462 Reading necessary a7id advantageous to Gardeners. 



the theory of gardening at all; but will any one say they 

 should have produced worse crops by having, while appren- 

 tices and journeymen, read books on botany, chemistry, hor- 

 ticulture, &c. ? Where is the gardener who has observed the 

 beautiful structure of the Mimosa sensitiva, ilZedysarum gy- 

 rans, DionaeV, .Nepenthes, Vallisneria, &c , who has not been 

 led to admire the wisdom of God in their nice sensation and 

 curious structures ? By reading we shall be made acquainted 

 with things we never can learn from practice. The smith can 

 weld his iron, the plumber can cast his lead, nor is it neces- 

 sary they should know how or whence they have originated. 

 Not so with us ; we ought to know that plants, like animals, 

 are very compound, organised, living beings, and supported 

 by air and food, endowed with life, and subject to death, as 

 well as animals. Every gardener ought to know that the 

 plant he cultivates derives nourishment by inhaling and ab- 

 sorbent vessels ; that it extracts and assimilates to its own sub- 

 stance those parts that are nutritious, and rejects the rest ; that 

 this nourishment is first absorbed by the radicle, or annual 

 fibrous root, and that it is carried through the stem of the 

 plant, if a tree, in a set of central vessels ; that from these ves- 

 sels it is carried into the leaves, and that in these most essential 

 organs it undergoes a process which few gardeners can learn 

 without reading; that, after the sap has undergone this pro- 

 cess, it is returned through another set of vessels, and deposits 

 substance which are annually converted into layers of wood 

 and bark. Nor is this all ; for, on its return, it feeds the buds 

 which contain the leaves and fruit in embryo, which are to 

 vegetate and mature in the ensuing season. Hence we per- 

 ceive the absurdity of stripping the leaves from shoots which 

 we expect to bear fruit the following season. Though the vege- 

 table economy is different in herbaceous plants, there the uses 

 of the leaf are just as great. We ought to know there is a 

 strict affinity between the crowns of herbaceous plants, such 

 as strawberries, asparagus, bulbous plants, &c., and the leaf 

 bud of trees ; and hence the folly of mowing down strawber- 

 ries, cutting down asparagus early in autumn, throwing by 

 bulbs immediately after flowering, &c., and depriving them 

 from generating sap to nourish them in the early part of the 

 next season ; hence, also, the bad practice of digging between 

 the beds of asparagus and lines of strawberries, and by one 

 blow depriving them of the fluid they have absorbed during 

 the whole summer. These, and many other truths, may be 

 partly learned by long practice ; but, where the apprenticed 

 gardener has access to books, he may well understand them 

 and many other facts before he is fifteen years of age. 



