HORTICULTURAL JOURNAL. 851 



Discretionary premiums were awarded for large and beautiful design not 

 entered in competition to Pentland & Bro. For baskets of flowers to Miss 

 Kurtz, and Mrs. Pentland, and bouquets to Miss Edmondson and Pentland 

 & Bro. Wm. Saunders, Cor. Sec'y. 



Arborial Curiosity. — The interest you take in trees, Mr. Editor, leads 

 me to present to your cabinet of curiosities a note on a "curious curiosity." 

 You have no doubt often seen trees with one trunk and two heads; but did 

 you ever see one with one head and two trunks? You may have heard of 

 one — the celebrated Welbeck oak, with an opening large enough to drive a 

 carriage and horses through ; but that was cut artificially for a wager. This 

 is, for aught any one living can tell, a "natural case." On the road leading 

 from West Chester to Marshallton in this State, is the White Hickory, pro- 

 bably three feet in diameter, which stands on two bases from three feet of 

 the ground. Long heads and round heads have been equally puzzled as to 

 the how and the why, M* 



COLLECTANEA FRAGRARIANA. 



Our present number contains a long article on this vexed question, almost 

 sufficient of itself to form a treatise. Having promised the author space 

 for another hearing, we could not well decline publishing it, which we should 

 have done had we been apprised of its great length. 



The importance of the subject to practical farmers will not warrant the 1 

 use of so much space, particularly as it has now been narrowed down to a 

 mere abstract point. It seems to be admitted all around, that a bed of pis- 

 tillate varieties will not produce a full crop without the presence of stami- 

 nates. This is not the question at issue, but whether, under any circum- 

 stances, a pistillate plant will vary its prevailing characteristics, be liable to 

 become staminate or perfect, and produce fruit. On the one side it is con- 

 tended this is impossible, and as unnatural as for a cow to turn into a bull, 

 the pistillate or other peculiarity being the fixed law of its nature — its true 

 normal condition. By fruit, in this connection, we understand to be meant 

 what is usually called the fruit of the strawberry, (the receptacle containing; 

 the seed,) and not the seed itself, which is the real fruit. Leaving the fact, 

 or otherwise, of this in the case] of the strawberry, analogy would seem to* 

 settle it as neither impossible or improbable. The Madura, a dioecious 1 

 plant, produces the osage orange apple, or receptacle containing imperfect seed^ 

 many miles away from any staminate influence, and as Dame Nature i& usu- 

 ally a consistent old lady, what she does once she may do again. 



Neither will it be denied that the strawberry plant, in its normal condi- 

 tion, has perfect flowers, and there are very many analagous cases, of plant* 

 under a change of circumstances, reverting back to, or varying from their 

 original character. This is no new fact in vegetable Physiology. 



But when the very foremost champion of the fixed sexuality of the straw- 

 berry plant, voluntarily comes forward over his own signature, and gives up 

 the vjhole case, and of his own accord knocks away every prop of the plat- 



