124 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 475. 



fancy prices, because the favorite flower of the then " hero of 

 the day"; of late these flowers do not sell at all. 



Flowers for transport are generally cut before sunrise ; the 

 best only are chosen, and are packed with cotton, as in the 

 case of camellias, roses and such Orchids as do not stand the 

 journey, or with tissue paper, or even both. Acacia or mimosa 

 generally lines the baskets. 



Flowers, as a rule, are not distilled at Grasse, etc., but the 

 leaves, bark, seeds, roots, etc., of odoriferous plants are. The 

 perfume in the other cases is secured by pressing the petals 

 between layers of suet or lard ; when the perfume has been 

 absorbed the grease is dissolved in alcohol, which in turn 

 absorbs the essence. Nice and Grasse work up yearly 800 tons 

 of fat and 500 ot oil in the preparation of perfumery, ft takes 

 twenty-five tons of rose petals to prepare two and a half 

 pounds of essence of roses, the latter representing ,£100. In 

 1892 the railway station at Cannes alone forwarded 900 tons of 

 flowers, valued at ,£160,000. The profits of flower-farming 

 fluctuate between eight and eighteen per cent. 



France alone consumes the moiety of the total of her flower 

 output. Paris is the great consumer; the capital needs per- 

 fumes and flowers for its fetes, weddings and funeral cere- 

 monies. It wishes flowers upon mantelpieces above a blazing 

 fire — for bouquets in the eyes of French people mean gayety. 

 A bunch of Parma violets can glide into a muff, can decorate 

 a buttonhole, or ornament a corsage. 



The wholesale market of Paris, with which the writer only 

 deals, is held in the central cross alley of the Halles Centrales. 

 In summer — April to September — the hours are 3 to 8 A. M. ; 

 in winter, 4 to 9. The right-hand side of the alley is reserved 

 for the flowers from southern France, as delivered by the rail- 

 way vans ; the left side is allocated to the floriculturists of 

 Paris and its suburbs, who have forcing-pits and greenhouses 

 of their own. There are about thirty -two licensed retail sellers, 

 who pay 4d. for their stand ot as many hours. There are two 

 sworn auctioneers, who give security each for ^400 ; their fee 

 is five per cent. The thousands of small baskets from Nice, 

 etc., of four to eleven pounds weight, are sold by the dozen ; 

 if possible, the same kind of flowers are disposed of simul- 

 taneously. Then there is in the distance a regiment of hawk- 

 ers, who come to buy from the auction salesmen ; they have 

 a handcart, which they hire tor 6d. a day, paying 2d. moie for 

 the liberty to trundle along the streets ; these are the subaltern 

 distributers of the floral harvest. 



In addition lo the special "local" flower markets of Paris, 

 there are 230 fleuristes — there were only forty-five in 1870— or 

 flower-shops, that have magnificent contents along the leading 

 boulevards and main thoroughfares. Their windows are often 

 marvelous displays of floral wealth, united to art. The con- 

 tents of each window constitute an object-lesson in the har- 

 mony of colors, in the arrangement of shades and of volume, 

 of flowering plants [the taste is sometimes questionable, wit- 

 ness the large ribbon bows and satin streamers intermingled]. 

 What wreaths, what bouquets, what painting of the Lily ! All 

 is the work of the special lady shop assistant, known as the 

 coloriste ; she receives £\i per month for merely dressing the 

 window and inventing combinations for bouquets. The 

 fleuristes in Paris are wealthy, like their customers, who com- 

 mand bouquets and plants varying from £4 to ,£20. Many of 

 the fleuristes have their own greenhouses in the suburbs, and 

 take by contract what is most beautiful for sale by private 

 growers. They possess every flower "out" of season, of the 

 very newest variety, with the freshest ot bloom, and displaying 

 the brightest colors. — Edward Conner, in The Gardeners' 

 Chronicle. 



Foreign Correspondence. 



London Letter. 

 Iris Robinsoniana. — English growers of plants for fur- 

 nishing purposes have been attracted by the elegance of 

 habit and rich green foliage of this Iris, of which a figure 

 was published in Garden and Forest, vol. iv.,352, prepared 

 from a large specimen which flowered in a sunny green- 

 house at Kew. It possesses in an exceptional degree those 

 characters essential to a good furnishing plant, its leaves 

 being far less stiff and better in color than the New Zealand 

 Flax, Phormium tenax, which has been tried again and 

 again by market -growers and has always failed to "catch 

 on " with furnishers, owing to its stiffness. The Iris is 

 easily grown in a greenhouse, and as it ripens seeds in 

 abundance a stock of it can be quickly obtained, or it may 

 be propagated by means of division, as it is very prolific of 



basal suckers. It will be remembered that this is the 

 "Wedding Flower" of Lord Howe's Island, the home of 

 the Kentias, and that it is by far the largest of all known 

 Irises. It bears tall branching panicles of beautiful white 

 and gold flowers. 



Ph/edranassa chloracea. — When properly treated this is 

 one of the most charming of bulbous plants, and a useful 

 plant for the conservatory. It prefers a sunny greenhouse, 

 a loamy soil, a fair allowance of water while growing and 

 absolute dryness when at rest. The leaves, which are pro- 

 duced with, hot after, the flowers, are like those of Eucharis 

 Candida, but longer in the petiole, and they are covered 

 with a glaucous, almost pale blue bloom, like the bloom of 

 the damson. The flower-scape is erect, eighteen inches 

 high, and it bears an umbel of about a dozen drooping 

 tubular flowers nearly two inches long with acute seg- 

 ments, their color being a beautiful combination of scarlet 

 and blue-green. The plant belongs to the same category 

 as the Urceolinas and Callipsyche. It is a native of the 

 Peruvian Andes up to 12,000 feet. It is sometimes cata- 

 logued by the Dutch bulb dealers, but it is rarely seen in 

 English gardens, although eminently worthy of a place in 

 all good collections. 



Dracena angustifolia. — Some young plants of this 

 Malayan species are now attractive in a stove at Kew by 

 reason of their large arching branched panicles of white 

 flowers, which are sufficiently attractive to place this spe- 

 cies among flowering stove plants, an unusual character 

 in the genus. The Kew plants have erect, unbranched 

 stems eighteen inches high and a quarter of an inch thick, 

 leafy to the base, the leaves bright green, narrow, a foot 

 long. The panicle of flowers springs from the top of the 

 plant and is two feet long, branched, the branches nine 

 inches long, the whole clothed with narrow tubular flowers 

 nearly an inch long. According to the description of this 

 species in Hooker's Flora of British India, it forms a stem 

 eight to ten feet high, as thick as a stout cane, simple or 

 forked, the leaves sometimes twenty inches long, the pani- 

 cle very large, the flowers white or tipped with pink, and 

 the fruit half an inch in diameter, fleshy and orange-colored. 

 It is a true Dracrena, not a Cordyline, and is a native of Aus- 

 tralia as well as India. 



Crotalaria longirostrata. — We obtained this plant from 

 seeds sent to Kew by Mr. J. N. Rose, of the United States 

 Department of Agriculture, in 1891. It is now one of the 

 most useful of shrubby legumes grown in pots for the dec- 

 oration of the greenhouse in winter and spring. Cuttings 

 are struck annually in a stove and the plants are grown in 

 a sunny frame all summer along with Poinsettias. They 

 form shapely little shrubs about two feet high, with pinnate 

 leaves of a soft green color, and long-stalked, erect racemes 

 of bright yellow flowers about the size of those of the com- 

 mon Laburnum. Planted in a bed out-of-doors in June a 

 batch of plants made healthy growth, but did not flower. 

 In subtropical climates where the atmosphere is fairly dry 

 it would probably prove a first-rate shrub for the open Of 

 the several hundreds of Crotalarias known very few are of 

 any value as decorative plants. C. jnncea, the Sunn-Hemp, 

 sometimes develops with us into a presentable shrub, and 

 its golden-yellow fl'owers are decidedly ornamental. 



Columnea Schiedeana. — This is a large-flowered, attrac- 

 tive stove-plant two or three feet high, with fleshy stems, 

 lanceolate dark green leaves four inches long, and axillary 

 clusters of stalked, tubular, two-lipped flowers three inches 

 long and colored dull crimson and brown, the conspicuous 

 calyx being bright red. It is easily grown, requiring simi- 

 lar treatment to shrubby Begonias, and it flowers freely in 

 February and March. The genus is a near ally of Allo- 

 plectus and Drymonia, and it is said to contain about sixty 

 species, all natives of the tropics of the New World. Only 

 very few, however, of them have ever been introduced, 

 and perhaps not more than three or four are in cultivation 

 now. One of the most striking is the Colombian Columnea 

 Kalbreyeriana, with a short stem, large leaves and clusters 

 of bright yellow flowers. C. Schiedeana was introduced 



