172 



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



take up or grow everything, but everyone may select and take up some- 

 thing and make it more beautiful or more useful for certain places or 

 purposes than it was before. Hybrids have already been obtained between 

 the blackberry and the raspberry, and attempts are in progress to ensure 

 a happy marriage between the Japan wineberry (Rubus phoenicolasius) 

 and the best of our native blackberries and raspberries. Even without 

 actual garden cultivation much may be done by merely fostering the best 

 of wild flowers, fruits, and vegetables in suitable places where they 

 naturally grow. 



Wild Vegetables, Salad and Pot-Herbs. 



" Great work is done be't here or there, 

 And well man worketh everywhere ; 

 But work or rest, whatever befall, 

 The farmer he must feed us all."— E. C. Leland. 



It is curious how some of our most important native vegetables are 

 found near the sea. Of these are cabbage, seakale, beet, celery, carrot, 

 and asparagus. Horseradish and Smyrnium (Alexanders) also show a 

 liking for the shore, as also " scurvy grass," which is an excellent salad 

 when young as raised from seeds like mustard and cress. It was the 

 great anti-scorbutic, and much sought after and eaten by sailors as a 

 preventive or remedy for scurvy before the discovery of lime juice, the 

 specific now so extensively and widely used. The wild radish is also a sea- 

 shore plant, and its seeds, like those of rape charlock or turnip, yield 

 excellent salading as quickly grown under glass. Chickory (endive), 

 lettuce, dandelion (forced and blanched) and watercress are all well-known 

 and excellent salads or vegetables raw or cooked. Asparagus, seakale, 

 watercress, horseradish, and dandelion have been very little improved 

 by cultivation, or by seminal selection, and experiments on each and all 

 would be likely to yield valuable results. The same may be said of the 

 meadow mushrooms (Agariciis campestris and A. arvensis), and there 

 seems no reason why "virgin spawn," or spawn made direct from the 

 spores, of fifteen or twenty other edible fungi should not be made and 

 cultivated for food. The most delicious and valuable of all fungi, viz. the 

 best edible kinds of truffles, certainly deserve more attention as to culture 

 and discovery than they have yet received. The chances are that many tons 

 of de.icious truffles waste their sweetness in the young oak and beech woods 

 and copses or on the downs of South England every year. One great 

 difficulty is to find them, growing as they do underground. Both dogs and 

 pigs have been trained to hunt and find them, and if the best French and 

 Italian kinds could be introduced and grown in England, a not unimportant 

 industry might be again revived. Many tons of the edible fungi of our 

 woods and meadows are lost every year, mainly owing to vulgar prejudice 

 and ignorance as to the difference between good and bad kinds. It is not 

 generally known how easily the meadow mushroom may be grown in 

 paddocks or meadows or«n orchards near the house, by simply planting- 

 lumps of spawn in the grass in June or July ; old cucumber, melon, or 

 marrow beds "inoculated" with spawn in lumps the size of hens' eggs 

 also prove very productive. 



If children were taught by actual experience afield and in the kitchen 



