110 
ADVANTAGES OF REMOVING DECAYING FLOWERS. 
by seed, and will, wherever that capacity is checked in its exercise, make its action 
apparent by throwing out flowers more abundantly, or in more frequent succession. 
Biennials, small as is the group they compose, yet afford some evidence of the 
advantage of the method we are writing upon. The Wallflower and Stock tribes 
are known to every one ; and all may ascertain, by trying the experiment, what 
can be done for a "Wallflower, or a Brompton Stock, or a Snapdragon, by cutting 
away all its blossoms when their chief beauty has departed. They must not be 
left till they have ceased flowering ; because they will continue developing weakly 
blossoms almost as long as they have any vitality remaining. But when the 
lowest seed-pods are nearly of their proper size, and the blooms are perceptibly 
getting smaller and feebler, the whole should be cut off, and they will soon after 
emit an immense number of flowering lateral shoots ; whereas, were they allowed 
to seed, they would at once become shabby and perish. 
At this stage, we are called to notice that the immediate effect produced by 
taking away the flowers of annual and biennial plants, is the protrusion of a great 
number of short and highly floriferous shoots. So that not only is the blooming 
season prolonged, but rendered, in its second part, yet more showy, besides the 
improvement that is made in the aspect of the plants by their augmented bushiness. 
Herbaceous species are acted upon very similarly, and the last-named benefit is far 
more conspicuous in their case. Shrubs, too, notwithstanding the greater remote- 
ness of the results of this process on them, are affected in an analogous manner, 
and manifestly develop more shoots as well as flowers in consequence of being 
so treated. 
Taking the next highest order of vegetable life, herbaceous plants show in a yet 
stronger light the necessity as well as the value of such a proceeding as that we 
are describing. Whether the sickliness and degeneracy so noticeable in the centre 
of herbaceous specimens towards the beginning or end of autumn be not rather 
attributable to the injudicious habit of permitting them to produce seed, than to 
their tendency to rob the soil of those properties needful to their support, or to their 
loading the earth with an excrementitious matter deleterious to themselves, may 
be rationally questioned. At any rate, we are confident that they are much 
debilitated from the former cause, and hundreds of herbaceous flowers may be 
made to attest this assertion. But we here speak merely of such as flower only 
once in the season. 
To advert to the class of herbaceous plants whose flowers can be developed at 
least twice in the year, or the greater part of the summer, by the means now treated 
of, there is the tribe of Rockets, one or two species of Anchusa and related genera, 
several kinds of Campanula, with Verbenas, Calceolarias, and numberless hardy 
and half-hardy plants besides. To pluck the decaying blossoms from these is simply 
to ensure that they emit a tenfold greater quantity of branches, and flower in pro- 
portionately greater profusion ; and this within a very short time after the per- 
formance of the operation. 
