158 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



sprinkle of mortar rubbish and spring soaking, and they will 

 attain a good old age, some of the tubers at Cheshunt having been 

 collected over thirty years ago. 



Flowers and Leaves. — The flowers are very similar in appear- 

 ance and in colour to those of their so widely known Eastern 

 relative C. persicum, but smaller in every part, though, as I 

 said, none the less beautiful for that. The leaves of most are 

 charmingly marbled, zoned, and veined with white, the under - 

 surfaces being generally of a purplish crimson. Indeed, the late 

 Mr. Atkins used to say that he grew them as much for orna- 

 mental foliage plants as for their flowers. 



Hybridisation. — The mention of Mr. Atkins' name leads me 

 to say how much I wish some amateur gardener in want of em- 

 ployment would take up and continue the work of hybridisation 

 which the late Mr. Atkins so well began. There is a wonderful 

 opening, I am confident, for anyone to immortalise his name in 

 gardening annals in this direction. For whether C. Athinsi be 

 simply a seed variation of C. ibericum, or a hybrid, as some sup- 

 pose, between C. ibericum and C. persicum, it is in either case 

 such a manifest improvement on its hardy parent that it appears 

 to me to hold out to the patient cultivator as distinct a promise 

 of success and of improvement in size and colour in these hardy 

 varieties as has already been attained by florists with the green- 

 house persicum. And let me here say that, in almost all branches 

 of hardy gardening at least, it is the amateurs — the men of leisure 

 — who should undertake these things, because the nurserymen have 

 first of all so little time for it ; and, secondly, one great point in 

 hardy gardening being the comparative cheapness of our favourite 

 plants, the nurseryman, however much he would rejoice in such 

 experiments, cannot afford to give up the time for them. Great 

 as his success might be, it would not sufficiently remunerate him 

 for the time abstracted from the other duties of his profession. It 

 may possibly pay a nurseryman to hybridise and grow seedling 

 Orchids, in which success may enable him to realise fifty or a 

 hundred guineas for some grand new break ; but when, as with 

 the hybridiser of hardy Cyclamen, he could at the outside only 

 look for fifty or a hundred pence, it is certainly not worth the 

 speculation, so that it is to amateurs (or to nurserymen working 

 as amateurs in this particular) that I think we ought to look for a 

 new race of larger flowering and more diversely coloured hardy 



