VI 



Preface 



it severely alone evidently under the impression that he is trying to 

 push unduly the sale of what he considers to be a useless drug on the 

 market. Many excellent plants have met this fate, and it has taken years 

 before others have become sufficiently well-known to florists, greengrocers, 

 and street sellers to make their cultivation at all profitable. Sometimes, 

 however, a new kind or variety will jump into popular favour at once, and 

 the commercial gardener, who is regularly in touch with the markets and 

 is being constantly influenced by their atmosphere and traditions, proceeds 

 at once to propagate and cultivate the new favourite in sufficiently large 

 quantities to meet the demand. In this way some of the older favourites 

 are gradually displaced by the newer ones, and it is only when one comes 

 to compare the kinds or varieties of plants or flowers that were sold in 

 quantities twenty, thirty, or fifty years ago with those sold at the present 

 day, that one realizes what enormous changes have taken place. 



Not only have new races superseded old ones, but the cultural methods 

 of commercial gardeners have also undergone remarkable changes. Cleaner 

 and more economic methods of cultivation also prevail to-day, and gar- 

 deners who have to make a living out of the growth of plants have in 

 many cases come to recognize the vast importance of the scientific aspects 

 of their calling. In these days the grower who would erect glasshouses 

 with small panes of glass and an enormous quantity of timber would be 

 regarded as insane. The importance of light and fresh air is now so well 

 understood, that the main object in view is to secure as much of each, 

 especially during the winter months, as is possible. 



The market gardener has perhaps more to learn in this respect than 

 the market grower. In many instances he practises the old and erroneous 

 farming system of cramming and crowding his fruit trees and bushes to- 

 gether in such a way that in a few years they become a mass of diseased 

 and distorted vegetation, yielding very poor, if any, profit. It is one 

 of the most difficult things to make some of the old school of market 

 gardeners and farmers realize that the great bulk of the dry weight of 

 any plant fruit, flower, or vegetable is obtained from the carbon of the 

 atmosphere under the influence of sunlight. They simply will not believe 

 it because they cannot see it. It is ever present to the minda of such that 

 to give any plant a fair amount of space and air and light, according to 

 its nature, would be " wasting ground ", as they term it. The natural 

 corollary to this lack of knowledge is the thought that the greater the 

 number of plants put into a given area of ground, the larger and better 



