Dec. 13th, 1884. 
227 
‘ Gardening is the purest of human pleasures, and the greatest 
refreshment to the spirit of man.”— Bacon. 
€\t darktratg Worlb. 
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13 th, 1884. 
Ajiatede Gaedenebs. —That prince of Ameri¬ 
can humourists Max Adeler, indulges in a little 
quiet sarcasm in one of his publications at the 
expense of the A ankee amateur gardener, whose 
ignorance of the elements of gardening is so 
great, that he plants his Cabbages upside down, 
and sticks in poles for the Strawberry-runners to 
climb; to the astonishment and disgust of his 
professional help, who next morning discovers 
these evidences of amateur gardening lunacy. 
Without doubt, Adeler is right in his assertion, 
that with the true amateur fresh from city office, 
warehouse, or study, a little manual labour goes 
a long way. And that whilst a tickling of 
a yard or two of the earth’s surface with a hoe 
may give pleasure, a regular burst at digging or 
other laborious employment, will be found to be 
anything but recreation or enjoyment. 
There is much genuine garden love in the man 
who potters about amidst his frames and his 
flowers, but he does not work really heavily, 
simply amuses himself, and withdraws the moment 
he feels discomfort or fatigue. That is pure 
recreation, and if with it there is pure garden 
enthusiasm, happy indeed is the lot of the 
amateur. But the puffing, loud talking and 
professedly 'laborious amateur is generally a 
humbug. He is a boaster, but does little or 
nothing to earn the credit he assumes. Usually 
he is trading upon the reputation of some garden 
hack who does the actual work which the amateur 
tries to persuade credulous friends is the product 
of his exertions. An hour’s real labour in dig- 
ing, or wheeling, or watering, or mowing, would 
settle him for a week, and for the sake of the 
poor hack happily so. The boasting amateur will 
never make a gardener, he lacks the soul, the 
inner sense of the recreative gospel, without 
which no one, rich or poor, great or small, can 
ever hope to become a true follower of the 
grand old gardener. 
We sympathize very much with Max Adeler’s 
appreciation for a garden which gives a run for 
the children to romp and play in. The new 
fashion of apportioning a plot of grass to the 
worship of lawn tennis and the consecration of 
it with broad hideous chalk lines and nets and 
poles to that form of recreation was evidently, 
and happily, not known when the Hurly Burly 
was indited. We love him greatly for his plea 
for the children, for a plot not dedicated to Boses 
or Cabbages, Vines, or Potatos, where the little 
ones may romp and play without doing harm 
or sacrilegiously trespassing on the cultivated 
ground. If a garden be all plants and narrow 
gravel walks ; if it lacks room to play in, to run 
in, or to have some form of physical amusement 
in, it is like a book that is cram full of Latinity 
or grammar and has not in all its pages one single 
illustration or picture wherewith to please and 
satisfy the longing cravingfor some littlerecreative 
oasis in this desert of priggishness and primness. 
The paid labourer, whose quality of work 
means the quantity of his pay, must of necessity 
have about his life much of the drudge, though if 
he has soul he may after all get more real enjoy¬ 
ment from his garden than his amateur employer, 
THE GARDENING WORLD. 
who with all his wealth soon finds that pure 
gardening is an enjoyment which no wealth can 
purchase. 
-- 
Hollyhocks and the Disease. —In common 
with the general apparent decline of vigour in 
fungoid plant diseases, we have noted during the 
past summer the subsidence of attacks on the 
Hollyhock of that pestilent fungus which for 
several years has rendered the culture of that 
favourite old garden flower almost impossible, we 
are tempted to ask whether fungoid diseases are 
waning in power or are in process of dying out, 
that during a season so favourable for its heat 
and drought to the promotion of some, if deterring 
to others, that the Hollyhock’s enemy should 
have proved so feeble. The general experience 
of this parasite has been that it was mostly 
favoured by dry weather, and that frequent water¬ 
ings and sprinklings overhead kept it in check. 
Certainly, this year, whatever causes may have 
been in operation to check the fungus, moisture 
has had no part in it. If this decadence of the 
fungus should lead to a renewal of confidence in 
Hollyhock culture, our gardens will be the 
gainers, for truly it is a grand flower, and one 
which merits all care and attention. We have 
now such capital seed strains, that it is very easy 
indeed to raise an abundant supply of good 
double kinds in great variety. It is too late to 
sow now in the hope of getting plants to bloom 
well during the coming year, but at least seed 
sown in May will give very stout plants to bloom 
the following summer, and another sowing made 
in August will give a good succession of bloomers 
for the autumn. The Hollyhock has enjoyed a 
high reputation as a florist’s flower, and has given 
to us many superb, named kinds. Probably many 
of these are extinct, but in any case it is of less 
moment that the pure florist’s features should bo 
revived than that the plants should once more 
take its position as a first-rate garden flower. 
-- 
Exhibition Apples, Peaes, &c.—How that 
the excitement incidental to the exhibitions of 
fruits, so plentiful of late, is over, there is a 
question to be asked and we should like to have 
it answered, and that is this, How far in the face 
of ruling market prices for good fruits of Apples, 
Pears, &c., can the culture of huge samples such 
as we have seen during the past few weeks be 
made profitable ? If we include in the term 
profitable the capacity such fruit may possess to 
win prizes here and there at shows, of course an 
element is introduced such as could hardly be 
expected to enter into our calculations. But the 
chance to exhibit fruit for prizes is of a very 
intermittent kind, whilst the real profit on fruit 
culture must of course be looked for chiefly if not 
only in market returns. How, big samples not 
only look well and always take the highest 
honours on the show table, but they will, as a 
rule, secure good prices relatively in the market. 
But these fine fruits are not obtained under 
ordinary systems or methods of culture. They 
are rather the spoilt children of the garden, 
procured by much thinning, or in such a way that 
they are made to carry six or a dozen, where an 
ordinary or fair crop should consist of three or 
four times as many. Some are grown on aspaliers, 
some on cordons, some on bush or small pyramid 
trees, but few or none on those ordinary standards, 
such as we find the backbones of our orchards, 
and the chief fillers of our fruit-rooms. We have 
seen wonderful crops of medium-sized fruits on 
small trees, and here and there some grand fruits 
thinly strewn over others; but still the main 
point for solution is, does the production of big 
fruits, whether of Apples or Pears, pay or does it 
not ? It is a matter well worthy of discussion, for 
profit is after all the chief element which we must 
regard in any attempt at systematic fruit culture. 
Daek Flesh in Potatos. —We meet with 
many complaints this year of the blackness of 
the flesh of many Potatos, and which is not of 
the common order of blackness found in tubers 
later on in the winter arising from rough usage, 
but is a blackness incidental to some deficiency 
in culture, or in the capacity of the season to 
fully mature the tubers, or from some other 
cause, the which it may not be easy to compre¬ 
hend. What is curious concerning this blackness 
is that it is chiefly found in what is called the 
heel or root end of the tuber, and is more specially 
seen in kidney than in round kinds. Our own 
conclusion is that drought or excessive dryness 
of the soil, such as has been the general feature 
of the past season, is to blame for this grave 
defect in our Potatos, but in what way it has 
operated it is difficult to explain. The fact that 
the nose end of the tubers in all cases is sound 
and good shows that the elements of good Potatos 
were not wanting in the soil, but it may be 
inferred that there must have been, in con¬ 
sequence of the drought, considerable inability to 
utilize them. The defect seen in this blackness 
is evidently one of imperfect growth or maturation. 
Farther, we find this portion of the tuber that is 
black to be hard, indeed it would seem as if some 
of the strength of the Potato plant needful to 
build up the woody stems had been directed into 
the tubers. In a vast number of instances the 
Potato plant received in the course of the season 
such a severe check that it may almost have 
abstracted nutriment from the newly-forming 
tuber to help sustain it, and thus led to the 
defects. There is ample room for this hypothesis, 
but the actual cause remains unknown. A 
chemist might perhaps tell us what is lacking 
in blackened tubers. 
-^- 
Oechid Sales. —The establishing of periodical 
sales of flowering Orchids, and the introduction 
of Orchids in flower into all the sales has done 
much to give interest to the sale-rooms, which 
may now be reckoned among our most useful of 
trade institutions, and to spread a knowledge of 
the plants by exhibiting the rare ones in flower, 
and showing what are good and what inferior to 
the old varieties. By these means the wealthy 
amateur can always add rare things to his 
collection, and at the same time see that the 
variety is worth getting, and different from what 
he already has, while he of slender means may be 
made acquainted with good and desirable rare 
species to be booked against the time they come 
within his reach. So frequently and unexpectedly 
do rare things turn up in flower at these sales, 
that many of our great growers seldom miss 
looking into Stevens’s or Protheroe & Morris’s 
rooms to see what can be picked up in bloom, 
even when the catalogue list.does not contain 
anything they want. Among the many rare 
things recently offered in flower lately by 
Messrs. Protheroe & Morris, at the City 
Auction Booms, 67 and 68, Cheapside, may be 
mentioned Cattleya Wagneriana, a pure white 
Mosshe,with orange lip; C. Eldorado Leeana, pure 
white, with yellow throat and crimson lip; 
Odontoglossum adspersum, a beautiful new 
hybrid; O. elegans, a hybrid between luteo- 
purpureum and cirrkosum ; Batemannia Colleyi, 
a rare and strange-looking Orchid; Cypripedium 
Arthurianum.one of Messrs.Veitch’s rare hybrids; 
with C. Fairrieanum, C. purpuratum (true), and 
many grand forms of 0. Alexandrse. As illus¬ 
trating the chances, too, of picking up good 
things at these sales, we may mention that Mr. 
Page, of Twickenham, recently bought at Messrs. 
Protheroe & Morris’s two small plants of Odonto¬ 
glossum in bud, one of which on flowering was 
valued at four guineas, and the other Mr. Page 
refused thirty guineas for, not wishing to part 
with it. 
