66 tltE CA^*ADlAN rtORTICULTUKlST. 



growing new varieties with perfect flowers from hybridized seed, I will 

 give a quotation from the English Gardeners' Chronicle of 1843. The 

 writer says : " We have observed in almost every variety of straw-' 

 berry that we have seen in cultivation, that some of its plants occur 

 occasionally bearing all male blossoms, and othefs none but female 

 blossoms." "By fat the greatei* number of plants in each variety have 

 separate male and female flowers on the same jplant" I will simply 

 Iremark, with regard to the last quotation, that no such imperfect 

 floweriilg strawberries have ever been grown by any Canadian in my 

 time, and I question very much if any person has ever seen in America 

 perfect female and male flowers growing separately on the same plant. 

 But it may be just as well to remark that very few if any strawberries 

 of Englisli origin have ever proved perfect or satisfactory in their 

 flowers in this country, and not until 1834, wlien Hovey, of Boston^ 

 Mass., introduced his seedling, was any real progress made in growing 

 Strawberry seedlings in America. Even this was a pistilate variety > 

 and was very apt to be barren, or bear very imperfect fruit, unless 

 some staminate variety was grown near by. But with a portion of the 

 V)ed being planted with our wild strawberries, Hovey's Seedling would 

 produce a very fine crop of large aild delicious fruit. 



The great improvement of the Hovey over all others of its day 

 caused many intelligent persons to grow seedling strawberries, with a 

 view to getting hermaphrodite varieties, (that is strawberries bearnig 

 flowers with stamens and pistils in each flower, instead of in separate 

 flowers,) and thus prevent barrenness. It will no doubt sound strange 

 to many readers of the HoUticiTlturist to be told that in this year^ 

 1881, there are such things ih Canada as barren strawberry beds; and 

 yet that there are a great inany of these barren beds in every county 

 in Ontario 1 have no doubt. The only cause of this barrenness that 

 I know of is the imperfection of the flowers, i.e. purely staminate or 

 purely pistilate flowers. 



til every old strawberry bed there will be sure to be a number of 

 seedlings sjjring up, and it often happens that many of these plants 

 bear such imperfect flowers as never to bear fruit of any kind ; yet 

 they are very prolific in runners, and these runners are frequently the 

 largest and healthiest plants in the bed. Now it will easily be seen 

 that to plant a new bed from runners grown in such a bed as this will 

 be at the risk of having a barren strawberry bed. Although sucli 



