96 
THE GARDENING WORLD. 
October 14, 1898. 
a glorious season is found in the check to 
employment which the drought has created. 
It has been a delightful season for pleasure, 
and the butterflies of Society have 
abundantly revelled in the sunshine, but 
the working bees have found rather a barren 
time. 
URPLUs Bedding Plants. —The usual 
public notices with respect to the dis¬ 
posal of the unrequired, and we fear too 
often useless, plants that are lifted from the 
beds in our London parks have been 
issued, and in a week or two the distribu¬ 
tion will take place. It is almost remark¬ 
able that there should be such a rush after 
these plants every year, but just as “ hope 
springs eternal in the human breast,” so 
may it be assumed that, in spite of repeated 
failures, London people, and of course poor 
people, think that they may sometime 
succeed in keeping these plants during the 
winter in their poor and crowded habita¬ 
tions, and then inducing them to bloom 
freely the following summer. 
If there is any labour that seems to have 
about it all the elements of hopelessness and 
failure, surely it is this. Surplus plants, so 
called, consist almost exclusively of Pelar¬ 
goniums, both zonal and var’egated. 
When the distribution takes place men, 
women and children may be seen wending 
their way home from the parks through the 
crowded streets, some carrying a bundle of 
six, some of twelve, some of more, and in 
two or three varieties. It is at the best a 
saddening spectacle, for the plants are 
about to be taken into quarters for the 
most part where life under any conditions 
for vegetation is hard always, and where it 
is speciall}' difficult, indeed almost painful, 
to keep plants in such an unfit condition 
alive. 
W^ould that someone could follow these 
plants to their new homes, and note the 
treatment they receive, the appearance 
they present as the winter deepens, and 
fin all}" record the live and dead when the 
summer again comes. Against the record 
of success we fear there w'ould hav"e to be 
set a long and sad story of losses and dis¬ 
appointments. To give these plants to the 
town poor, who worship anything in a 
flower pot as though it were a God, 
especially in the late autumn, is to keep the 
wordy promise to the ear and break it to 
the hope. If surplus plants could be givmn 
away in the spring they would do well, but 
these exhausted bedding plants are in 
October surely valueless. 
^HE Bulb Season. —We are now right 
^ into the thick of the retail bulb season. 
Our Dutch and French friends have in a 
wholesale way done their part and now it is 
for the army of home retailers to do theirs. 
Some of our traders have in the past bit¬ 
terly complained, and not without reason, 
that the Hollander, after serving them with 
wholesale orders, have then swamped their 
home constituencies with retail lists offer¬ 
ing at very low prices, so that anything 
like a reasonably profitable sale was out of 
the question. Whilst most desirous that 
all descriptions of bulbs should be brought 
within easy reach of all classes, we cannot 
approve of a practice that is distinctly un¬ 
fair to the honest home trader, and hope 
that the practice has somewhat subsided. 
However it may be, we realise that now 
of all times is the time to purchase bulbs 
and plant them. Our readers who may 
have no great experience of the former will 
do well to realise what others with 
experience have long since found—that the 
cheapest is not always the best, and that 
it is wiser to pay a fair price for good roots 
than a low price for inferior ones. If bulbs 
are worth growing at all they are worth 
doing well, and the doing well of rubbish is 
sheer waste. 
It would be difficult to imagine a garden 
now without bulbs. What with Crocuses, 
Snowdrops, Scillas, Tulips, Hyacinths, 
Daffodils, Ixias, Gladioli, Liliums, and many 
others, all giving v^arieties in wondrous pro¬ 
fusion, we find material that is now 
absolutely indispensable, and especially for 
the production of forced flowers. Liliums 
alone have become marvellous floral 
elements. They are so noble, so beautiful 
and so varied, giving flowers almost all the 
year round, under diverse conditions, that 
these seem to hqve distanced everything 
else in the race for popularity. Happily 
now a few pounds can secure a big supply 
of all sorts of bulbs giving an abundant 
return in flowers. 
.^NDiAN Corn.— That we shall ever take to 
* the growing of maize in this country for 
the production of ripe corn seems to be too 
utterly improbable. Some effort has been 
made, though so far with little success, to 
induce the cultivation of this handsome 
plant, for the giving to us green corn cobs, 
the which, properly cooked and served, is 
regarded as almost a delicacy in America. 
That these green cobs can be produced in 
abundance here is very evident, and some 
day perhaps we shall find them constituting 
one of our food products. 
But whatsoever may be the state of 
things in America, at least here it is certain 
that the green Corn Cob finds formidable 
rivals in the wealth of really delicious vege¬ 
tables that %ve have—-a wealth that can 
hardly be fully realised because so very con¬ 
siderable. We have great variety of kinds, 
and, thanks to business enterprise, we have 
immense abundance of the finest of varie¬ 
ties, so that here at least there is .so little 
need for products that seem to require a 
specially created taste to enable us to 
appreciate them. 
Maize, however, has a value that during 
such a season as this can hardly be under¬ 
stood so fully as should be. Whilst there 
has been generally a lack of cattle food, 
that has in many localities almost 
approached a famine, there has been in 
others, where Maize was sown early in the 
summer as an ordinary green crop, great 
plenty. Still in how few instances were 
precautions taken to secure such a crop, 
whilst where sown the produce of rich 
sweet food must have been per acre 
enormous. We saw breadths of Maize in 
the autumn of the most luxuriant kind 
growing under ordinary culture, and can 
hardly doubt but that it was the most 
valuable of provender. 
-- 
The Pontefract Chrysanthemum Society's Show will 
take place on November loth and nth. 
The Ryde Chrysanthemum Show will be held on 
November ist. 
The Sheffield Chrysanthemum Society’s Show is 
announced to be held on November 17th and i8th^ 
Mr. Melville, foreman to Mr. Lunt at Ardgowan, 
has been engaged as gardener at Poltalloch, Argyle- 
shire, in succession to Mr. James Russell, whose 
retirement is more fully alluded to in another 
column. 
Gardening and Forestry Exhibition.— On Monday 
evening Mr. Harry Turner, of Slough, was enter¬ 
tained at dinner by a number of friends at the 
Gardening and Forestry Exhibition, in recognition of 
his services as president of the horticultural section 
of the exhibition. Mr Milner, F.L.S., C.E., pre¬ 
sided, and warmly eulogised Mr. Turner's services 
in organising the numerous floral exhibitions that 
have been held during the season and in the decora¬ 
tion of the gardens. A handsome epergne was 
presented to Mr. Turner as a memento of the 
occasion. 
Awards at the Gardening and Forestry Exhibition.— 
We are requested by Mr. Milner to state that only 
one Gold Medal was awarded at the recent exhibi¬ 
tion to Messrs. James Veitch & Sons, not two, as 
would appear from our report of the show. So far 
as we are concerned, the error arose through a " Gold 
Med^l” card being placed on both of the Messrs. 
Veitch’s collections. 
Death of Mr. W. Y. Draper. —We regret to hear of 
the death, on the 7th inst., at iq, Addison Crescent, 
Kensington, aged 60, of Mr. William Yates Draper, 
the head of the firm of Messrs. J. W. Draper & Son, 
the well-known salesmen of Covent Garden. Mr. 
Draper had long been a martyr to gout, but held a 
high position in the market, and was much respected. 
The funeral took place at Brompton Cemetery on 
the nth inst. 
The Private Gardens at Hampton Court.—It is 
stated that, with the approval of the Queen, about 
four acres of private gardens at Hampton Court 
Palace, which have hitherto been maintained out of 
the Privy Purse, but to which the public have for 
many years had free access, are about to be trans¬ 
ferred to the management of the Board of Works, 
and the expense borne by the Parliamentary Vole. 
The orangery is to be repaired and redecorated, and, 
together with the lawn in front, will be set apart 
specially for the use of the private residents of the 
Palace. 
Plants Certificated at Ghent. —At the last meeting 
of the Belgian Chamber of Horticulture, Certificates 
of Merit were awarded to Mr. E. Bedinghaus for a 
collection of variegated Yuccas ; to Mr. A. Van 
Imschoot for Sobralia xantholeuca ; to Mr. Jules 
Hye for Cypripedium prestans; to Mr. F. Desbois 
for Caryopteris mastacanthus; to Madame la 
Marquis de Wavrin for Miltonia Morelliana var. 
atropurpurea; and to Mr. Edward Pynaert for 
Phoenix insignis. 
Chrysanthemum Show at the People's Palace. —The 
East London Amateur Chrysanthemum Society will 
hold its third annual exhibition on November 6th 
and two following days in the Queen's Hall and 
Winter Garden at the People's Palace in the Mile 
End Road. The competition for prizes will be re¬ 
stricted to the members of the Society, but the 
Governors of the Palace will gladly receive contri¬ 
butions of groups or cut flow'ers from other ex¬ 
hibitors. t 
Dundee Horticultural Society.—At the annual 
general meeting of the members of this Society, 
which is to be held next Friday, a number of 
important amendments of the existing rules will be 
voted on. One amendment has for its object the 
placing of the Society on a sounder financial basis. 
An account of the Society's financial condition which 
we have read, shows that the expenditure has 
exceeded the income, and the executive have had 
to draw from the balance in hand from former years, 
but although this is the case the accounts show’ 
that they have still a large balance in hand. The 
Dundee Horticultural Society is well know’n to be a 
strong and important body. 
A New Solanaceous Plant. —The horticultural 
journals of the south of continental Europe announce 
that M. de St. Quentin, in the course of a voyage of 
exploration in Uruguay, has discovered upon the 
banks of several rivers, a Solanaceous plant, giving 
edible tubers in abundance, analagous to those of 
the Potato. The Horticultural Society of Marseilles, 
according to the Illustration Horticole, has decided to 
offer a gold medal to the importer who shall intro¬ 
duce this new plant into Europe in a living state. 
Another gold medal will be decreed to him who shall 
obtain the first return or produce of the new plant in 
question. 
Mr. George Cannon.—This well-known Ealing 
horticulturist, who has filled the post of manager at 
Messrs. C. Lee & Son's nursery at Ealing for the 
past twenty-nine years, is about to take over the 
nursery business carried on so long by Mr. George 
Weeden, Matlock Lane, Ealing. Mr. Cannon, when 
quite a lad, went into Messrs. Osborn's nursery at 
Fulham, then he was for four years with Mr. 
Richard Smith at Worcester, and in 1864 he took 
charge of Messrs. C. Lee & Son's out-door nursery 
at Ealing, developing the business to a considerable 
extent, and as a landscape gardener laying out with 
considerable success many villa residences and 
