194 
THE FLOEIST AND POMOLOGIST. 
[ September, 
Had it, for example, been a truer consideration for the beauty of the Auricula, 
we might before now have had it a star-fish form, a flower of narrow windmill 
petals, instead of one fair round disc, upon which varied zones of colour-work are 
best displayed. We might have misdirected the Picotee into a fantastic fimbriate 
flower, as fringy in its way as those frilled-paper anklets that set off festive legs 
of ham or mutton! But where, then, the continuity of the lovely “ wire-edge ?” 
The Tulip had a stained base till nature taught us, in the first clear flower, that 
absolute purity must be one of our high aims there. 
But there is nothing to prove to us that we have in any of our florist-flowers 
reached motionless perfection yet. At every attempt at improvement do im¬ 
provements come, and show there is plenty of work, and the end not in sight. 
Where our florist fathers rested in the evening of their day, is the point we 
start from in the morning of our own, and we should ever have this purpose 
before us in our floral pursuits, to leave something added, something better than 
we found. So, when shadows are long upon the grass for us in turn, and we 
come to lay the old gentle pleasures by with that same feeble consent in which we 
part from friends who cannot stay, we may be able to say we have done some¬ 
what for the future in these quiet ways, as the past has done for us. 
For such reasons, apart from all the pleasures, let us not forget the duties of 
floriculture, but seek to improve our favourites, so far as we have time for the 
care—^by seed. 
In seeding the Auricula, only the best flowers in the collection should be 
used for parents. If a valuable plant is young and healthy, there is no danger in 
allowing it to carry a pod or two of seed. Chance-saved seed is not worth 
attending to in comparison with that obtained by careful cross-impregnation. The 
flowers must be fertilised while young, at the time the pin or stigma is viscid, and 
the pollen on the anthers proud and fresh. This will often be before the blooms are 
fully expanded. Where anthers close the tube, as in some varieties, I remove them 
before their pollen has burst, and indeed generally, in order to have the young stigma 
free for any cross I wish to make. I use no instrument for imparting the pollen, 
but the anther itself, which I apply with a delicate pair of nippers. Pollen is a very ^ 
subtle substance, of grains so minute that a camel-hair pencil is not easily freed 
entirely from it for a new experiment. Generally, green-edges will be crossed 
with greens, grey with greys, and so on, and it perhaps does not feel like wisdom 
to cross out of the classes. But the Auricula is so sportive that heavy white- 
edged parents will produce pure green-edged seedlings, while a large proportion 
of all seed from edged flowers will be simply seifs. Class distinctions, therefore, 
are completely broken down as regards the characters that seedling Auriculas 
may assume. 
I do not, as a rule, allow the large plants with heavy stems to carry seed. 
Wherever the stalk with its pt)ds is likely to remain in a central or prominent 
position on the plant, there seems to be a strain imposed upon it that often pulls 
it down. By far the best and most willing seed-bearers are those sprightly 
