199 
PHILOSOPHY OF FLORICULTURE. 
Long before our attention was directly called to this subject 
by the communication of “ Tyro,”—whom our readers will per¬ 
ceive is no Tyro after all,—we were fully aware of its importance, 
and of how indispensable a moderate knowledge of it is to every 
one who cultivates flowers in any other way than as a merely 
servile copyist;—and he who gets not beyond this, stands small 
chance of making a single step of advancement in the delightful 
art, or even of preserving for any length of time the beauty and 
health of those flowers which he purchases. This may be all very 
well for the mercenary grower, who cares for nothing but an ex¬ 
tensive sale of the same common and easily-grown flowers, year 
after year, in interminable succession. But to the art it is a 
serious disadvantage ; and it is equally injurious to that higher 
department of the trade, whose minds are constantly on the rack, 
and whose monies are continually in circulation, in order to produce 
something that is new and excellent. The accomplishment of this 
is the glory of floriculture ; and unless in the cases of plants of 
very peculiar and delicate habit,—and much less in them than is 
generally believed,—it feels its way downward through all ranks 
in society; and we have many instances in which, after the lapse 
of not very many years, a plant has not only been obtainable as a 
border flower by the humblest cottager, for fewer farthings than 
it originally cost guineas, as a conservatory plant, to the wealthy, 
but that the cottager can, with the improvement of time, rather 
than the loss of it, multiply the same plant almost wdthout limit, 
and gratify his friends or neighbours with a supply, without any 
cost to himself save the pleasure of gratifying others,—the sweetest 
of all pleasures to a mind rightly constituted. Convinced that the 
attraction of the people’s attention, generally, to simple, refined, 
and intellectual pleasures, is far more calculated to call forth the 
good and repress the bad, than all the laws, with all their penal¬ 
ties, that ever were, or that ever can be enacted, even though they 
should have recourse to a system of rewards in order to deepen 
the repulsiveness of the punishments, we are strenuous advocates 
for the universal diffusion of floriculture, from a thorough convic¬ 
tion that there is no one recreation of the leisure hour at all com¬ 
parable to it, if it is grounded upon right principles, and the owner 
