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exhibitions of the Exposition of 1900. For a week or so before 
the opening the pedestrians on the Pont de l’Alma have watched 
with curiosity the building and its surrounding grounds, where 
crowds of workmen were erecting little thatched arbors and in- 
stalling all kinds of horticultural implements, greenhouses on both 
a large and small scale, cold frames, garden furniture, garden 
potteries and sculpture and every conceivable article used in con- 
nection with ornamental plant culture. 
The Society is an old and influential one, boasting of 3,823 
members and its exhibitions are most beautiful as well as interest- 
ing and popular, as was attested by the crowds that attended the 
opening day. It was the first absolutely rainless day Paris had 
seen for nearly a month, warm and sunny and the large gayly 
dressed crowd was a typically French one, for in a long after- 
noon’s ramble among the flower beds not a foreign word was 
eard. 
It is impossible to enumerate in such a short space all the ex- 
hibits which showed great variety, and especially to a foreigner, a 
most fertile imagination as to artistic arrangement and composi- 
tion in the disposition and grouping of the plants. 
At the entrance, out of doors, were some charmingly grouped 
rectangular beds of pansies, the flowers showing all variations of 
purples and dull browns, many of them three inches in diameter. 
The pots were sunk in the raised beds and the latter in their turn 
were bordered with a banked edging of sod, green and fresh, so 
that it was difficult to believe that they had not always been 
grown there. Long beds and lines of trained dwarf and trellised 
fruit trees were in the next section, most interesting and recalling 
the beautiful espaliers of the old formal gardens. 
Near the main building three exhibits attracted much interest, 
a collection of some 34-40 Japanese dwarf maples, exhibited by 
Paillet Fils, a miscellaneous collection of dwarfed Japanese plants, 
the latter not as fine as some collections recently seen in New 
York and several geometrically arranged beds of alpine plants, 
shown by the well-known firm of Vilmorin-Andrieux & Cie. 
would be impossible to imagine anything more daintily charming 
than the arrangement of those beautiful frail little plants, with 
