4G2 



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



the successful growing of Carnations. You cannot stick them 

 into the ground and leave them to take their chance ; but my 

 complaint is, that when you have done your best, you are so 

 apt to meet with failure. 



You order your plants from the grower, and I am sure there 

 are many among my audience who will remember with what 

 excitement and expectation they have awaited them. They 

 arrive, not perhaps so sturdy as we hoped and expected to see 

 them, but our hopes are by no means dashed, for we know what 

 lovely flowers they will produce in the summer ! Have we not 

 seen them with our own eyes at the exhibitions of the previous 

 year ? 



We prepare the soil for them with as much care as if it were 

 the food of our own children ; we select the choicest corner of 

 our gardens for them, and in due time plant them out. With 

 what result ? The weather is perhaps unpropitious, and we see 

 our cherished plants growing smaller instead of bigger, ex- 

 changing the beautiful blue-green of their grass for a sickly 

 yellow, and in the end we get but a few wretched, half-starved 

 blooms, which are no more like the flow T ers we saw at last year's 

 exhibitions than is a Dog-rose to a well-grown Marechal Niel. 



Again I ask, with whom lies the fault ? With the amateur ? 

 I do not think so. No doubt he may be blamed for attempting 

 impossibilities ; but when he lias bestowed upon his plants all 

 the attention and care in his power, I think he has some right to 

 complain when he finds that bis plants will only really thrive 

 when grown under glass. 



The sinners, I verily believe, are our great Carnation-grow T ers, 

 who in their natural desire to obtain beautiful flow r ers sacrifice 

 stamina and constitution to beauty. 



Now I should be both foolish and ungrateful if I did not here 

 acknowledge the great debt we owe to these gentlemen for the 

 work they have done. They have shown us to what excellence 

 the Carnation may be brought — they have, by years of patient 

 and enthusiastic labour, given us a standard to work up to — and 

 the only fault I w r ould presume to find is that I do not think 

 they have taken the public sufficiently into their confidence, 

 and that in their catalogues they have not drawn a sufficiently 

 distinct line of demarcation between the hardy and tender varie- 

 ties. I maintain that the greater proportion of modern Carnations 



