50 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Stove Plants ix their Native Tropics. 



By Professor George L. Goodale, of Harvard University, Cambridge. 



In the language of horticulturists, stove plants are those Avliich 

 require a higli degree of heat and moisture for their most thrifty 

 growth and their best estate. Without any exception worth men- 

 tioning, such plants are natives of the tropics, and it is the 

 endeavor of cultivators to give them conditions of a tropical cli- 

 mate. But it must be clearly understood that within the tropics 

 there are two distinct types of climatic conditions : one character- 

 ized by abundant moisture in the soil and atmosphere, and the 

 other by great aridity. In fact, some of the larger deserts lie 

 within the tropics, and yield to our greenliouses only a few plants 

 from their oases. It is jnerely the difference in the amount of 

 water that makes the difference between any oasis and the sterile 

 waste around it. It is, therefore, only with the plants which are 

 native to the moist parts of the tropics that we have to deal when 

 we examine the vegetation that we confine to our hothouses or 

 '' stoves." 



Near the equator there is a somewhat irregular and interrupted 

 belt, which runs as a zone around the very warm, moist parts of 

 the earth, and within this zone there is a nearly equable climate. 

 North and south of it there is a dry season, followed by a rainy 

 one, but in the equatorial belt one day is much like every other 

 through the year. The temperature at night is always high 

 enough to insure the best conditions for the growth of plants, and 

 thus to utilize to the best purpose the materials which the green 

 foliage has been preparing during the hours of daylight. Green 

 plants are so many factories for the manufacture of starch and 

 other food and building matters in their structure, and this work 

 goes on only in the light. The only materials needed in this 

 work are carbon-dioxide, commonly called carbonic acid, and water, 

 with small traces of mineral substance, such as salts of potassium, 

 calcium, and magnesium, together with more or less nitrogen. 



It is plain that in the tropics, as in our best managed stoves, 

 plants are well provided for all their wants, and all they have to 

 do is to work in the sunlight, and grow at night. There are no 

 climatic foes; all the foes are the competing plants, or the animals 

 at every point. To compete successfully with the one and to 

 resist the otlier, demands most varied forms and characteristics. 



