274 
THE FLOEIST AND POMOLOGIST. 
[ December, 
beauties. Florists at once turn critically to the bloom to find out old faces and 
old favourites, and to weigh the merits and promise of any rising young 
variety. 
The Auricula looks always sweetest and prettiest at home, and I am always 
half-sorry when exhibiting time comes. I know that for the flowers themselves 
it is the breaking-up of a happy family gathering that never meets quite in the ^ 
old way again. Plants that are taken to the shows come back weary and worn 
with (as last time) a week of travel; days spent in a hot, dry air, and nights in a 
cold sleeping-box—all so unlike home. Thus the harmony, and richness, and 
duration of the bloom are interfered with; and it perhaps is not too much to say 
that the quiet enjoyment of the opening flowers at home, allowed to expand at 
their leisure, with no ever-haunting anxieties as to their being too late or too 
early, would be the most comfortable self-indulgence in Auriculas. 
The most memorable incident of the past bloom here was the splendid race 
between full and equal plants of Lancashire Hero and George Lightbody, long 
considered great rival greys. Both flowers were particularly free from the faults 
that each is liable to. ‘ Hero ’ showed no indecision of edge, or crack in the paste 
or that peculiar want of flatness, technically known as “ cockling,” which in large 
pips of this variety is apt to throw the whole flower out of form. George Light- 
body was also well mealed on the edge, deep and lively in body-colour, and cleverly 
free of his well-known fault of one petal too many on the pip, which either 
helps to form a joint petal of inordinate and awkward breadth that will not 
flatten, or else lies upon the face of the pip, as a smaller one for which there 
is no room in the symmetry of the flower. 
Both varieties are magnificent Auriculas as plants, and probably honours 
would be found divided among them, but I could not help giving the shade of 
preference to Robin Lancashire’s grand old seedling. It was such a Hero! A 
plant of such noble carriage, the edge such a model grey, of bold white meal upon 
a rich green ground ; the body-colour such an intense broad black; the paste 
so dense and snowy, and the whole flower in every way so full of power, quality, 
and finish. The Auriculas that will beat the best Lancashire Hero down into 
the dust are at present past imagining. 
The best of known varieties in green-edges were :—Colonel Taylor, which was 
over before the Crystal Palace Show, owing to the trusses having risen too far in 
autumn ; Mr. Simonite’s Talisman, which here was as much too late ; Booth’s 
Freedom, which wins its way by the superb brilliancy of , all its colours, the 
vividness of the dark-green edge, the velvety depth of the black body, its density 
of paste, and richness of tube,—otherwise, as the paste is terribly angular, and 
the pip sometimes so, the body often too heavy, and the plant a shy bloomer, on 
a long stalk. Freedom is a flower with grave faults. Anna is a seedling raised 
from it by the late Mr. Trail, and is a pure green-edge of rounder outlines than 
its parent, with the body-colour a dead, sooty black that is peculiar. 
