6 Commercial Gardening 



at different periods of the year. In some cases exhibitions on the Conti- 

 nent are also visited, and in this way some firms have worked up a large 

 international or cosmopolitan trade. These exhibitions naturally cost 

 much money, not only for transport, but for the maintenance and lodging 

 of the necessary staff; and it is essential to reap a good harvest in the 

 way of orders to enable one to pay the expenses and leave a balance on 

 the right side. 



Market Gardening- and Market Growing-. The business of the 

 market gardener and the market grower is different in a technical sense. 

 The market gardener proper, as a rule, grows fruits and vegetables on 

 a large scale in the same way that the farmer grows corn and root crops. 

 If he indulges in glass at all it is a few frames at the most to raise early 

 supplies of seedlings to put out at the first favourable opportunity in 

 spring; or he may use bell glasses or cloches to protect his early cauli- 

 flowers and marrows, much in the same way as the French cultivators do. 



Market gardening has been a great industry in the Thames valley for 

 generations, and notwithstanding the operations of the builder, and the 

 enormous growth of the London suburbs, there is still a large area around 

 the metropolis devoted to market gardening. Of course the market 

 gardener is being pushed farther and farther out, but with improved 

 methods of transit, and better roads, the man twenty or thirty miles from 

 London is probably in as good a position as his predecessor was fifty or 

 sixty years ago, when only a dozen miles from Covent Garden. Old 

 market-garden districts like Deptford, Fulham, and Chelsea have been 

 wiped out by the builder, and buildings and roads now take the place 

 of cabbages, rhubarb, fruit trees and bushes that not so many years 

 ago made those neighbourhoods truly rural. This pressure from the 

 centre has naturally driven the market gardener farthei out, and such 

 places as Feltham, Ashford, Sipson, Staines, West Drayton, Harmonds- 

 worth, Bedfont, Shepperton, Stanwell, and Cranford, in Middlesex, are 

 becoming covered with fruit and vegetable gardens. Kent, Surrey, and 

 Essex are being invaded in much the same way, and there seems to be 

 a tendency to increase the acreage under these crops. From Mortlake 

 to Richmond and Petersham, on the south side of the Thames, market 

 gardens still exist, but it will probably not be for very long. Chiswick, 

 on the north bank, still contains some of its ancient market gardens, and 

 these extend to Brentford, Isle worth, Heston, and Hounslow; but in these 

 famous market-garden areas the builder is rapidly covering the ground 

 with bricks and mortar. The vale of Evesham in Worcestershire has 

 become famous as a centre, not only for the market culture of fruits and 

 vegetables, but also as the first place in the British Islands where " inten- 

 sive cultivation " as practised around Paris was established. For particulars 

 of this system the reader is referred to Vol. IV. 



While the market gardener is seeking fresh fields for his labours, 

 the market grower who brings his crops to maturity under glass has 

 come very much to the front during the past thirty or forty years. 



