. 

 There was always an opposite mode of treatment required 

 in many particulars, but the system of showing has 

 become so widely opposed to judicious management at 

 home, that gardening for the home and the foreign 

 department affect us like two different sciences. The 

 necessary preparation for transmission from one place to 

 another, and constant jumbling about, has converted all 

 our natural plants into artificial ones. Not one produc- 

 tion in a hundred is shown in its natural form. We can 

 excuse this when we remember that plants have to be 

 taken for miles, jumbling up hill and 'down dale, over 

 rough roads and stone streets, before they reach their 

 destination, and then have to be got into the carts and 

 got home again the same day ; for, if the branches were 

 in their natural state, playing freely in the air, they would 

 be frayed to destruction by the mere action of rubbing 

 against each other. But we must own, at the same time, 

 that a plant, with every branch and bloom constrained in 

 its place, and bound mechanically to some formal sup- 

 port, is no more fit to compare with one fairly grown 

 and unconstrained than an artificial plant would be with 



