24 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



father's garden on the corner of Front Street (now Harrison 

 Avenue) and Oak Street, in Boston, where Scotch polyanthuses 

 and ladies' delights about as large as a nickel grew. Her father 

 would have been astonished at the size of the pansies now grown. 

 There were also two varieties of honeysuckles, roses, and mari- 

 golds, and a few fall chrysanthemums, the whole furnishing a 

 succession of flowers until frost. There is a fashion in flowers. 

 Marigolds, at one time in her recollection much prized, came to 

 be looked on with scorn, and are now popular again. Mrs. 

 Wolcott spoke of the garden of the late Edward M. Richards, for 

 many years Vice President of this Society, in Dedham, where he 

 introduced new pseonies and irises. The flowers used in window 

 gardening are less changed than the out-door flowers, though the 

 oxalis has been added, and she did not remember horse-shoe 

 geraniums, but the rose geraniums are the same. She likes the 

 Society, though she finds a good deal of fault with it. There is 

 much to be done to make children and old people happy by the 

 cultivation of flowers. 



Robert Manning said that the apple mentioned by the essayist 

 as the Cathead was probably the variety known as the Ipswich 

 Cathead, a medium sized fruit of flattened conical form, with a 

 red cheek, and quite distinct from the large, coarse, green apple, 

 described by Coxe and later writers under the same name. The 

 High Sweeting, he thought probably the kind now known as 

 the Hightop Sweeting, which is supposed to have originated in 

 Plymouth Colony, soon after the settlement of the country. The 

 tree is of very upright growth. About fifteen years ago, he visited 

 the fair of the Marshfield Agricultural Society, with the late Hon. 

 Marshall P. Wilder, when one of the townspeople took them in 

 his wagon to the home and tomb of Daniel Webster, and on the 

 way pointed out a row of Hightop Sweeting trees said to be more 

 than two hundred years old. 



President Walcott spoke of the garden at the birthplace of Dr. 

 Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Cambridge, which was reconstructed 

 by him after the death of his mother at the age of over ninety 

 years. He gave a very interesting account in the " Atlantic 

 Almanac" for 1868, of the reconstruction. The flowers had 

 yielded their places to weeds and the gravel walks to grass, but 

 "The Garden" still existed in his memory; the walks were all 

 mapped out there, and the place of every herb and flower was laid 



