PIGEA (SPRUCE) 477 



You can purchase from your nurseryman seedlings or trans- 

 planted seedlings of Norway Spruce for a few dollars per hundred. 

 These lined out will grow in four or five years into nice stock 

 ranging from two to four feet or thereabouts in height. During 

 these years if you set out enough plants, you will have stock to 

 draw from for the filling of porch and window boxes for Winter 

 effects. You will have calls occasionally for small plants that 

 someone wants for planting out; or in December the most perfect 

 plants can be potted up to answer as miniature Christmas trees, the 

 call for which seems to be on the increase from year to year. Many 

 people prefer a neat, well-developed little tree about eighteen 

 inches high for the center of the dining table, either in a pot or set 

 on a block of wood. (See Fig. 269, page 524.) 



I hate to think of sacrificing any kind of conifer and consider 

 it a crime to do so, yet as long as people demand and will pay 

 for them, it would be foolish not to supply them. While some 

 prefer a small size tree to a larger one, there are others again who 

 use both and still others who will select a half-dozen or so of these 

 small Spruces to be sent as gifts to their friends. Sometimes they 

 require a little trimming up; others order them with only a crepe 

 paper around the pot. 



If a florist with room will keep on for about six or eight years 

 planting out each Spring a certain number of such Spruces and will 

 keep on transplanting and giving more space to the larger ones, 

 he will, at the end of the eighth year have a valuable lot of stock 

 on his land which will bring him better returns than almost anything 

 he could plant. To make doubly sure of large returns, along with 

 those Christmas trees he should plant each year a few Colorado 

 Blue Spruce, a few P. Engelmannii and some P. DouglasiL They are 

 all awfully slow while small, but you don't notice this after you 

 have a stock under way and small ones coming on each year. 



If you happen to live in a country town you should encourage 

 the use of live Christmas trees. A 6- or 8-ft. Norway Spruce may 

 be lifted with a frozen ball of soil, burlapped and used for three 

 or four days in a cool room or sun porch for Christmas and planted 

 out later. It isn't claimed that every tree so treated will live or 

 do well, but a majority of them will, and the smaller the tree the 

 more apt it is to grow into a good specimen in years to come. Advise 

 customers who buy these little living trees to prepare places for 

 them in the Fall and mulch them well to keep the ground from 

 freezing. The plants can then be set out when the holidays are 

 over with the least trouble and maximum chances of their living. 



PINCUSHION FLOWER PINKS 



See Scabiosa See Dianthus 



