THE SECKETARY. 
161 
Shirley, where 1 at once began to cultivate and improve my garden, 
devoting myself principally to Eoses, Pears, Poppies, Paeonies, 
Apples, Plums, Peaches, Nectarines, Daffodils, Strawberries, 
Khododendrons, Flag Irises, Phloxes, Tulips, Hyacinths, Hardy 
Ferns, Lilies, Snowdrops, and Herbaceous plants in general. 
About 1880 I became a member of the Floral Committee ; and was 
elected to a seat on the Council and appointed Honorary Secretary 
in 1886. The Society at this time was burdened with debt and 
consisted of only some 1,200 Fellows, many of whom were Life 
Fellows whose ' composition ' money had long before been spent on 
costly buildings at Kensington. A resolute effort was made by the 
President and Council to save the life and continuity of the Society 
and to bring it back to a genuinely horticultural policy, with the 
result that probably never before has the position of the Society 
been so secure as it is at the present, the number of Fellows having 
steadily increased up to about 4,500 and its financial balance 
standing at more than 4^8,000. 
" I am proud of my Poppies because (i) they are known all over 
the world, (ii) the seed has been given away freely to whosoever 
has asked, and (iii) they have given joy and delight to the poorest 
as well as the richest. They arose in this way : In 1880 I noticed 
in a waste corner of my garden abutting on the fields, a patch of 
the common w^ild Poppy of cornfields — Papaver Bhcms — one solitary 
flower of which had a very narrow white edging to the four petals. 
This one flower I marked and saved the seed of it alone. Next 
year, out of perhaps 200 plants, I had four or five on which all the 
Howers were white-edged. The best of these were marked and the 
seed saved, and so on for several years, the flowers all the while 
getting a larger infusion of white to tone down the red, until they 
arrived at quite a pale pink, and one plant absolutely pure white in 
the petals. I then set myself to change the black central portions 
of the flowers, the anthers, stigmatic surface, and pollen, from black 
to yellow or white, and succeeded at last in obtaining a strain with 
petals varying from the brightest scarlet to pure white, with all 
shades of pink in between, and with all possible varieties of flakes 
and edged flowers, and having golden or white stamens, anthers, 
stigmatic surface, and pollen, and a white base to each petal. I am 
still working at them, in the hope of some day obtaining a true 
yellow P. llhceas, and I have already arrived at distinct shades of 
salmon. The Shirley Poppies have thus been obtained simply by 
M 
