AMERICAN VS. BRITISH HORTICULTURE. 85 



continually endeavoring to extract " sunshine from cucumbers," in 

 a climate where nothing grows golden and ripe without coaxing na- 

 ture's smiles under glass-houses ! 



For theorists, who know little of human nature, it is easy to 

 answer " well, when British gardeners come to a climate totally 

 different from their own where sunshine is so plenty that they can 

 raise melons and peaches as easily as they once did cauliflowers 

 and gooseberries why, they will open their eyes to such glaring 

 facts, and alter their practice accordingly." Very good reasoning, 

 indeed. But anybody who knows the effect of habit and education 

 on character, knows that it is as difficult for an Irishman to make 

 due allowance for American sunshine and heat, as for a German to 

 forget sour-krout, or a Yankee to feel an instinctive reverence for 

 royalty. There is a whole lifetime of education, national habit, 

 daily practice, to gvercome, and reason seldom has complete sway 

 over the minds of men rather in the habit of practising a system, 

 than referring to principles, in their every-day labors. 



Rapid as the progress of horticulture is at the present time in 

 the United States, there can be no doubt that it is immensely re- 

 tarded by this disadvantage, that all our gardeners have been edu- 

 cated in the school of British horticulture. It is their misfortune, 

 since they have the constant obstacle to contend with, of not under- 

 standing the necessities of our climate, and therefore endeavoring to 

 carry out a practice admirably well suited where they learned it 

 but most ill suited to the country where they are to practise it. It 

 is our misfortune, because we suffer doubly by their mistakes first, 

 in the needless money they spend in their failures and second, in 

 the discouragement they throw upon the growing taste for garden- 

 ing among us. A gentleman who is himself ignorant of gardening, 

 establishes himself at a country-seat. He engages the best gar- 

 dener he can find. The latter fails in one half that he attempts, 

 and the proprietor, knowing nothing of the reason of the failures, 

 attributes to the difficulties of the thing itself, what should be attri- 

 buted to the want of knowledge, or experience of the soil and cli- 

 mate, in the gardener. 



A case of this kind, which has recently come under our notice, 

 is too striking an illustration not to be worth mentioning here. In 



