124 AMERICAN CARNATION CULTURE 



Heredity and evolution are two forces in Nature. One is pro- 

 phetic; the other, reminiscent. One seeks to return to primitive 

 types, the other seeks to advance old standards. One yearns for 

 flesh pots; the other, for the promised land. 



This simple law accounts for all the capricious habits and 

 modified forms of vegetation in the world. Every species of plants 

 has bands, belts, zones or isothermal lines along which they 

 reach their highest evolvement. If they are moved out of their 

 climatic home they sport into different types adapted by climatic 

 selection. Plants as they migrate toward the poles become an- 

 nuals; toward the equator, perennials. The Nasturtion is. an an- 

 nual vine in the temperate zone; a perennial shrub at the equator. 

 No carnation acclimatized in England, Germany or California 

 ever was, nor can be, immediately successful in the remontant car- 

 nation zone in the states. 



Heredity is less strenuously impressed on embryonic life. 

 Henzie's White was from imported seed, as were many other ex- 

 cellent varieties. A carnation seed fertilized in Eufurt, if its an- 

 cestors possessed the forcing and perpetual blooming features of 

 the Alegatiere type, germinated and grown in Chicago, would 

 strongly incline to the type of carnations grown there. A Lap- 

 lander's child, born and bred in Boston, would imbibe the habits of 

 the "Hub" and "benevolently assimilate" with the decendants of 

 Miles Standish and Paul Reviere. Adaptation starts with new 

 life, in the crypt of conception, and not through a line of cuttings, 

 which is the continuance of old life. After fifteen generations of 

 life by cuttings, Henzie's White sulkily left the field to better 

 kinds, the same robust, hardy, late blooming carnation as when it 

 started on its conquering career. 



Buttercup, the oldest carnation in cultivation, is today the 

 same proud, capricious, Cleopatrian queen, bewitching with its 

 dawn-lit beauty a world of Anthonys, as when it leaped from the 

 tactful fingers of Charles Starr, thirty years ago. Its amazing 

 health and vigorous constitution is a defiant denial that propaga- 

 ting by cuttings is devitalizing and an imperious assertion of the 

 fact that varieties die only from the poison of neglect. Bouton d' 



