The American Garden 



Vol. XI. MAY, 1890. No. 



A NEW SCIENCE. 



HE orchard, the vegetable gar- 

 den and the ornamental garden 

 are old institutions, and many 

 of the practices and traditions 

 of them are nearly everywhere 

 familiar. Collectively they 

 constitute horticulture, and 

 horticulture, like agriculture, 

 is known as the oldest of arts. But horticulture is 

 an art which rests immediately upon a science, and 

 singularly enough, this science is to this day almost 

 wholly unrecognized as one separate and peculiar. 

 Science in its direct application to agriculture in 

 general is among the latest forms of knowledge and 

 practice, and its application to horticulture in par- 

 ticular is almost the latest of the latest. If it is 

 strange that such is the case, there is nevertheless a 

 reason for it. This science is largely a knowledge 

 of plants ; yet botany, of right the science of plants, 

 has fixed for itself a wholly conventional boundary, 

 and has not reached the garden. It pursues the 

 study of plants whose parts and habits are normal, or 

 natural, as some would say, which have never been 

 modified by the agency of man. Botany has been 

 repelled by the garden fence, and has failed to reap 

 its own best fruits. The difficulties of studies in 

 the garden have discouraged botanists. "Roses 

 have ceased to be a botanical study," our most em- 

 inent botanist once said to the writer. There is 

 also a feeling among botanists that cultivated plants 

 are scarcely worth the trouble of study. " How 

 can you be a horticulturist ? How can you love the 

 garden ?" a botanist of note once enquired of me. 

 So the scientific study of garden plants has been 

 neglected largely because the science to which it 

 belongs has not claimed it. 



It needs no argument to convince the reader that 



cultivated plants form an inestimable part of the 

 possessions of the race. Darwin declared that 

 "one new variety raised by man will be a more 

 important and interesting subject for study than 

 one more species added to the infinitude of already 

 recorded species." That this addition, origination, 

 of new varieties has been almost wholly haphazard, 

 is no excuse for its neglect. There is no chance in 

 nature, and somehow, sometime, we shall find out 

 how and why it is that a peach can give birth to a 

 nectarine or a white flower can produce a red flower. 

 Or, of truth, we must first determine why a peach 

 cau give birth to a peach, or a white flower can pro- 

 duce a white flower. In other words, we must de- 

 termine why and how it is that plants possess hered- 

 ity, and vary, and can be made to vary under cul- 

 ture. We must come to a practical understanding 

 of the fact that pedigree means as much in plants 

 as in animals. 



We shall look for the operation of the same laws 

 in the garden as in the fields and woods, with the 

 addition of the modification and intensification 

 wrought by artificial conditions. The horticultur- 

 ist begins where the botanist leaves off: he steps 

 beyond the action of purely natural forces into the 

 larger inquiry of natural forces as modified by man. 

 It was the study of domesticated plants and animals 

 that led Darwin to discern Darwinism. He was 

 first struck by great likenesses of species when in 

 the Galapagos archipelago : "But it long remained 

 to me an inexplicable problem how the necessary 

 degree of modification could have been effected, and 

 it would thus have remained forever had I not stud- 

 ied domestic productions, and thus acquired a just 

 idea of the power of selection." 



In essence, man's cultivation is the same as na- 

 ture's. Cultivation means, chiefly, an increase in 



COPYRIGHT, 1890. 



