390 
THE GARDENING WORLD. 
February 18, 1893. 
you get the same quality of flower. We have the 
Rose now nearly all the year round, why not the 
Chrysanthemum ? It may not have the sweetness of 
the Rose, but it is more useful as a decorative flower. 
If we apply artificial heat, Queen Rose can be got 
to smile at almost any time of the year, in other 
words, force her to bloom ; but Queen Chrysanthe¬ 
mum is more feminine in her nature, and if you try 
to force her too much you come off only second 
best. She won’t do it, and soon makes that pretty 
plain by taking the sulks, and ends the struggle by 
going home to her mother (Mother Earth) with her 
beautiful face all suffused with moisture—damps off, 
in fact 
When I found that the flow’ers of plants struck in 
the usual way would not come to perfection if the 
buds were taken early, I came to the conclusion that 
unripe wood was the only cause. I have now tried 
three different ways of getting late varieties to bloom 
early. My first experiment was with old plants cut 
over after they were done flowering. I commenced 
by selecting some of those that were likely to break 
freely from the old stem, which I cut over some nine 
inches above the pot, and when they showed signs 
of growth I reduced the old ball and potted, into 
fresh soil, using as small pots as possible. These I 
grew on in the usual way, giving larger pots where 
required. Plants treated in this way will show bud 
in the month of May, others not till June or July, I 
always take the first bud that shows, and never have 
much difficulty in getting good blooms. My next 
experiment was to select old plants that were throw¬ 
ing up suckers, cut away all the old wood, leaving the 
suckers only, and treating them the same as the 
others—they were hardly so early, but rather better 
flowers. Altogether I consider this a more natural 
way. My next experiment was to strike cuttings in 
June and July, most of these gave me flowers in 
December and January, some of them much later. 
As soon as they were done flowering I cut them 
from 6 to g inches above the pot, some will break 
away from the old wood and others will send up 
suckers. I may say I get equally good flowers from 
both the suckers and cut over plants. I commenced 
cutting blooms in July, and have continued up to the 
present time with such varieties as Molyneux, 
Boule d'Or, Sunflower, Etoile de Lyon, Madame 
Leroy, W. Coles, Puritan, Madame Lecroix, 
Baronne de Prailly and its sport Carew Underwood. 
Mrs. F. Jamison is only coming in now, and very 
fine it is. Altogether I have tried about thirty 
varieties, most of these were Japanese sorts. I was 
not very successful with the semi-early varieties, 
such as William Holmes, Roi de Precoces, and some 
other semi-early sorts, and these were the kinds I 
expected to be most successful with. I also tried a 
few Incurved varieties and some Pompons. I could 
not say that either was a success, some singles that 
I tried came semi-double; Figaro, a v„ery beautiful 
variety, came a perfect master of ugliness ; Admiral 
Symmonds came all right but very late; Mary 
Anderson was the best of all. I exhibited a vase of 
this at the International Show in September last 
year, and they were the largest and finest single 
blooms ever seen. This was the opinion of all the 
Chrysanthemum men that saw them. When 
grown as above described they are very dwarf, 
varieties that generally run up to six feet will be re¬ 
duced to three, this itself is a great gain. The 
flowers last much longer owing to their never having 
got fire heat. I exhibited a collection of three dozen 
blooms in London last August, they were cut on a 
Monday afternoon and packed dry , travelled all 
night by rail, gained a medal at Chiswick on Tues¬ 
day. The same blooms were again exhibited at the 
International Show, at Earl’s Court, on the Friday 
and Saturday, and were still fresh enough to be 
thought worthy of another medal. Of course they 
were not kept dry all this time. Oh, no ! we both 
had summat My plants that I had at the Caledonia 
Show are still fresh yet. I don’t mean this paper as 
a guide for exhibitors, but I would ask them not to 
poison their Chrysanthemums with stimulants when 
expanding their blooms. How often do we see at 
at shows half-rotten blooms. Theyjust manage to 
hold up their heads while the judges are looking at 
them, but the second day of the show—well, they 
seem as if their day of judgment had been too 
much for them, and that they had passed a miser¬ 
able night amongst fire and brimstone. Before 
closing my paper I may say that for my general 
stock of winter bloomers I prefer the cutting down 
system. I get dwarfer plants and more useful 
flowers for decorative purposes. I commence cut¬ 
ting down the late sorts about the middle of May, 
and ends with the early varieties well on in June. 
In a gcod season I have cut back some of the early 
sorts as late as the beginning of July, so as to extend 
the Chrysanthemum season till after Christmas and 
the New Year, as there is often a great demand for 
cut flowers about that time. Those that go in for 
exhibition blooms I am afraid must stick to the Jack 
and the Bean Stalk style of growing; but what 
labour and care those tall plants do take ! I have 
grown Madame C. Audiguir 12 feet in height. 
Imagine a man not half that height anxiously gazing 
up into the sky looking out for the appearance of 
the first bud At last he is rewarded by the sight 
of a tiny round globe, and, if his eyesight be good, 
and it happens to be a clear day, he may find that 
this little globe has a satellite revolving round it in 
the shape of a satan of an earwig looking out for a 
nice tender spot to begin his cruel work of destruc¬ 
tion. He must be caught. But how ? You may 
shake the plant if you like, but the law of gravita¬ 
tion don’t aftect him, for he has a pair of nippers at¬ 
tached to his axis, and, comparatively speaking, he 
is as difficult to get at as an inhabitant of Mars that 
our astronomers are so anxious to get a sight of. I 
had almost forgotten to mention an experiment that 
I made some twelve years ago. About the latter 
end of February I had a plant of Grandiflorum, a 
late yellow Japanese variety, well set with flower 
buds. At that time I was trying how late in the 
spring I could get them to bloom. I expected this 
plant to flower in April, but I thought that if I cut 
off the tops and struck them I might keep them fom 
blooming till May. I had no difficulty in getting 
them to root, but I could not get them to flower— 
when the flower buds began to expand the petals 
were green, they never formed themselves into a 
proper flower, although they partly retained the 
petal shape, but shot up into a shoot or branch. I 
was surprised at this, as I had often before flowered 
other varieties in this way, but never so late in t.he 
season, nor with so late a variety. May and June 
are the only months of the year that I have failed to 
cue Chrysanthemums in. My last year’s Chrysan¬ 
themums lasted up to April, when I finished by cut¬ 
ting good blooms of L. Canning, which I exhibited 
at the April meeting. But to go back to my half¬ 
flower half-branch, which I considered a failure at 
the time, but have now come to look at in a 
different light, for it seems to me that my unnatural 
treatment for a few months had pushed back nature’s 
improvements for thousands, perhaps tens of 
thousands of years, and that I had just got a 
glimpse of one of the first links in that beautiful 
floral chain that now almost encircles the year. 
-- 
Celery destroyed by frost. 
“ H. W." is not alone in his loss, and it was scarcely 
expected that crops in general could withstand such 
rigorous frosts without being part or wholly de¬ 
stroyed. The ground with us was frozen 16 inches 
deep. This I consider severe and sufficient to de¬ 
stroy any crop of Celery, with ridges no more than 
2 ft. 8 in. through, as the frost penetrating side¬ 
ways meets in the centre and transforms the whole 
into a frost-bound mass. Our Celery trenches are 
6 ft. a part, with double rows of plants. When 
earthed up, the ridges are 4 ft. thick. Consequently 
there has been several inches of unfrozen soil around 
the stems as a protection. Our chief loss is a few 
inches of the tops, the frost striking downwards 
through the litter and boarded tiles, has notwith¬ 
standing left a mass of gangrene to complete the 
deadly work. 
Preserving Celery in Sand. 
This method is strongly recommended, provided 
cool, frost-proof sheds or outhouses are at hand. 
There is a slight deterioration in quality, but this is as 
nothing by comparison with the total loss of the 
crop. The divesting of roots and tops, as recom¬ 
mended in a contemporary, is unnatural. Celery 
should be stored as carefully as Beet, moderately 
trimming both roots and tops. In this way we have 
kept Celery good and sound until late in the 
spring. — B. L. 
Celery: a light Foliaged Variety. 
As the season for sowing is upon us there has been 
several enquiries from cottagers for the name of a 
light-leaved kind which has been grown by them and 
which theyassure me is remarkable forits crispness and 
quality. I do recollect seeing a row of Yellow Celery 
in a garden by the wayside last summer, but took 
no further notice of it at the time, thinking that the 
sickly appearance was due to the administration of 
some over-strong stimulant. Amongst the numerous 
seed lists to hand, I notice that only the Chester firm 
has a sort named White Plume. Has any reader 
grown this, and if so will he give us his experience 
of it ? — B. L. 
FERTILISATION OF 
FLOWERS. 
A most interesting and instructive course of lectures, 
delivered under the Thomson bequest, has just been 
concluded in the Free Church College Hall, Aber¬ 
deen. The lecturer for this year—the appointment 
lies with the Senatus of the College—was Mr. J. A. 
Thomson, F.R.S.E., Lecturer on Zoology and on 
Biology in the School of Medicine, Edinburgh, and 
his course was entitled “The Web of Life.” We 
give below a synopsis of his lecture on " The Fertili¬ 
sation of Flowers,” and, should space permit, we 
may some day soon give his lecture on “ Interactions 
between Plants and Animals.” Considerable interest 
was manifested in the lectures, the attendances being 
large and representative. The limelight was brought 
into requisition to illustrate the lectures. 
Mr. Thomson, in opening his lecture on “ The 
Fertilisation of Flowers,” said that perhaps the most 
important contribution which the poet Goethe made 
to science was contained in an essay published in 
1791, entitled ” An Attempt to Explain the Metamor¬ 
phoses of Plants.” In that essay he discerned that 
any ordinary flowering plant might be reduced to an 
axis and appendages ; and the flower which crowned 
the axis and limited its growth was, after all, nothing 
but four tiers of modified leaves adapted to secure 
the continuance of its species. That was his inter¬ 
pretation, and, although it was now a botanical 
commonplace, it was then a great discovery. The 
first circle consisted of green sepals, which bound the 
flower together and protected it when it was in the bud ; 
the second whorl included the petals, the attractive 
leaves to which insects were drawn ; the third whorl 
was much more essential, it consisted of stamens, 
the pollen-producing leaves ; and the last innermost 
whorl consisted of those leaves which produced the 
possible seeds—in other words, the carpels. 
The process of fertilisation was generally ex¬ 
pressed as the bringing of the nucleus or kernal of 
the pollen grains into contact with the nucleus of the 
egg-cells, which enclosed the possible seed. At first 
sight this seemed difficult. The pollen grains were 
produced inside the anther, and as they grew the 
skin became thinner, and when the stamen burst 
the pollen grains were set free. After that there 
was no difficulty. Some trees, however., were only 
pistilate and not staminate; and in this connection 
the lecturer alluded to the custom in ancient times 
of cutting off the branches of staminate Date Palms 
and dusting the pollen on the flowers of the 
pistilate trees, and so ensuring the crop. The Fig 
tree was even more complex, some of them bearing 
edible fruit and the others only stamens. A wasp 
or gall-fly made its way into the narrow aperture in 
the good Figs until it reached the little pistilate 
flowers at the bottom of the Fig; it then laid its 
eggs and died. When the little gall-flies were 
hatched they flew out of the aperture of the Fig, 
not, however, without brushing against the stamens, 
and carrying pollen with them on their wings and 
hairs, which they took to the edible Figs, and so 
secured a good crop. 
As far back as 1694, Camerarius found out that no 
seeds were formed in isolated plants when the 
stamens were cut off; and in 1793 Sprengel noticed 
that the pistils were a kind of umbrella to shelter the 
pollen stamens. 'Some botanists, notably Professor 
Geddes, had attempted to divide flowers into two 
great sets, which they called grassy and floral ; and 
this corresponded with the two great modes by 
which pollen was carried from flower to flower—by 
wind and insects. These differed most markedly. 
The wind flow'ers, such as grasses, and trees, such 
as the Oak, Lime, Beech, Pine, .Poplar, and Hazel, 
had an absence of any bright colour, and absence of 
