102 PRACTICAL, FLORICULTURE. 



practice of many of our agricultural and horticultural 

 journals, of selecting from English papers articles that 

 often seriously mislead. For example, a Boston maga- 

 zine a year or two ago copied a long article from the 

 English Journal of Horticulture, telling us in a very 

 patronizing way how to propagate the golden tricolor- 

 leaved geraniums. The writer laid great stress on having 

 a sharp knife and cutting the slip in a particular manner, 

 then to insert it in silver sand, and a lot of other non- 

 sense that any boy of six months' practice here would 

 have known was absurd ; but, above all, the operation 

 was to be performed in July ! He might have got the 

 sharpest knife that was ever made, and the purest silver 

 sand that ever lay on the seashore, but he would have ut- 

 terly failed in our climate, if he attempted the work in 

 July. This is only one of scores of such absurd selec- 

 tions as we see yearly in some of our horticultural jour- 

 nals. If the conductors of such have not original matter 

 to fill up with, better far that they leave their pages blank 

 than to show their utter ignorance of what is suitable to 

 our climate. 



CHAPTER XVH. 



HOW PLANTS AND FLOWERS ABE GROWN. 



Many of my readers live so remote from our great 

 cities and towns, that "Flower manufacturing," as it may 

 be termed, is something by them unseen and even un- 

 heard of. To such the accompanying sketches, taken in 

 the middle of the month of December, from our establish- 

 ment in Jersey City, N. J., may be interesting as well as 

 instructive. 



Figure 31 represents an inside section of a propagating 

 house. This has a propagating bench or table on each 

 side, having a ledge to it, and is covered with about three 



