xvi AUTHORS' PREFACE 



kitchen-garden plants have been to us a subject of long-continued 

 labour and much care. Some persons, perhaps, may consider them 

 to be somewhat vague and elastic in their expression, and such a 

 remark may apply to many of them ; but, on the other hand, if they 

 had been more hard and fast, and had been drawn up in more 

 peremptory terms, they would not be so true. Account must be 

 taken of the variable appearance of cultivated plants under the 

 different conditions in which they are grown. A season more or 

 less favourable, or sowing earlier or later the same season, is sufficient 

 to produce a material alteration in the appearance of a plant, and 

 a precise description of it as it then presents itself would obviously 

 exclude other forms of it which should be included. Nothing is 

 easier than to describe a single individual in the most exact terms, 

 just as it is the easiest thing in the world to draw precise conclusions 

 from a single experiment ; but when a description is to be applicable 

 to a great number of individuals of the same variety and the same 

 race, the task is more difficult, in the same degree as it is when one 

 endeavours to form a conclusion at the close of a series of experi- 

 ments which give different and sometimes contrary results. Nearly 

 all our descriptions, which in the first instance were drawn up with 

 the growing plants before our eyes, have been, from time to time 

 and season after season, read over again with new crops of the 

 same plants before us. It is the variations which we have noted 

 in the size and appearance of the same plants when grown under 

 .different conditions that have induced us to pen our descriptions 

 with a broadness which enables them to include the different aspects 

 which the same kind of plant assumes according to the different 

 circumstances under which it is grown. 



Whenever we have been able to seize upon any prominent and 

 really permanent feature in the characteristics of a variety, whether 

 that feature may be found in some important peculiarity or in a fixed 

 uniformity in the size or shape of variable organs, we have been 

 careful to bring it conspicuously into view, as the surest means of 

 recognising the variety in question. Most frequently, in fact, the 

 experienced cultivator of kitchen-garden plants recognises different 

 varieties from one another by the general appearance of each, the 

 peculiar aspect which the plant presents, and which more frequently 

 depends on certain proportions in the position and relative size of 

 the various organs than on any strictly structural characteristics. 

 Such distinctive marks, although they never escape a practised eye, 



