206: JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL BORTiCULTURAL SOCmTY. 



DEOUGHT AND Gz\EDENING. 

 By Prof. I. Bayley Balfour, M.A., F.E.S., V.M.H. 

 [Read May 14, 1912; Sir Daniel Morris, K.C.M.G., in the Chair.] 

 Being the Seventh "Masters Lecture." 



When your Council did me the honour to give me the invitation to 

 which I am responding I felt that I ought to endeavour, in anything 

 I might say, to follow in the path of the name-father of these lectures 

 by selecting a theme through which might be illustrated some bond 

 between the practical operations of gardening and the scientific study 

 of plant-life. Along this avenue of interpretation no one has advanced 

 with more certain step than Dr. Masters. Wresting her secrets 

 from Nature by his own studious research and grasping with critical 

 acumen the points of investigation of others, he always held high the 

 torch of Science and directed its illuminating rays to the elucidation of 

 problems of horticulture. The Gardeners' Chronicle — which he 

 raised to a position of unique prestige, now worthily maintained — bears 

 on its pages the record of his earnest endeavour to interweave science 

 and practice, and is our heritage of his effort to associate botany and 

 horticulture in one advance for the benefit of each. , 



In the spirit of Dr. Masters' work I wish to speak to-day, and I 

 have sought in the water-relations of plants for a subject upon which 

 I might say something fitting on this commemorative occasion. 



If the title which is attached to my lecture — " Drought and 

 Gardening " — has suggested to any of my audience that the subject 

 of which I am to speak has matured out of the exceptional meteoro- ; 

 logical conditions which were experienced in this island in the course of 

 last year, let me at once undeceive them by saying that my theme 

 is not immediately based upon the relations between drought and 

 gardening as exemplified in the phenomena of recent experience. 

 From all accounts such a relation might be summarized briefly in — , 

 enter drought, exit gardening. More definitely, perhaps, and as a 

 striking head-line, the title might have run, A Contribution to the 

 Physiology of the Watering Can." How one wishes that a true, 

 physiology of that useful yet misused implement were possible ! Yet I 

 take it if mathematical precision were introducible in the matter of 

 watering plants, or in the operations of gardening generally, much of 

 the fascination of the garden would go. 



You are all doubtless familiar with the paradox that to any one ofi 

 us the danger in getting wet is the getting dry. As regards plant-life 

 within the ken of the gardener one may invert the paradox and say 

 that the danger in getting dry is the getting wet. The problem of the 

 relationships of plants to their water-supply far outweighs all other 

 problems that present themselves to the gardener. " Improper water- 



