LUTHER BURBANK 



Mr. Burbank does not employ this method, as 

 he works on too comprehensive a scale, but it is 

 used by Professor Hugo De Vries, the celebrated 

 Amsterdam botanist. In his experiment gardens 

 at Amsterdam, you may see heaps of dirt being 

 thus renovated with the aid of time and the ele- 

 ments, and any amateur who operates on a small 

 scale may imitate the example. 



Ordinarily, of course, it will be more expedient 

 to practice rotation of crops, giving your soil the 

 additional benefit of occasional sprinkling with 

 a germicide. But for the benefit of the small beds 

 located in some particular part of the lawn where 

 you wish, for example, to keep cannas or gladioli 

 or tulips season after season, the more trouble- 

 some but highly effective method of using two 

 coatings of soil in alternate years may be worthy 

 of consideration. 



SOME GIGANTIC FLOWEBS 



Among Mr. Burbank 's almost endless experi- 

 ments with bulbous plants, perhaps none have 

 greater interest than those that have to do with 

 the not very familiar plants which are known to 

 the horticulturist under the name of Amaryllis, 

 but which really belong to several somewhat 

 closely allied genera. One true amaryllis (the 

 so-called belladonna lily) is a rather common 

 plant indigenous to the United States. But the 

 plants that go by the name in horticultural circles 

 are mostly of the genus Hippeastrum, and have 



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