PERPETUAL STRAWBERRIES. 



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on the very border between herbaceous and shrubby plants. 

 Potentillas, which are next to them in the botanical classification, 

 have a still wider range of organisation ; some of them, as P. 

 anserina, being perfect herbs, and some others, as P. fruticosa, 

 being decidedly shrubs with woody permanent stems. Straw- 

 berries are mostly placed just on the intermediate step between 

 the two. Their short-jointed, thick stems bear from eight to twelve 

 leaves, at the axil of which a bud exists, which seldom becomes 

 abortive, and mostly develops either into a branch similar to the 

 main stem, or into a runner, or into a flower stem, these appen- 

 dages being in a manner equivalent to and, so to speak, inter- 

 changeable with one another. 



The runner at first sight appears as different as possible from 

 the ordinary leaf-bearing stem : it becomes very plain, however, 

 upon closer inspection, that it is merely an elongated branch, 

 dissimilar to the original one simply in the great length of 

 the internodes and in the diminutive size of the leaves, which 

 are mostly reduced to mere bracts. But the runners show their 

 identity with the normal branches in producing from their knots 

 exactly the same appendages as the primitive stems do, viz. 

 regular stems, runners, and even flower stems, and in bearing 

 also abortive axillary buds occasionally. A vegetable axis 

 which reproduces another axis similar to the one from which it 

 proceeded cannot be called really different from it in nature. 

 Now it is the case both in the Alpine and in the large-fruited 

 Strawberry that runners issuing from the normal stems produce 

 from some of their axillary buds new stems exactly similar to 

 the original stems. 



The Large -fruited Strawberry. 



The vegetative organs are in the large-fruited Strawberry in 

 the same organic relation to one another as in the alpine. 

 There is consequently no reason why the same characteristics 

 should appear in the one and fail to appear in the other. 

 Barring the greater thickness of the runners and flower stems 

 (which in either species are respectively very like to one another) 

 the relations of number, position, and growth are just the same 

 in both. 



This is reason enough why the creation of perpetual varieties 



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