1895.] ESSAYS. 61 



at our Hall has not been so liberal as it used to be. I don't know why 

 it is. I don't see why any lover of flowers should forego the pleasure 

 of having a few Gladiolus. 



Question. How long does it take those little bulblets to flower? 



Answer. It will take three years. The first year of their growth, 

 you get a little bulb as large as a pea ; but the bulb, as that is now, 

 will grow right on the top of that little one that is inside, and it will 

 be just about as large as what that is. Next year that will make a 

 good reasonable growth. My seeds will make bulbs from the size of 

 a good Marrow pea up to the size of a walnut. I don't know but what 

 they would keep on growing all the time. I have never tried it ; but I 

 think I will go home and sow some seeds to see if they will grow 

 continually and keep growing and come into flower. 



Mr. Draper. By planting them as thick as he suggests, so many 

 stalks together will be self-supporting. I have very clear recollec- 

 tions of the way J. M. Earle used to plant Gladiolus. I happened to 

 be at his place one time when he was laying out a l)ed. He was a 

 vei'v methodical man. He had laid out his bed the length of his gar- 

 den and four to five feet wide, made it very rich and raked it over ; 

 and then he had that marked out as regular as the squares on a 

 checker-board, so that every bulb would be planted six or eight inches 

 apart. Then he would place his Gladiolus where those cross squares 

 would intersect each other, and six inches in depth. Thus they were 

 planted so many inches apart each way and just so many inches deep. 

 They were very symmetrical. 



One thing about Gladiolus ; there is no flower that will keep so 

 long in the house as that will. There is no flower that will produce 

 a better effect. 



Mr. Watts. I would like to say I have tried this thing and proved 

 that so much labor is perfectly useless. You had better put them in 

 as I have put them in, and take a chair and sit down and watch them 

 grow. 



I will show you that all the labor of our friend Earle and the way 

 he put them in is perfectly useless and amounts to nothing. 



There, now, he has taken a good deal of pains to put them in per- 

 fectly upright, and put them down just six inches. Now this eye on 

 top dies, this one here below is going to grow ; but it is not going to 

 come up straight, it is going to start right up here. Now he has lost 

 his line of symmetry. If he is going to put a stake there, he can do 

 it easily enough. I used to do as everybody else did. I used the 

 stakes to keep the Gladiolus straight, but now I have abandoned that 

 * and put down strong stakes, about three in the length of this room, 



