194 PLAIN ANT&amp;gt; PLEASAXT TALK 



autumnal use, and we procure a (so called) winter sort. 

 We need one pea for its earliness : but early fruit seldom 

 has size or a high flavor ; we desire other varieties, there 

 fore, for flavor, even though, in giving them a longer 

 period to perfect their juices, we have a late pea. But some 

 men raise peas for market, and cannot aiford to raise a -pea 

 merely because fine-flavored, unless also it is prolific. Then, 

 once more, market peas must be raised, usually as a field- 

 pea, and sown broadcast. Some peas stand up stronger 

 than others, and these are of course preferred. Now, as we 

 cannot find any vegetable that combines all the qualities of 

 earliness, size, flavor, and adaptation to variety of soil and 

 diversity of cultivation, we come as near to it as possible, 

 by gaining varieties, in which some one or more of these 

 qualities are better developed than in any others. The rea 

 sons for multiplying varieties aiford a rule by which they 

 may be limited. 



The fact that a seed is a variety different from all others 

 is no good reason for retaining or cultivating it ; it must, in 

 SOME respects, surpass others now in use, or it only encum 

 bers the garden. What is the use of ten varieties of peas 

 ripening at the same time of one size, and differing from 

 each other in not one assignable particular ? When a cata 

 logue enumerates j^y varieties of cabbage, or pea, or bean, 

 are we to believe that each of the fifty has a virtue peculiar 

 to itself? If not, if two-thirds of them have no merit 

 which is not found, and found in a higher degree, in the 

 one-third they have no business to be retained. Let the 

 one-third, stand and the rest be erased. We regard a very 

 fat catalogue as we do a very fat man all the worse for its 

 obesity. In comparing catalogues, we are not left as much 

 without an authoritative standard of judgment, in respect 

 to a proper extension of the number of varieties, as might 

 at first appear. English gardening has been carried to such 

 a degree of excellence, both as an art and as a science, that 

 we may regard the deliberate judgment of the best gar 



