THE FLORISTS' MANUAL. 



J25 



Good advice, so long as nurserymen 

 won't furnish you a tree that has been 

 transplanted and furnished with a 

 compact ball of roots. 



You must remember that many of 

 the evergreens that are hardy in the 

 vicinity of New York and Boston are 

 useless in land in the latitude of Chi- 

 cago, and many are catalogued as 

 hardy, such as Cedrus deodara and Cu- 

 pressus Lawsoniana. They are use- 

 less in our vicinity. It is not only 

 the low temperature but some other 

 climatic influence that kills them or 

 leaves them stunted, crippled objects. 



Several of the abies are fine, includ- 

 ing alba, white spruce; canadensis, 

 hemlock spruce, and excelsa, Norway 

 spruce, many forms of it. Several 

 junipers, the Irish, Swedish and our 

 own red cedar, J. virginiana. Picea 

 pungens, the Colorado blue spruce, is 

 the most beautiful of our conifers, and 

 P. balsamea, P. concolor and P. Nord- 

 maniana, are fine trees. The pines are 

 the noblest of the conifers. The Aus- 

 trian is one of our hardiest trees, and 

 so is P. sylvestris, the Scotch pine. 

 P. strobus, our native white pine, and 

 P. cembra, the stone pine. 



The retinosporas are dense growing, 

 compact evergreens, and are good and 

 hardy. The Thuyas (arbor-vitae) 

 make handsome trees. T. occidentalis 

 is our yellow or white cedar, and T. 

 orientalis is the Siberian or Chinese 

 arbor-vitae, a very compact, hardy ev- 

 ergreen. Taxodium distichum, the 

 southern cypress, though deciduous, 



Garden of Hardy Plants in a Public Park. 



like our American larch, is a conifer 

 and makes a splendid specimen for our 

 lawns, and the giants of the south 

 provide us with its invaluable timber. 

 For dwarf evergreens the taxus (yew) 

 are unequaled. They are hardy and 

 have several ornamental forms. 



It is characteristic of many of the 

 conifers that they vary much in form 

 and color, hence the many varieties 

 that are now known, and to this varia- 

 tion we owe the several golden forms 

 we have in the thuyas, taxus and reti- 

 nosporas. 



I have said nothing about propaga- 

 tion of the shrubs because that is 

 a nurseryman's business, and unless 

 you are in the business to some ex- 

 tent you had better buy the shrubs 

 from reputable nurserymen. Even 

 they depend largely on importing 

 small plants from France from spe- 

 cialists who raise millions of the lead- 

 ing varieties and supply them at a 

 seemingly very low cost. If you have 

 a few acres of good light soil, easy 

 to work, it would be a good invest- 

 ment to buy a thousand or so of small 

 plants of the leading kinds and in 

 two years you will have shrubs that 

 you can sell your" customers with the 

 greatest confidence. 



The long list of noble trees I can- 

 not enter on. Nurserymen publish de- 

 scriptive catalogues of all desirable 

 kinds. I am not in favor of trans- 

 planting large trees from the woods of 

 our native elms and maples. They 

 survive a few years, but generally col- 

 lapse in three or four, 



HEATING. 



There are only two recognized meth- 

 ods of heating our glass structures, 

 steam and hot water. Brick flues have 

 gone and electricity has not come, 

 but it may. Some fifteen years ago 

 heating greenhouses by steam came 

 with a rush, although it had long been 

 used as a means of heating dwellings 

 and large buildings. Men who had 

 .been at first most sanguine about its 

 superiority over water began to hesi- 

 tate and consider whether after all 

 hot water had not the most advan- 

 tages. A patriarch of the business, 

 Mr. Peter Henderson, being asked by 

 the writer in 1889 which was the best 

 way to heat, inquired what system I 

 was then using. On being 'told "hot 

 water," the reply came quick and 

 brief, "Keep on with the hot water." 



But after all this ebb and flow of 

 popular favor it is now well estab- 

 lished that with an improved system 

 of piping, steam for many establish- 

 ments is the cheapest and best, and 

 although by no means claiming to 

 know of steam what I do of the circu- 

 lation of water, we will first consider 



Steam Heating. 



Steam as applied to heating green- 

 houses has several advantages over 

 water. Heat is quickly produced by 

 steam and sent through the houses 

 in case of a quick fall of the outside 

 temperature. It is also quickly re- 

 duced or entirely absent in the pipes 

 should you see in the early morning 



