has meant that the nurseries have not the skilled labor which they 
formerly had, but the women are available to take their places and 
will quickly become as skilled as the men were. Consequently, al- 
though the present period is a period of labor scarcity, the situation 
is not as serious as in England, where the women are not able to do 
such heavy labor. M. Turbat told me that 40 of his men had gone to 
the war and that after the armistice four of them were aUve to return. 
But he had, when I was there, plenty of peasant women, who were 
grafting the roses, digging the plants, packing and shipping. The 
fact that they were not used by long association to the large numbers 
of varieties which the French are growing, will be one of the reasons 
which will drive from the French nurseries within the next few years, 
many hundreds of varieties of plants, for it will be impossible mth 
labor new to the nursery business to label and keep such plants 
separated. This will be a blessing which will drive from commerce 
hundreds and thousands of antiquated and superseded varieties which 
the French have continued to grow for the same reason that they con- 
tinued to do everything else, namely, that the}^ had always done so 
before. They will make this change with reluctance, but it will 
be forced upon them now. There can be no reason to regret this, 
for such long lists of varieties are only a burden. I saw in Tours, 
at the time of the armistice, three nurseries and I beUeve that each 
one of them was growing more than a thousand varieties of chrysan- 
themums and the thousand that one man was growing was not the 
same that the next one was growing. This is the rule, not the excep- 
tion in France; some of the wholesale growers of Angers offer as 
many as 300 varieties of Pears, 100 varieties of Raspberries, 500 
varieties of Roses, 100 varieties of Lilacs, and so on. I saw in the 
spring of i9i8,in Chaumont, a florist growing Heliotropes under about 
20 different names, although there were not more than three distinct 
forms among them. 
The shortage of labor, in spite of the fact that they have woman 
labor, also will make it imperative to use machines where formerly 
work was done by hand. This change is already upon them, and I 
saw in the Vilmorin nurseries, near Paris, a Planet, Jr. cultivator being 
pulled by one woman and pushed by another. M. Millet, who was 
with me, stared at this machine with his mouth wide open, with very 
much the same spirit as the farmer at the circus who looked at the 
giraffe for half an hour and then remarked that there was no such 
animal — for he asked me confidentially afterwards whether it was 
true that such machines were used much in America and whether they 
were at all practical; and this man had been in the nursery business 
all his life, while the Vilmorin nurseries, where the machine was being 
tried, are the oldest and largest in France. 
16 
