



JLORISTS^ 



CAN KENTIAS COME 



FROM THE COAST? 



Six years of studied and steady development at Sierra Madre, Cal., have 

 gone far toward demonstrating that the Belgian palms shut out hy the guar- AsJW't 



antine can he replaced hy production there under slat shade. Principally a >^^'v 



matter of patience, perseverance and depth of the producer's purse. 



HETHER or not palms can 

 be grown on a commercial 

 scale under the conditions 

 of southern California de- 

 pends on the ability of 

 the growers to "estab- 

 lish" the plants without 

 bottom heat. That bot- 

 tom heat is necessary has 

 been the belief of most 

 plantsmen, both on the coast and in 

 the east, but on his return to Philadel- 

 phia, after a recent inspection of what 

 is being done in the vicinity of Los 

 Angeles, so good a judge as Jacob D. 

 Eisele made the statement that the 

 experiments of Bassett & Washburn 

 seem in a fair way to revolutionize 

 palm production for the trade in the 

 United States. 



The subject is of special interest now, 

 since the plant quar- 

 antine has shut off the 

 importation of palms 

 from Belgium and from 

 the finishing factories 

 of the British Isles, 

 but it is worth while 

 noting that the experi- 

 ments at Sierra Madre 

 were begun in 1913, 

 long before the quar- 

 antine was thought of. 



Ante-Belltun Ways. 



Probably everyone 

 who keeps in any way 

 in touch with trade 

 affairs knows that one 

 of the specific objec- 

 tions to the general 

 quarantine when it 

 was proposed, was that 

 it would close the 

 channels through which 

 the trade and the 

 American people had 

 been accustomed to ob- 

 tain their supply of_ 

 palms. Of course 

 palms can be grown 

 from seeds in green- 

 houses, but the produc- 

 tion of a plant of sala- 

 ble size is a matter ,.of 

 years. At pre-war 

 prices for building ma- 

 terial, fuel and labor 

 no great number of 

 growers persisted in 

 the business; by far 

 the greater part of the 

 stock handled in the 

 "United States has been 

 imported. 



Before the Germans 

 overran Belgium more 



palm seeds germinated in the vicinity of 

 Ghent and Bruges than in all the rest of 

 the world, commercially speaking. As 

 soon as the seedlings were established 

 in 21^-inch pots they became salable and 

 from then on they might, as they grew, 

 change hands several times. But with 

 each shift they had the accelerating 

 assistance of more or less bottom heat, 

 either in greenhouses warmed by hot 

 water or in beds made genial by an 

 underlayer of fermenting manure. 



Whence Imports Came. 



Belgian palms in small sizes fre- 

 quently went to Scotland or England 

 for a finishing process before they came 

 to America, but a far larger number in 

 all sizes came direct to the United 

 States, the larger sizes fully established 

 in tubs and ready for sale, the smaller 



Three-acre Lath House of Kentias Planted July, 1919. 



sizes usually needing a pot and a few 

 weeks or months in a greenhouse to put 

 them in shape for the trade's uses. 



An unestablished plant may look all 

 right in a greenhouse, but put it in a 

 store or a dwelling and it goes quickly 

 to pieces. 



German occupation and the British 

 blockade temporarily shut off the Bel- 

 gian plant exports and, just as the war 

 lifted, our Federal Horticultural Board 

 clamped down the lid for keeps, as it 

 said, by its sweeping quarantine order. 

 It seems quite clear that if American 

 firms would not invest in growing palms 

 under glass under pre-war conditions, 

 they will not do so under the quaran- 

 tine, because the cost of greenhouse 

 construction and of greenhouse opera- 

 tion has increased in the last five years 

 as much as the price of palms has ad- 

 vanced, even with the 

 starved supply and ac- 

 celerated demand of 

 the last year. In 1914 

 representative firms 

 advertised in The Re- 

 view 5-inch kentias, 50 

 to 75 cents; 6-inch, $1 

 to $1.50 each. In 1919 

 the same growers of- 

 fered 5-inch at $1.25 

 each and 6-inch at $2 

 to $2.50 each. 



Westward Ho! 



Under such condi- 

 tions it is natural that 

 thoughts should turn 

 toward those parts of 

 the United States in 

 which the climate is 

 such as to suggest the 

 hope that palms can be 

 grown without artifi- 

 cial heat, which means, 

 so far as the kentia is 

 concerned, southern 

 California, for the ken- 

 tia never has seemed 

 at home in Florida. 



Palms have come 

 from California for 

 years, but to the aver- 

 age manager of a first- 

 class flower store the 

 mention of them sug- 

 gests plants fresh from 

 their hair cut, but 

 which have not yet 

 had their bath. The 

 botanical encyclopedias 

 tell us twenty-six gen- 

 era and eighty species 

 of palms grow in the 

 gardens of southern 

 California, but from the 



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