122 THE PHILADELPHIA FLORIST. [August 



" Lives there a man with soul so dead, Cy 



Who never to himself hath said — \D 



This is my own, my native land !" 



Time will modify these distinctions, if that is the wish of the Ameri- 

 can puhlic. If not, let th«m continually force it upon foreign gar- 

 deners that they are aliens, and then — How 1 



Ploughing in Green Crops. 



It would seem that our agricultural friends connected with the press 

 are as tenacious of old systems as the "old fogies" are of political er- 

 rors — merely because they are old. The great increase in population 

 in all agricultural and manufacturing countries, demands at the hands 

 of the tiller of the soil the most rigid economy of labor and expense. 

 Therefore, to cultivate a crop at a great cost and return it directly to 

 the soil, is a practice very questionable as regards utility or economy. 

 It lays a double price on each acre thus treated, so that the ensuing 

 crop must be supposed to produce a yield greatly above the average. 

 That such proves always to be the case is by no means certain. A 

 great many considerations arise as to the nature of the soil before the 

 adoption of this treatment — the absence or presence of certain pro- 

 perties, the physical texture of the soil, and many other topics demand 

 consideration before we could with accuracy assert that the green 

 crop, even if clover, had added the accumulated matter to the soil. — 

 There can be no doubt but that to a soil greatly deficient in organic 

 or nitrogenous matter, all other matters requisite to fertility being pre- 

 sent and ready to be called into action, the addition of the one materi- 

 al — being the one alone wanting — would produce immediate and 

 striking benefit, an extraordinary yield, and altogether surprise and 

 encourage the experimental farmer. But to soils already possessing 

 a portion of organic compounds, some of the inorganic matters being 

 absent, we submit that the result would be totally different. On the 

 whole, the wasteful process of losing one crop to increase another, 

 does not savor much of improved husbandry, and is enumerated by us 

 in the list of systems of which the bare fallow is a familiar example — 

 "agricultural old logyism." 



0.y* It has been judiciously remarked by the editor of Hovey's 

 Horticultural Magazine, in a review of the Philadelphia Florist,that if 

 our statement is really true, that there is a totally different climate 

 treatment required for exotic plants in the latitude of Philadelphia, 

 from what is customary in Boston or Albany, the appearance of "an 

 To organ the exponent of their wants" will be a benefit and is hailed 

 *~ with pleasure. And it has been enquired if it is really true that wej^ 



