170 THE FLORIST AND 



beauty of the trees to any who may pay a visit to Springhrook for 

 the purpose of seeing trees managed on this system ; trees too that 

 I had been advised by experienced horticulturists in times past to 

 get removed, because they were believed to be worn out and "done 

 for." The system i^ ? of course,- equally applicable to the Peach. 



Thomas Meehan. 



The Gardener's Chronicle extracts from a new work on the 

 vegetable cell by Von Mohl, tho following remarks relating to the 

 longevity of vegetation, which contain so much information, that 

 we should consider ourselves as defrauding the readers of the Florist, 

 if we did not copy them into its pages. 



" The peculiarity of their organization, and the unlimited power of growth 

 of plants, offer many difficulties to the definition- of the duration- of plants, 

 and have given rise to many incorrect theories. Every individual cell, and 

 every individual organ, has a determinate end to its life; but the entire 

 plant has not, since the individual shoots run through their periods of de- 

 velopment quite independently, and only share in the weakness of age of 

 the older organs when these are no longer able to convey to the young shoots 

 the needful amount of nourishment, in which case the latter do not die from 

 deficiency of vital energy, but are starved. It therefore, depends wholly 

 upon the mode of growth of a plant whether this occurs or not. When a 

 plant possesses a thallus spreading horizontally by the growth of its circum- 

 ference, it can annually extend itself into a larger circle, after the old parts 

 in the centre have been long decayed, as is seen in old specimens of crus- 

 taceous Lichens, in the fairy rings caused by fungi, &e. In like manner 

 when a higher plant has a creeping stem, and possesses the power of send- 

 ing out lateral roots near the vegetating points, and in this way 7 conveys 

 nourishment directly to the young terminal shoots, the latter are wholly in- 

 dependent of the death of the older parts of the stem and of the primary 

 roots, and there exists no internal cause for death in such a plant. It is 

 truly a different plant every new year and vegetates in a new place, but there 

 is no definite boundary between it and its predecessors ; such a plant is like 

 a wave rolling over the surface of a sheet of water ; it is every moment 

 another and yet always the same. Thousands of inconspicuous plants, of 

 Mosses, Grasses,. Rushes, &e., have vegetated in this manner upon peatbogs 

 and similar localities perhaps for thousands of years. Plants with upright 

 stems are placed in much more unfavourable circumstances. It has been 

 declared of these also, and particularly of the Dicotyledonous trees ( Db 



