48 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



professions. The time lias gone by when floriculture was an 

 effeminate diversion. Of course when virile men are busy 

 opening a continent to commerce, and wrestling with the stern 

 pioneer facts that dispute every inch of a man's progress towards 

 success in any business, they are not thinking about posy beds ; 

 but as surely as a refined and intelligent man gets beyond the 

 critical stage of his business or professional development, the 

 tastes of his mind will come to the surface and he will yield to 

 the sweet seduction of such diversions as have restful pleasure 

 in them ; and, speaking for this mundane world, the very man 

 who is running under the highest pressure of business is the man 

 who must yield to the enticement of some pleasant hobby or 

 speedily terminate his suicidal career. I do a good deal of floral 

 preaching outside the pupit, for I consider that there is no higher 

 humanitarian mission than to persuade men to wed some hobby 

 that shall make them absolutely forget their daily vocation 

 for an hour or for a half-day. I will challenge any man to find 

 an avocation that will more restfully exercise and at the same 

 time divert body, mind, and spirit than some special line of flori- 

 culture. 



A short time ago floriculture was what it was to your dear old 

 grandmother, a medley of confused flowers. But a new era in 

 floriculture has dawned. Life is now too short to master even 

 one flower as we have come to understand it. A man deserves 

 to be knighted who takes some sweet floral nymph of the woods, 

 or some old-fashioned favorite of our childhood garden, and 

 makes a royal family of it, unlocking the mysterious colors that 

 are hidden in its pale bosom, and turning one modest little Cin- 

 derella into a hundred queens of beauty and proud grace. What 

 Mr. Eckford has done for the Sweet Pea, a score of other conse- 

 crated noblemen have done for other flowers. The time has not 

 come to canonize these men. They have come through the humble 

 walk of being some rich man's gardener, or they are down on 

 their knees in communion with the soil, wearing the poor man's 

 clothes, earning the pittance of a struggling florist, happy if 

 some lady Avill pay the cheap price of a nosegay. But if you 

 will believe it they are ushering in the day when floriculture will 

 be the queen of arts, and when men of the proudest ambition and 

 intelligence will aspire to have their names associated in monu- 

 mental remembrance with the development of some flower. We 



