Improving the Flower Varieties 
Photographs by Mary H. Northend, Chas. Jones, and N. R. Graves. 
THE RESULT OF PLANT BREEDING TO PRODUCE BLOSSOMS 
BETTER IN COLOR, SIZE, OR FORM—WHAT THE GARDEN LOVER 
CAN DO IN THIS FIELD FOR HIMSELF—RECENT ACHIEVEMENTS 
The little African daisy is 
now a desirable addition 
to any garden 
SUPPOSE we are all, at times, 
tempted to break the tenth 
commandment. I admit frankly 
that I am; I envy some people their 
gardens; or, to be more correct, 
the time they can spend in them. 
The great joy, that peaceful, 
comfortable but unparalleled pleas¬ 
ure of the true gardener is not to 
behold, but to create: it is a calm, 
but an active instead of a passive passion. Even the private gar¬ 
dener, who cannot feel that a single plant in all the extensive 
grounds is his own, gets a hundred times more happiness from 
his beloved gardens than does the half-appreciative owner. 
And just as no true gardener would be content to take a garden 
ready made, so every one who has worked among flowers, and 
come to realize those fine distinctions which separate not only 
different groups and varieties, but even different plants and blooms 
of the same sort, inevitably comes to feel within him the urging 
to create or develop new sorts. Some particular form, some pe¬ 
culiar shade of coloring will, by the intricate and inexplicable 
laws of individuality, appeal especially to him, and these he will 
want to fix, to make his own for the future. There is also the 
healthy and powerful fascination of the feeling of creating some¬ 
thing new, something heretofore undiscovered. It may not be 
an improvement; perhaps even “a poor thing, but mine own!” 
Nevertheless, it will hold your interest and affection. 
There is a new “half dwarf” strain of snapdragon that should go far 
toward adding to the deserved popularity of this attractive flower 
Thus, it seems to me, this feeling that one can put himself into 
harmony with the creative forces of Nature, the mystery of Evo¬ 
lution, is the supreme joy of gardening, at once more intellectual, 
more keen and more permanent than any other. 
I do not mean by this to suggest that you consider making 
yourself a candidate 
for a second Bur¬ 
bank, but there are 
certain things along 
the lines mentioned 
above that you can 
do: things that are 
perfectly p r a c t i - 
cal and which will 
give you a great 
amount of fun and 
interest. 
First of all, you 
can experiment with 
different varieties of 
the same flower, un¬ 
til you feel satisfied 
that you have found 
the ones which suit 
you best. It is hard 
to make a satisfac- 
t o r y selection of 
flowers from the de¬ 
scriptions given in a 
seed catalog. You 
may save time by 
paying a visit to 
some nursery or large greenhouse establishment, but even this is 
not wholly satisfactory, as the chances are that many of the things 
you want to see will not be “in stock,” and only a part of the 
various things will be in bloom at one time. The only real way 
to get results that are certain is to test out all the sorts you can 
under the conditions in which you will grow them in future years, 
and then pick out the best and discard the others. 
That is the first step, and by no means an impractical one, for 
the work need not all be done at once. It may be spread over as 
many years as one wishes, a good plan being to take one group 
of plants at a time. In this way you are able to make a more 
inclusive trial, and to compare the different sorts more definitely. 
I know one democratic lady who has gone through the list of 
annuals and half-hardy perennials alphabetically, taking as many 
as she could each year—but not all the varieties, of course. They 
were by no means the sorts most praised in the catalogs that gave 
her the best results. 
Having taken this interesting first step, you are best prepared 
to proceed with the second, which is even more intensely fascinat¬ 
ing—that is, to keep and improve your favorites until you attain 
the acme of beauty and strength of growth with each sort. By 
this time, those plants which you have singled out as being worthy 
a place in your selected garden will have assumed an individuality, 
created in you a personal interest which in the old haphazard 
garden you would never have dreamed possible, and it will be 
Old-fashioned coxcomb has been developed 
into the long, sweeping ostrich plumes of 
the modern celosia 
(35) 
