108 JOURNAL OF THE KOYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



The market grower sins greatly, but he must be forgiven while the 

 public appeals to him to supply the showiest, and in their eyes the best, 

 though it is pleasant to discern a bettering of the public taste in its 

 appreciation of what constitutes " flower beauty," and this taste may surely 

 be attributed to the desire for single flowers in the house and in the 

 garden. But I will be fair in my judgment. In spite of the fashion for 

 simplicity in flower decoration, which is happily setting in as a reaction 

 from over-cultivation and a desire for bulk, we are not unmindful of the 

 great debt all flower-lovers owe to those good horticulturists who have 

 improved and are constantly improving original stock. It is only when a 

 naturally beautiful flower is made hideous by elaborate cultivation, over- 

 development, or both, that we thrust it aside as a miserable deformity 

 unworthy of the hybridist's skill or the cultivator's experience. 



Some may have practical proof of the results of too high feeding. 

 Superb Mignonette flowers for size were bought some short time ago from 

 a market grower, but in a few hours so tainted and discoloured was the 

 water in which they were placed that it was impossible, though the water 

 was changed, to use them for room decoration — they positively smelt of 

 the manure tank. 



While condemning the forcing of a flower beyond a size which is just 

 right, we must not forget that there is another interference with the 

 natural growth of a plant which does not make for beauty. 



Nothing is more frequent in books or catalogues than to find the words 

 ■• dwarf and compact " used in praise of some annual plant, and used with 

 an air of conviction, as if to say : " There, now we have got it ' dwarf and 

 compact.' We have done our whole duty by it ; buy it and grow it, and 

 be happy." 



Is it an ungenerous and ungrateful act on the part of some of us that we 

 are not content to accept "dwarf and compact " as the end of all beauty? 

 Is it not rather, as we venture to think, a question that demands the most 

 careful consideration and the exercise of the most well-balanced judgment 

 in the case of each individual kind of plant that is commonly grown for 

 the adornment of our gardens ? For planting beds in a geometrical 

 garden, where the object is merely to fill spaces of certain shapes with a 

 mass of some chosen colour, these dwarfed plants are all -.very well, and 

 no doubt this is a way of gardening that has its uses. But because the 

 dwarfed form may suit such use in perhaps one garden out of a hundred, 

 it is not a reason for denying the best possible form that the plant might 

 have to the other ninety-nine. May it not be one of the many cases in 

 which the practice of what is easiest has falsely taken the place of what is 

 best ? 



The over-doubling of flowers is another matter that is often fatal to 

 beauty. Many a flower is better for a judicious degree of doubling, but 

 when it is carried too far it turns what should be a handsome flower into a 

 mis-shapen absurdity. This has been done in the case of Zinnias. In 

 this line Mower moderate doubling is a gain on a well-grown plant a 

 couple of feet high. But there is a monstrous form when many rows of 

 petals show one above the other. In this the flower is robbed of all its 

 natural beauty and becomes an absuid cone of quite indefensible ugliness, 

 and it is all the more deplorable an object when this monstrous flower is 



