December 31, 1892. 
THE GARDENING WORLD. 
27? 
GARDENERS IN COUNCIL. 
(i Continued from p. 262.) 
The Violet evidently is a very humble flower, and 
as such is often killed by too much affected kindness. 
The placing of the Violet in some positions and 
boring it with a host of unnecessary attentions is 
like placing a humble countryman in a long-tailed 
coat and asking him to dine with the squire ; both 
become digusted and their food naturally chokes 
them. Mr. Ebbut’s opening remarks prove this. 
He says : “ I have invariably found that the greatest 
number of flowers are produced by plants grown on 
poor soils ; in richer soils foliage takes the place of 
flowers.” No plant for either autumn or spring 
cutting so well repays the cultivator for his attention 
as the Violet, but these attentions should be largely 
guided by nature. Failure to produce an abundance 
of flower is more often the result of fads of the 
cultivator than the posi¬ 
tion. All that is necessary 
to my mind is plenty of 
growing room, plenty of 
air and sun to well ripen 
the crowns, and a plenti¬ 
ful supply of moisture 
during the summer 
droughts to prevent a 
check of their growing 
powers, and you may rely 
on an abundant supply of 
flowers for both autumn 
and winter. 
Mr. Ebbut speaks of 
forcing the Violet, and at 
the same time tells us 
that it is most impatient of 
artificial warmth. This 
seems rather conflicting 
and of itself to answer a 
question I should like to 
ask, viz., is it necessary to 
force the Violet at all ? I 
think not. All I think it 
requires to enable us to 
prolong its flowering 
season is protection, more 
especially from cold, frost, 
and heavy rains, and in 
doing this to ensure it at 
the same time an abun¬ 
dant supply of air, and 
your forcing apparatus, if 
you like so to call it, is 
complete. 
Tomato. 
This seems to me to have 
been one of the best 
papers of the session, and 
my reason for saying so is 
because I find it deals en¬ 
tirely with Mr. Rowlands’ 
own actual experience,and 
for a society like ours 
this is exactly what we 
require. We want to be¬ 
come more familar with 
the best modes of culture, 
whether of the Tomato or any other subject, as 
adopted successfully by our own members, inde¬ 
pendently of any outside theory, written in all pro¬ 
bability more for the sake of adding a little to the 
writer’s income than as a practical guide to others. 
We ask only for hard facts and then to be allowed 
to deal with them as each may think fit. The 
Tomato has of late years become one of the most 
popular vegetables of the day, and should therefore, 
as such, be more extensively cultivated in England 
by those who supply our markets. It should be one 
of those things if properly handled that should help 
to alleviate the so-called depression in trade. Our 
English cultivators should remember that fashions 
exist and change equally as much with fruits, vege. 
tables etc., as they do with silk hats and petticoats, 
and that it is by watching these changes that fortunes 
are made or lost. To make a fortune you must not ba 
too conservative in your ideas ; you must see at once 
when a thing has had its day and drop it as you 
would a hot Potato and take up quickly those tha 
are taking its place, before competition has had time 
to play havoc with the prices. 
The Tomato has not yet soured the public taste 
and at the prices realized should pay its way. It 
has struck me that our English growers do not plant 
sufficiently early enough, and therefore get a super¬ 
abundance of green fruit late in the season, which 
never can attain perfection, and therefore unless for 
making sauce, which I must admit is very good, be¬ 
come unrenumerative. This I am fully aware can¬ 
not, where the necessary protection is absent, be 
avoided, but surely it would pay the cultivator to 
provide this early spring protection for so valuable 
and certain a crop, rather than to spend all his 
energy in growing simply green meat, which in nine 
cases out of ten never gets further than the refuse 
heap. 
I have had no means at my command to enable 
me to gain a practical knowledge of the cultivation 
of the Tomato, but it seems to me that success 
depends mainly on first selecting a free fruiting kind, 
then keeping your plants growing and healthy, and 
Mr. Alexander Watt. 
at the same time prevent their growing too luxuri¬ 
antly and so prevent their setting their fruit, and to 
secure this any feeding they may get is better applied 
after the first fruit has appeared rather than it 
should have been placed in the soil previous to 
planting. Evidently it is more beneficial to the crop 
that the superabundance of growth should be 
checked in this way than by pruning, by which 
means you must necessarily cut off not only fruit 
producing wood, but much that is necessary to the 
full development of the fruit already produced. 
The Chrysanthemum. 
Culture by an amateur, as I understand it, is a 
culture of love; not merely monetary, from which 
point we poor selfish professionals regard the culture 
of everything more or less in all probability, oft 
times mixed with a certain amount of love, but 
generally otherwise, and here it is where I think the 
culture for exhibition—although it may excite the 
cultivator to endeavours he would otherwise scarcely 
dream of, and to perhaps splendid results not other¬ 
wise attainable—takes to a great extent the real love 
of the flower off his mind, and replaces it with a 
sort of morbid straining after in many cases the 
impossible. My idea of a good gardener is that 
he should be an amateur in any case — the professional 
part of the business is found to come in when 
exhibiting or very high culture is taken up. 
Mr. Crabbe has not merely shown us by his paper 
what results are attainable by any one in a similar 
position to himself, but has of late given us ocular 
demonstration of doing it himself, and so proved by 
the best possible means that his paper was not 
merely the outcome of a fertile brain and based 
entirely upon theoretical knowledge. 
It would be mere affectation on my part to pretend 
to criticise the means he uses to bring his plants to 
perfection, as they seem to me for the most part 
thoroughly practical, and quite in agreement with 
what I myself have been taught, and with what is 
generally carried out by most gardeners. I should 
however, just like to say one word on the system of 
drainage. Mr. Crabbe seems to pin his faith to 
zinc. May I be allowed to 
ask, are there any special 
properties in zinc itself 
which are detrimental to 
either worm or slug, that 
it should be of such value 
as a draining material ? 
To my mind there is 
nothing like crocks of old 
or broken pots. If I may 
be allowed to judge from 
the scanty drainage I 
often see used by many 
of our present day gar¬ 
deners, they do not give 
this matter half the con¬ 
sideration or think it near 
so essential as did the old 
day gardeners. This I 
consider one of the evils 
we have to contend with. 
Evidently they have more 
the saving of the water- 
pot at heart than the 
health of the plant. I feel 
thoroughly convinced that 
good drainage is most 
essential to all plants 
grown in pots, whether 
pot-bound or otherwise. 
I am also fully per¬ 
suaded that not half the 
care and attention is bes¬ 
towed on watering as is 
necessary to the health of 
pot plants, and in this way 
lessons taught us by old- 
fashioned gardeners are at 
the present thrown away 
by our young men. 
As a winter decorative 
plant, and one calcula¬ 
ted to give an endless 
amount of pleasure, there 
is none more valuable 
than the Chrysanthe¬ 
mum ; from it we get 
a diversity of colour, 
most colours in fact, 
excepting perhaps the true blue or the ofttime, 
despised scarlet. Like everything Japanese it is 
essentially artistic, both as regards habit and colour¬ 
ing, and to the lovers of the beautiful cannot at any 
time fail to awaken feelings of emotion. To all 
cultivators they must prove an endless pleasure, and 
therefore no garden can be perfect without them. 
-- 
PLATYCERIUM .ETHIOPICUM. 
The Elk's Horn is the grandest and noblest form of 
Platycerium under cultivation. Both the barren 
and the fertile fronds have a noble and telling 
appearance, but the latter are not very plentifully 
produced ; they are produced in pairs, but frequently 
those which should be fertile fronds remain small 
and fruitless, we say small, because when they 
attain anything like proper size they are 2 ft. to 3 ft. 
long, pendulous, twice divided into three long forks, 
and hoary beneath with tomentum. The barren 
fronds are like great plates of vegetable tissue, rolled 
round at the sides as if to protect the surface against 
which they cling, and shallowly lobed at the top. 
The species is also known to cultivators under the 
name of P. Stemmaria. We noted it with Mr. H. B. 
May, Dyson's Lane Nurseries, Upper Edmonton. 
