200 THE CULTURE OF FLOWERS FROM SEEDS 



advance, or one tending more directly to the public advantage, than in 

 the improvement of the strains and races and stocks of the seeds of 

 florists' flowers. For all the ordinary, and for the highest of the 

 ordinary, purposes of the floriculturist, the raising of these plants from 

 seed is sufficient, provided always that the seed is produced and saved 

 with the aid of all the knowledge that experience has brought to bear 

 upon the business. Why should a man who has to decorate a con- 

 servatory and a set of flower-beds be subjected to the worry of 

 working up a stock of soft-textured plants from offsets and cuttings, 

 when the sowing of a pinch of seed will insure to him all he can 

 desire at a tenth part of the trouble, and with a greater degree of 

 certainty ? Why encumber pits and frames and houses with stores of 

 troublesome plants that might be thrown away with advantage, leaving 

 the glass at liberty to produce winter Cucumbers and Kidney Beans 

 and Mushrooms, or to shelter the nobler forms of permanent vege- 

 tation, and encourage plant beauty of the highest interest ? The 

 growth of florists' and decorative flowers from seed is a gain every 

 way to the community, for the process liberates glass and garden 

 room, labour, time, and money for better work than the perpetuation 

 of named varieties, the beauty of which can, for all practical pur- 

 poses, be equalled by stock raised from seed. The return to old 

 methods will soon be made whenever it shall be found that the seed 

 stocks have degenerated. 



As the true florist is the best friend of the floral decorator, so he is 

 the right-hand man of the producer of flower seeds of high quality. 

 It is to him we must look for maintaining in all their integrity the 

 true canons of floral perfection, and to these canons our stocks and 

 strains must conform less or more, and the more the better. And 

 beyond this the florists are our friends. By their severe rules of 

 criticism they assist us subjectively, and by the actual results of their 

 agreeable labours they bring objective aid, their finest flowers serving 

 not only as our types, but as the actual stud to breed from. Thus 

 the decline of floriculture implies the deterioration of flowers, and, on 

 the other hand, the prosperity of floriculture is concurrently reflected 

 in the improved and improving quality of flowers of all kinds, in- 

 cluding such as the florists have never taken any special notice of. 

 They constitute the school in which the public taste is formed, and 

 they provide the ideas and the materials which aid in the gratification 

 and advancement of the taste which finds in flowers an intellectual 

 as well as a sensuous exercise. Let us not, therefore, be unmindful 

 of the importance of the study of technical details and hereditary 



