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THE winter of our discontent" is a phrase so apt 

 that too often it is used as a smug justification for 

 sudden cessation of interest in garden affairs during 

 the cold months of the year. As a matter of fact, 

 thoroughly appreciated by very many gardeners, 

 the cold months bring a change in opportunity but not a 

 cessation of it. Gardens are very different affairs from open 

 fields, and although they have their highest flush of natural 

 color and glorification in the summer days, there is much 

 more in gardening than summer alone brings for the plant 

 grower and the garden lover who will look for it. 



As the year wanes and outdoor growth takes on the lux- 

 uriance and opulence of maturity, there is simultaneously an 

 awakening of a world of v/ondrous beauty opening up to those 

 who are willing to give the needed extra protection from the 

 rigors of climate to hosts of gorgeous flowers and beautifully 

 foliaged plants that come to us from the tropics. From now 

 on the real interest in growing plants shifts, to be sure, from 

 the outdoors to the indoors; but the lure of under-glass culti- 

 vation opens up a really new gardening world through its 

 groups of new material. 



Garden interest is based on two things primarily; on the 

 one hand there is the art of developing the surroundings of our 

 dwellings into a picture or series of pictures as harmoniously 

 beautiful as the combination of fine design and appropriate 

 material can produce. On the other hand, there is the col- 

 lection and maintenance in fine condition of all kinds of 

 plants, either for their inherent beauty or intrinsic interest 

 and value. The outdoor gardener depends very largely upon 

 quantity in the production of his "effects" or pictures. In- 

 doors the element of artistic arrangement is given less con- 

 sideration and the cultural welfare of the plants themselves 

 preponderates. Not that this is necessarily the case, indeed, 

 as acquaintance with some of the finer greenhouses of many 

 well kept estates shows (quite irrespective of their size). 

 The garden under glass indeed can be given a spectacular 

 splendor that is decidedly dramatic in its brilliancy and seem- 

 ing extravagance, for the protection afforded by the glass 

 roof over the growing plants makes possible a standard of 

 perfection quite different from that which belongs outside. 

 Plants are under better control, the flowers can be developed 

 more uniformly, and complete freedom from the caprice 



of the elements results in a quality and a production in quan- 

 tity surpassing anything in the outdoor garden. 



Whether all who love gardens "love a greenhouse too," as 

 we have been told they do by one of the master poets, the 

 fact remains that the glass garden opens up to the gardener, 

 the greatest possibilities for personal enjoyment. The 

 commercial florist and cut flower dealer could not exist a 

 week without the products of the greenhouse, and the great 

 revival of modern plant interest actually has origin in the 

 time when travellers and traders began to send home to 

 Europe from remote corners of the world the amazing plants 

 that startled them in the course of their peregrinations. The 

 greenhouse was of course the receiving station, and people 

 began in that far-off time to vie with each other in the pos- 

 session of these living curios from far countries. 



Inasmuch as the greenhouse was necessarily associated 

 with the garden, attention began little by little to devolve 

 upon the possibilities of these "outlandish flowers," as Park- 

 inson called them, for brightening the parterre and for garden 

 uses. Many of the new comers were found readily adaptable 

 to bedding and other styles of outdoor gardening — at all 

 events in the summer time. And so — as is the nature of the 

 human animal in all things — he went to the extreme, and 

 indulged in a perfect orgy of riotous, garish, color splashes 

 that some of these new exotics made possible. 



This over-indulgence had its inevitable reaction and ulti- 

 mately led to the triumphant evolution of the harmoniously 

 balanced, garnished "landscape" garden that holds sway to-day. 

 But may we not pause and ask whether we are not again 

 showing a tendency to run into excess and over-indulgence 

 in this contrary fancy, and thus to forget the beauties of some 

 of these more tender plants that can only be grown in the 

 glass garden? Surely we do not want to abolish everything 

 that lacks the element of the wild! 



To the real plant collector the glass garden is an essential, 

 unless he is willing to be the victim of the climatic vicissitudes 

 of one region, the incidents of which can never be foretold 

 and which each year goes to one kind of extreme or another. 

 Of course from the purely practical standpoint of plant pro- 

 duction, regarding the greenhouse as a factory, and nothing 

 else, there is little to be said for the greenhouse as part of the 

 all-round garden; but it has perhaps become a sort of fashion 



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