OPENING ADDRESS BY THE CHAIRMAN. 



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While decorative plants and flowers, in all their varied forms 

 and brilliant and delicate colours, must necessarily form the 

 most striking part of a horticultural exhibition, and also the chief 

 attraction for the general public, it cannot be otherwise that the 

 homely aspect of the vegetables in daily use should cause them 

 to fall into a subordinate place as objects for exhibition to the 

 majority of the visitors. To the gardener, however, they have a 

 different significance, and often a deeper interest attached to 

 them than the more showy products of the flower garden. In 

 fact it is not too much to say that an exhibition of vegetables 

 like the present one is essentially a gardener's exhibition. 



There are some simple facts connected with the present state 

 of development of our most commonly cultivated vegetables that 

 are worth bearing in mind. One of the most prominent of these 

 facts is the length of time that it has taken since these plants were 

 first reclaimed from the wild state to attain the perfection in 

 which we now have them. Scarcely a vegetable in daily use 

 can be named that has not been in gardens for centuries. The 

 Eunner Bean, the Tomato, and the Vegetable Marrow were pro- 

 bably among the latest to come into general cultivation, and these 

 were as familiar to our great-grandfathers as they are to us, 

 although in a lower degree of perfection and productiveness. 

 The Cabbage is one of the most ancient of vegetables, for we 

 know that it was cultivated by the Greeks and Eomans, and it 

 has therefore been in cultivation as an article of food for more 

 than 2,000 years in the south of Europe generally, and following 

 the spread of civilisation into more northern latitudes. In a 

 wild state the Cabbage has been observed to deviate a little from 

 a common type, but under the care of man, in such a variety of 

 climate and soil in which it has been cultivated during so many 

 centuries, it has broken into the various forms we now have it, 

 these forms including the Broccoli, Cauliflower, Brussels Sprouts, 

 Savoy, Kales and Borecole, besides all the varieties known in 

 gardens as Cabbage ; and yet it is an accepted theory, I may say 

 a positive belief, held by botanists, that all these various forms 

 have originated from a single herb still to be found wild in 

 places on our own coast, and somewhat more plentifully on the 

 neighbouring coast of France. This plant is the Brassica 

 oleracea of science, and is, I dare say, known to many of you. 

 When we contemplate this seaside herb in comparison with its 



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