MODERN IMPROVEMENTS OF GARDENING. 
435 
Truly “ the school-master is abroad,” and such is the diffusion of 
knowledge obtainable from the verbal admonition and practice of the 
preceptors, and the monthly reports of periodicals together, that ignor¬ 
ance is no longer a weed in a garden, nor need the culture of its crops 
ever be again entrusted to the management of a greenhorn. 
All this is very creditable to the present race of young gardeners. 
They have advantages which their fathers had not; the latter had 
experience for their teacher; they got" their stock of knowledge by 
morsels, collected through many a toilsome year: the former grasps 
the whole at once, or in the course of a very short apprenticeship. 
Th is prompt seizure of the business is now-a-days quite practicable ; 
it is a capture which may be made with but little exertion, and with but 
a small sacrifice of time. The apprentice at the conclusion of his three 
years’ study comes forth a full-grown master, and under the influence 
of youthful ardour, is often apt to wonder why it is said that long expe¬ 
rience only can make a perfect gardener. 
Such is the promptitude with which a knowledge of gardening may 
now be acquired, that placing this circumstance in one scale, and long 
experience on the other scale of a balance, a looker-on would probably 
observe so many vacillations of the beam, that he would be exceedingly 
puzzled to say whether the radiant youth or the hoary sage preponder¬ 
ated. Persons at a distance from this trial scene, and ignorant of the 
real circumstances of the case, will very naturally be inclined, however, 
to prefer and trust the judgment of the old practitioner, merely on the 
abstract principle that the oldest must necessarily be the wisest, and 
particularly because the veteran is constitutionally exempt from those 
impetuous impulses and undeliberated conclusions to which the elastic 
mind of youth is, or at least used to be (we speak from experience), 
sometimes subject. 
The fact is, that the objects of a gardener’s care are affected by so 
many invisible agents, that it behoves every one, old as well as young, 
to be always invested with that graceful garb of rational diffidence 
which is so becoming even to grey hairs. 
But to proceed. Gardening has, within the time specified, been 
improved by the accession of new culinary vegetables, new practices in 
their culture, additions to our catalogues of fruit, and improved modes 
of bringing them to perfection, whether native or exotic. The business 
has also been facilitated by clearer views of the organography and phy¬ 
siology of plants, and which has provided the cultivator with powers to 
which he was heretofore a stranger. New facilities have been given by 
the late improvements made in horticultural buildings, and in the heat¬ 
ing apparatus employed in them. All which has given the modern 
