10 
in the open air, and the bulbs are beautifully construc¬ 
ted, coat within coat, of smooth white, with the embyro 
plant packed closely within them, provided with such a 
quantity of nourishment that it can begin to grow without 
even touching the earth. It is this support for the bud that 
makes the onion one of the most useful of the plants used 
for food, and the peculiar taste seems to be given to it 
for the sake of directing man to live on what is so whole 
some. The poorer classes in most countries, and above all 
in Spain, eat it eagerly with bread and cheese. Different 
kinds are to be found native to most parts of the Temperate 
Zone. We have the wild GARLIC or ‘ramsons’, a plant 
with handsome white flowers, but with a horrible smell 
and a taste which it imparts to the milk of cows which 
have eaten it; the ‘CROW GARLIC’ like a little onion, and 
several others ofwhich the lovely blue ‘VERNAL SQUILL’, 
is the rarest and most beautiful. The LEEK is the natio¬ 
nal badge of Wales, and is always worn on St. Davids day 
because (on the authority of Captain Fluellen), the Welsh¬ 
men of the army of the Black Prince did good service 
against the enemy in a field of leeks in one of the bat¬ 
tles in France, each mounting one of the savoury vegeta¬ 
bles in his cap, in memory of which, every patriotic 
Welshman wears the like on the feast of his national 
Saint, and at Eton the Welsh boy of highest rank presents 
one of silver to the head master. 
PLATE VII. KITCHEN VEGETABLES. 
Of all our Garden plants, none is so precious to us as one only 
known in Europe for the last 300 years, and one which 
in spite of its valuable properties, is very nearly related 
to poisons. Few of us like to dine without the round mealy 
floury POTATO, (fig. b) which by its starch and gluten 
corrects the greasiness of the meat that we eat, and there 
is many and many a cottage where the potato is the only 
dinner, either with or without a little butter or dripping to 
moisten and give it a relish. Yet this excellent article ofdaily 
fare is one of the SOLANUM tribe, thesameto which belongs 
the dangerous BITTER SWEET (PI. XXI fig. b,) whose flo¬ 
wer is very like that of the potato. The potato blossom is 
so pretty that it would be grown for ornament, even were 
it useless, the corolla of a single white or lilac petal, 
contrasting prettily with the peak of fine long yellow An¬ 
thers, meeting and projecting in front like the point of an 
ancient British shield, while the corolla is turned back so 
as to protect the germ which grows behind it, and which be¬ 
comes a round hard berry, the blossoms and berries growing 
in drooping clusters amid the leaves, which consist of six 
small leaflets opposite to each other, with one at the point. 
It is in this berry that all the poison of the potato resides, 
and the first plants which Queen Elizabeth’s great Mariner 
Sir Walter Raleigh grew in his garden at Youghal in 
Ireland, were very near being lost, when his servants 
made the first experiment by tasting the fruits instead 
of looking underground; a mistake for which the Irish 
have since made up, since theirs has ever since been above 
all the land of potatoes, and the choicest diet in the world 
would be nothing to them, were the “praty” missing. Under¬ 
ground, the true roots are a network of fibres, but where 
they cross, there spring the next year’s buds, in the midst 
of a tuber or ball, consisting of starch, gluten and sugar, 
intended to support the new plant, but to which we take 
the liberty of helping ourselves, calling the buds, the eyes 
of the potato, and cutting them out before using the tu¬ 
ber for food. When potatoes are planted in the late win-; 
ter or early spring, the field is ploughed, or the garden 
bed ridged in furrows, and the tuber is cut into slices each 
containing one bud, which are set at proper intervals, 
earthed up, and left to grow. They flower in the middle 
of the summer, and are a very pretty sight, full of promise 
for the winter’s store, unless that strange blight, the po¬ 
tato disease, should pass over them, blackening the leaves, 
spreading a peculiar odour of decay all around, and 
finally corrupting the roots themselves. The prevalence 
of this disease has rendered the potato a much less certain 
crop of late years, and somewhat less universally the food 
of the poor, but a good year for potatoes is one of the 
greatest blessings that can befall the country, since it is 
a most valuable addition to the scanty cottage fare. Men, 
women and children come out in October to dig up the 
tubers from their furrows , clear them from the earth, and 
separate into different baskets, the large ones fit for the 
table, and the lesser ones, only fit for the pigs; and it is 
a sadly anxious time to many a poor family, for upon the 
state of those roots does it depend whether they shall be 
hungry nearly all the coming year. There are many varieties 
of potatoes , large and small, red skinned or white skin¬ 
ned, keeping for a long or a short time, ripe early or ripe 
late; but they all come from the small kind which Sir 
Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh brought home from 
America because they saw the Indians living upon it. 
America is much endowed with these plants with the floury 
tuberous roots. YAMS and BATATAS are also American, 
and so is the JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE fig. a, a tall sun- 
wer with a tuberous root, coming from Peru, as to the 
name of Jerusalem, that is only a corruption of girar-sole, 
go round with the sun, the Italian name belonging to it 
as a sunflower. 
It must have been called an Artichoke from the taste, resem¬ 
bling that of the receptacle of the true A R TICHOKE 
(fig. a); a noble plant with strong hard leaves, serrated 
at the edges, and buds consisting, like those of all com¬ 
pound flowers, of scales, laid closely one over the other, 
and all set into a large shield like receptacle. This recep¬ 
tacle, and the scales are full of fleshy glutinous substance, 
intended for the support of the flowers, but when boiled 
becoming soft and nutritious. The portion at the bottom 
of each scale is dipped in melted butter and bitten off, 
until scale after scale being removed, the young flowers 
become visible, and are called the choke (they certainly 
would choke any one who tried to eat them) and these 
being pulled off, the solid and excellent receptacle remains 
to be eaten. Such of the buds as escape coming to this end, 
open into splendid blue compound flowers, slightly sha¬ 
ded with lilac, and with their forest of tall styles, look¬ 
ing like azure crowns in the midst of the kitchen garden. 
It is the flower bud of the Artichoke that we eat, but it is the 
whole young sprout of the ASPARAGUS (fig. a) that we 
devour, an excellent specimen of the growth of an Endo- 
gen, coming up so thick and solid all at once, the scaly 
leaves overlapping the round head that the French call 
the thumb of asparagus. So hard do the stems become 
that only the topmost bud is softened by boiling suffi¬ 
ciently to be eaten, by any one at least except King 
William IH, who taught Dean Swift to do the same, 
and it is said that the Dean looked so extremely stern 
and sour at such as did not follow his example, that 
his guests did not dare to be dainty as to their aspa¬ 
ragus stumps in his presence. The asparagus is a plant 
so full of life and vigour that the more the buds are 
cut off, the more it resolutely thrusts up, and after 
the hopes of the persevering plant have been thwar¬ 
ted for about six weeks in the summer, it is left in peace, 
to let its thumbs grow up into a forest of graceful waving 
miniature trees, with branches from the main stem, bear¬ 
ing tufts of leaves like bristles, and small green lily 
flowers, their parts of course in sixes, and giving place 
to scarlet berries, which look very pretty when the whole 
plant has turned yellow, as it dies down for the winter. It 
grows wild on the sea shore on the south western coast of 
England, though much smaller, tong’her and harder than 
cultivation has made it. 
It is the leaf stalk of the RHUBARB (fig. b 1 b 2 ) that furnishes 
the earliest tarts and puddings of the spring. The Rhu¬ 
barb is a large African dock, and most children know the 
sharp pleasant taste of the stem or leaf stalk of the little 
red wild sorrel or dock, some times called Cuckoo’s Bread 
and Cheese. These plants have a tall straight spike of 
small flowers, three petalled, three pistilled and six 
stamened, a single stem, large handsome leaves veined 
with red, and full of acid juice, and a straight tap root, 
which dried and grated furnishes a useful medicine. 
Before Rhubarb was brought from Turkey a wild dock was 
grown in Convent gardens by the monks, who used to 
be the great doctors; but it was not for a long time that 
the more agreeable way of using the leaf stems was dis¬ 
covered. Little more tham 30 years ago, the first bundles 
of Rhubarb were brought to Covent garden market, only 
three out of seven were sold, and people laughed at 
the notion of physic pies — whereas now, waggon 
