108 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Yet the Auricula is not an unhealthy plant, though there 

 will in time be deaths from old age, which the plants of some 

 varieties seem to reach sooner than do those of other kinds. 

 After a few years' duration in vigour, a plant naturally dwindles 

 away, splits up, or blooms itself out. A whole variety, also, 

 has its declining years, marked by its losing the constancy 

 and power of its earlier qualities, and by becoming more and 

 more difficult to grow. 



Probably some old varieties have disappeared, not through 

 being discarded, but by quietly passing away in a gradual decay 

 of faculties and constitutional powers. 



So, in our flowers even, do families and titles become extinct, 

 and great names pass to floral history. 



I almost think, if lovers of the Auricula could all rest content 

 with the labours of their florist forefathers, none ever striving 

 to enrich and lead the flower on by seedling culture, but 

 content to be, as it were, consumers only, and not producers, it 

 would bring the Auricula down at last to decrepitude and 

 exhaustion — a flower so peculiarly our own, so domesticated, 

 and so changed, that she has left her kindred and her father's 

 house, and has no home but ours. 



The vigour of a young variety, once established, is very 

 marked ; and even supposing that nothing better than what has 

 been could be hoped for from future seedlings, still, newness 

 of health and strength, together with many a fresh feature in the 

 foliage, would be obtained. There is not one of our florist 

 flowers to which the foliage means so much as it does to the 

 Auricula. In all others it is subservient to the flower itself — is 

 perhaps rather in the way, as with the Chrysanthemum ; but in 

 the Auricula the foliage, in character and perfume, is a sister 

 charm and beauty, and the two are inseparable. 



Rather than anything else in the culture of this flower, I 

 would touch upon its improvement by seed. All that we have 

 accomplished since the great year of the Primula Conference 

 (1886) I cannot compress within limits reasonable to-day. 

 I will only allude to the ''self" class — flowers that have the 

 look of good nature and simplicity, but which are as much given 

 to wrong devices as any other class. But I think we have 

 progress in the " selfs " towards black and rich brown. They 

 require leading away from amiable but weak shades of plum, 



