‘284 
THE GARDENING WORLD. 
April 8, 1905. 
to the populace, who are the chief support' to maintain a show. 
At a local show Fuchsias, Hydrangeas, trained zonals seem to 
occupy first attention. The presumptuous amateur will repeat 
into your ears that he has won first prize with that Fuchsia 
for a period of years; similarly with the “ Heather ring© ” : hut 
annuals are reared from infancy yearly, and to secure a suc¬ 
cession of prizes with them let us supersede the Fuchsia craze 
entirely. Vases are preferable to tubs and boxes. 
Cut the annuals the night or morning previous to the show. 
Arrange good-sized bunches, as much as can be held easily in 
the hand • do not pack together, but loosely. Every indi¬ 
vidual flower should be seen clearly. Stage at home, to 1 find 
a harmonious blend of colour ; aim at an equable tone, a. light 
arrangement; avoid too much of one shade. A back line of 
Sweet Peas, Coreopsis, Cardinal Poppy, and Lavatera are hard 
to beat. Do not forget to have the names attached. Have 
neatly made tickets, and fasten to a piece of cage wire by 
making a small ring at one end, and insert in the bunch of 
annuals, to be seen slightly above it. How often do we see, 
not only in annuals, good stuff badly arranged, poor examples 
well arranged. Competitors err in staging effectively, also 
ineffective sorts for exhibition, insipid, and with no recom¬ 
mendation whatever. I have seen nice bunches as a- back row 
dwindling down to mere buttonholes as a front line and 
bunched .severely together. Examine the plant’s habit, and 
arrange in accordance with it. Denuding the sprays of all the 
foliage has no recommendation. These 'items may - seem of 
momentary notice, but to ignore the same is failure. 
(To be continued .) 
Seedless Fruits. 
When we consider that' a. fruit proper is a seed or collection 
of seeds destined for the reproduction of the plant concerned, 
and that the luscious pulp or flesh which accompanies the seeds 
is merely a provision for their distribution through the animals 
which may devour it, a seedless fruit is seen to be altogether 
an anomaly. The cultivator, too, who attains such a result by 
selection must be looked upon as perpetrating a. sort of fraud 
on the plant world, since by so doing he derives all the benefit 
of the plant's efforts, and does not, as in ordinary cases, give 
it a chance of reproducing itself in the normal way. The ex¬ 
traordinary feature in such cases as the seedless Cucumber, the 
Banana, and other examples is that the subtle influence of the 
pollen or fertilising element which is essential to the setting 
of the fruits should exercise its effect, upon, to the plant, 
absolutely useless excrescences, while failing altogether to. fulfil 
its object of rendering the seed capable of perfecting itself. 
If we take the flower of an Apple, Pear or Plum, or that of 
a Strawberry, we find at its base a very small, fleshy mass, in 
which, or on which, the embryo, seeds are embedded. The 
pollen falling on the stigma attached to this body sends down 
tubes which carry with them the fertilising element to the in¬ 
dividual seeds, and these being vitally perfected by the fertili¬ 
sation, the plant then devotes its energy to. supplying them 
with material for subsequent growth into full-sized seeds con¬ 
taining a store of nutriment for the young plant. This is the 
office proper of the pollen, and the subsequent production of 
pulp or flesh is quite a secondary process induced by the efforts 
cf the plant to facilitate the distribution of the ripe seeds in 
its own particular way. With edible fruits of the Apple, 
Orange, or Strawberry type, the seeds are hard and in¬ 
digestible, and the plant’s idea, so to. speak, is to tempt animals 
to devour them with the attractive pulp, giving the latter as 
a sort of quid pro quo for the subsequent dissemination of 
the seeds under peculiarly favourable conditions for growth. 
Edible fruits of the nut kind, however, belong to an opposite 
category. The Filbert and Cob also produce a fleshy outer 
shell, but. it is acridly sour and repellent ; that of the Walnut 
is veiy astringent, while that of the edible Chestnut is a 
veritable chevaux de frise of spikes, all these adjuncts being 
calculated to protect the precious seed from being devoured. 
which in its special case would mean destruction. The Cocoa- 
nut is an extreme case of this kind evolved in a land where 
monkeys prevail and armour plating, plus tough external pad¬ 
ding, is an essential to survival. Under these circumstances we 
find no specialist striving for seedless nuts, which would be 
the reductio ad absurdum of fruit culture. Since in many 
plants we find great luxuriance of foliage to be associated with 
relative infertility, the vital vigour of the plants concerned 
being diverted into non-reproductive channels, it is to be pre¬ 
sumed that the so-called seedless fruits are due to a similar 
cause—i.e., the embryo seeds are really existent in the ovarv 
and when the pollen reaches them fertilisation results in the 
ordinary course. The pulp or flesh-producing energies of the 
plant have, however, been so enhanced by selection that at the 
first stimulus they take the upper hand, monopolise the sup¬ 
port of the plant destined for the seed. 
We may, indeed, find a biological parallel in the Welsh 
Polypody, an extra leafy form of the common Polypody of the 
hedges. Here the frond primarily is destined to carry the 
spores—that is, the fruits of the Fern, but it never does so, the 
whole of the vital vigour being diverted to frond formation. 
As regards seedless fruits, the suppression of the seed is 
undoubtedly calculated to improve the quantity and probablv 
the quality of the pulp or flesh, and as it likewise relieves man¬ 
kind from the necessity of removing the seeds, the presumption 
is that in this, as in many other cases, the moral rights of the 
weak—i.e., the plants-—will be ignored without compunction, 
and as many as possible will be educated to give all and sret 
nothing so lung as their seedless existence permits them to 
survive. Chas. T. Druery, V.M.H., F.L.S. 
Wintering Caladiums. 
More than forty years ago I entered a. large garden, and 
after being in charge of the pleasure grounds I was offered the 
charge, of the plants. There were not many varieties of Cala¬ 
diums in those days, the favourite being Chantinii. I was in¬ 
formed that the conns invariably perished during the winter, 
and buying or begging had frequently been resorted to, and a 
few were procured for me to try my hand with. The structure 
for their growth was all that could be desired, with abundance 
of fermenting material for bottom heat, in which they seemed 
to revel. They were started in 4-in. pots and moved into 
larger ones as they required it, and Chantinii was a yard 
through when growth was completed. 
They were taken into, the mansion and arranged in large 
vases each side the staircase, and as their equal had not been 
seen there before they were much admired. They remained 
in the hall till they got. too shabby, and when brought out were 
placed in the. stove. After they had thoroughly gone to- rest 
those in the largest pots were turned out, and when the gar¬ 
dener saw them after they were shaken out, he exclaimed: 
“ Eh, mon, what a. fine lot; but what about next. February? ” 
I replied that I thought they would be all right, but lie- seemed 
dubious. I had really no previous experience with them, but 
I was fairly well acquainted with the contents of “ LindleyV 
Theory and Practice of Horticulture,” and I remembered read¬ 
ing that in the hot months of the year the roots of some bulbs 
must frequently, and, indeed, habitually, attain a temperature 
which can only be imitated in our hothouses by actually sus¬ 
pending over the soil plates of red-hot iron ; not that I thought 
it had any reference to- Caladiums (for I suppose the book was 
written before they were introduced to our gardens), but I 
thought from the nature of the corms they would withstand 
those extreme conditions in a. modified form. I packed them 
in pots with sand and placed them on the hot-water pipes in 
the stove, and those left in the pots were placed there also, and 
they were all perfectly sound in the spring. 
I still make a practice of storing them as near the hot-wateri 
pipes as possible when at rest, and I never lose one-. 
The Caladium will withstand any rough treatment ; it may 
be in a room till hardly a leaf bears its natural colour and 
so-ddened with water withal, but cold in winter it will not bear. 
W. P. B. 
