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Slower (Brower 
I PUBLISHED MONTHLY ON THE FIRST OF THE MONTH BY I 
[ MADISON COOPER, CALCIUM, N.Y. f 
1 FOR BOTH AMATEUR AND PROFESSIONAL FLOWER GROWERS | 
1 Subscription Price : OUR MOTTO : Canadian and Foreign = 
i $1.00 per year. Special favors to none, and a Subscription Price | 
I 3 years for $2.00. square deal to all. $1.25 per year. | 
Growers are invited to contribute articles or notes over their own 
signatures, but the Editor reserves the right to reject anything which 
in his judgment is not conducive to the general welfare of the business. 
Copyright 101!) by Madison Cooper 
The contents of THE FLOWER GROWER, formerly "The Modern Gladiolus 
Grower” are covered by general copyright. Permission is given to editors to use not 
more than one-third of any article providing proper credit is given at the beginning or 
end of such quotation, as follows: “ From THE FLOWER GROWER, Calcium, N. Y.” 
Special permission necessary for reprinting illustrations, long extracts or articles entire. 
Vol. VI December, 1919 No. 12 
“ He who sows the ground with care and diligence acquires a 
greater stock of religious merit than he could gain by the 
repetition of ten thousand prayers.”— Zoroaster. 
Have a Flower Garden Bogey. 
Did you ever see one of your well-to-do, portly business 
men driving a pebble about a vacant lot with a club for the 
exercise or sport of the thing ? Undoubtedly no. Yet, this 
same man will pay good money for the privilege of spend- 
ing a whole afternoon in the boiling hot sun driving a small 
rubber ball all over an eighty acre golf links and come back 
to the club house puffing and dripping, and if perchance 
he has equalled or bettered his previous record, it is indeed 
a Grand and Glorious day. And why ? Because he has 
made play out of work and the Bogey did it. Without the 
Bogey our various golf links would be about as exciting as 
a country church yard. 
Why not apply this idea to your flower garden ? To 
have a good one you will have to spend several hot after- 
noons pulling weeds, cultivating and combating the various 
insect pests, all of which is work or play, depending 
entirely on the spirit with which you go about it. Right 
here is where the garden Bogey comes in. Instead of 
simply growing flowers, add a little zest to the thing by 
way of friendly competition with your own efforts, and 
make play out of your garden work. 
Lay out your garden in the spring according to a definite 
plan and plant accordingly. Keep a detailed account of 
your progress from week to week and of the net results in 
the fall. Then, during the coming winter, see if you can- 
not devise some new plan which will give you better results, 
better and larger flowers. Use your previous record as your 
garden Bogey and see if you cannot beat it. Loosen up and 
enter into the spirit of the game and the first thing you 
know you will become so absorbed in the Bogey that you 
will consider it an infringement on your rights and preroga- 
tives as the head of the family and master of the garden, 
if perchance your wife, or some other member of the house- 
hold, should presume to touch it. All of which I can assure 
you will be greatly appreciated by the other members of 
your family, and particularly the younger ones, for on them, 
too often, the disagreeable tasks fall. Thus your Bogey 
will not only sustain and stimulate you in your work, but 
will filter on down through the whole family to the great 
joy and peace of mind of all concerned. If you find keep- 
December, 1919 
ing a detailed record too irksome, then select the best garden 
in your neighborhood and use that as your Bogey and try 
to beat it. Get your neighbor into the game too and see if 
you can’t make two flowers grow while he grows but one. 
It is the Bogey that made possible the new varieties of 
Dahlias, the Ruffled Gladioli, the Spencer Sweet Pea, and 
put the fragrance into the Peony. The men who originated 
these and all of our other wonderfully improved vegetables, 
fruits and flowers, are no more fond of work than you are. 
If you have any doubts about this, present any one of them 
with a buck saw and a cord of good dry hickory and watch 
the results. But each of them has a definite plan, object, 
ideal, a Bogey, if you please that they are striving for, and 
that is the thing that sustains and encourages them in 
their work and makes possible the long hours, close appli- 
cation, and finally puts the thing across. Gardening is not 
work to such as these any more than a game of golf is to 
a golfer. 
The average man has enough work keeping up with the 
everyday burdens of life without carrying it into his garden, 
and making that just one more darn thing after all the 
others. If you do not like the term Bogey, call it any name 
you please, but get the idea, that is the thing, and if you do, 
your garden trials and tribulations, together with the 
drudgery, weeds and insects, like the Arabs, “ will fold their 
tents and quietly steal away.” 
Oliver S. Andresen. 
Why Worry About Diseases of Gladioli ? 
It seems that those who undertake to grow Gladioli for 
the first time are quite likely to look for perfection and for 
this reason much more likely to find defects than those 
who have had long experience. It really amounts to little 
if a few corms are defective, if the average is of good 
quality. Don’t expect that everything will be perfect in 
growing Gladioli any more than it is in other things. 
We have been growing Gladioli for a dozen years or 
more and every year some varieties show defects and it is 
not the same variety each year either. The trouble may be 
owing to peculiar or unusual conditions in the particular 
spot in the garden where the defective stock is found. But 
as before stated, why worry? One can make oneself quite 
miserable by imagining troubles that do not exist or mag- 
nifying little troubles into large ones. So far as we know 
there is no disease of the Gladiolus which will not eradicate 
itself under clean and fairly correct cultural conditions. 
We, personally, have had stock from all over the world 
nearly, doubtless showing all the different species and varia- 
tions of disease that are known to science. We simply 
forget it, and although, a certain portion is lost, those that 
do well seem to be clean and good, and so why worry ? 
Madison Cooper. 
Mr. Andresen’s suggestion to have a flower garden 
“ bogey ” (which by the way means setting the pace for 
competition) is a most excellent one. Not only should we 
have a flower garden bogey, but we should have a work 
bogey, and not confine it to flower growing only. Production 
per capita is at a very low ebb in this country, in fact the 
world over for that matter, and a serious condition con- 
fronts us unless this is corrected very soon. While The 
Flower Grower does not aim to cover sociological ques- 
tions, we believe that the situation is such that it should be 
brought to the attention of every one in a very forcible 
way, and we hope to have more to say along this line in 
future issues. 
Ol)£ Slower (Brower 
