228 PRACTICAL FLORICULTURE. 



some well-conducted establishment one that has been 

 long enough established to have made the business a suc- 

 cess, for the best index of ability in any business is suc- 

 cess. I have said, if it can be afforded, as for the first 

 two years, unless a youth prove himself unusually smart, 

 he will not likely receive more than enough to pay his 

 board, for he is simply an apprentice under instructions, 

 who has come with the design of leaving when he has 

 acquired a knowledge of the trade, and just at the time 

 that he begins to be of use to his employer. 



But to those to whom it would be inconvenient to place 

 themselves thus under instructions, a knowledge of the 

 business could be unquestionably obtained from books, 

 particularly if actual practice were followed conjointly 

 with the reading. There are upward of a hundred of my 

 patrons (about one tenth of whom are ladies), located in 

 neai-ly every State of the Union, who have worked them- 

 selves into the florists' business exclusively by reading 

 and their own practice, having had no opportunity for 

 other instruction. In not a few cases some of these have 

 got ahead of what is known as professional gardeners, 

 those who have had no other experience than that received 

 in private gardens in Europe, which by no means fits them 

 for the American style of commercial floriculture. The 

 increase of taste for flowers for the past twenty years has 

 been truly wonderful. A gentleman who has a turn for 

 statistics in this particular line, informed me that he had 

 begun to procure information from all parts of the coun- 

 try of the numbers engaged in the trade together with 

 the capital employed. He said that his investigations for 

 this locality, taken in the rough, extending in a radius of 

 ten miles from the center of New York Island, proved 

 that the number of florists' establishments was about five 

 hundred, and the capital used in stock and structures 

 upwards of $6,000,000. If the number of establishments 

 is nearly correct and there is no reason to doubt it I 



