CHRYSANTHEMUM SEEDS AND SEEDING. 



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great Ox-eye Daisy {Chrysanthemum leuctinthemum), with any- 

 thing like the long- suffering faith that must have prompted and 

 animated the Chinese gardeners who first began the culture of 

 the wild Chrysanthemum centuries upon centuries ago. It is 

 not only possible, but extremely probable, that the Chrysanthe- 

 mum was a popular garden flower in China when Egypt was in 

 its prime, and in the future it is likely to remain the national 

 floral emblem of a people who will either, as friends, help us to 

 keep our foothold in the East, or, as foes, they may possibly eat 

 up the Russian Bear, and then reserve the Eastern half of the 

 world's loaf for themselves. 



We have now to consider the flower itself. I have reasons 

 for believing that the small single yellow Chrysanthemum indi- 

 cum (commonly cultivated in India, although only wild in Corea, 

 China, and Japan) is the original wild type from which natural 

 variation and culture have evolved all larger-growing and more 

 highly coloured forms. All the botanists, from Linnaeus and De 

 Candolle to Messrs. Forbes and Hemsley (Jour. Linn. Soc, 

 vol. xxiii., p. 437-8), have considered C. indicum and C. 

 morifolium (= sinense) as two distinct species. I only believe 

 in one species — the so-called C. indicum ;of which C. morifolium 

 (C. sinense) is, as I take it, a mere geographical variety), since I 

 find that nearly every batch of seedlings exhibits a tendency to 

 revert to this, as the primitive yellow-flowered type, although all 

 sorts and sizes, and conditions and colours, are obtainable from 

 seeds gathered from the same capitule, be the seed-bearer pompon 

 (C. indicum) or large-flowered (C. morifolium- sinense). When 

 the weird forms, now known to have been of Japanese garden 

 origin, were introduced by Mr. Fortune in 1862, we were very 

 nearly led to believe in a third species (C. japonicitm), so distinct 

 and different were these flowers to those previously known in 

 Britain. Even supposing that there originally were two wild 

 species of Chrysanthemum in China or Corea (a view from which 

 I dissent), the result, as above stated, would tend to show that 

 they must have intercrossed freely with each other ; but all my 

 observations go to prove that the weedy little single yellow Pom- 

 pons, which so often come from the seeds saved from the finest 

 and most modern of the large -flowered kinds, really imply rever- 

 sion to first principles (ativism), and not the unmixing of two 

 distinct wild plants naturally or artificially cross-fertilised. 



