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Updated: May 16, 2025
An extensive grower of pot plants, from information carefully gathered among his fellow nurserymen, estimates that the plant trade of the vicinity of New York reaches nearly the sum of $200,000 annually, and this for plants mainly employed as "bedding plants," in the decoration of gardens and city yards, leaving entirely out of the question, those for winter culture at windows and in green houses, as well as the immense stock of the growers themselves to supply the demand for cut flowers.
I have seen gardens which were all experiment, given over to every new thing, and which produced little or nothing to the owners, except the pleasure of expectation. People grow pear-trees at great expense of time and money, which never yield them more than four pears to the tree. The fashions of ladies' bonnets are nothing to the fashions of nurserymen.
It is not only for the fruit that we are indebted to the Old World, but also for some distinctively beautiful and most ornamental varieties of the apple, not by any means as well known among us as they ought to be. The nurserymen sell as an ornamental small tree a form known as "Parkman's double-flowering crab," which produces blooms of much beauty, like delicate little roses.
Ten years ago, before the Pecos was taken in the National Forests, goats and sheep ate these young pine seedlings down to the ground; but of late, herds have been permitted only where the seedlings have made headway enough to resist trampling, and thousands of acres are growing up to seedling yellow pines as regular and thrifty as if set out by nurserymen.
Government levies a conscription on the young intelligence of the kingdom at the age of seventeen or eighteen, a conscription of precocious brain-work before it is sent up to be submitted to a process of selection. Nurserymen sort and select seeds in much the same way.
On this principle nurserymen always prefer saving seed from a large body of plants, as the chance of intercrossing is thus lessened.
The pear is dwarfed by grafting it on the quince; the apple can be limited to a mere garden fruit-tree in size by being grown on a Doucin stock, or even reduced to the size of a bush if compelled to draw its life through the roots of the Paradise. These two named stocks, much employed by European nurserymen, are distinct species of apples, and reproduce themselves without variation from the seed.
There is an ample choice from entirely hardy varieties for every locality, and these, by careful inquiry of trustworthy nurserymen, should be obtained. Moreover, it should be remembered that few evergreens will thrive in a wet, heavy soil. If Nature has not provided thorough drainage by means of a porous subsoil, the work must be done artificially.
If the plants must be bought and transported from a distance during hot weather, I should not advise the purchase of any except those grown in pots. Nurserymen have made us familiar with pot- grown plants, for we fill our flowerbeds with them. In like manner strawberry plants are grown and sold.
"Them's the colour of biled cabbage," said he; "I grew them verdigris green beds of 'em, when I was with Squire Cross." One day he said to me: "The nurserymen call them plants big onias just to sell them, I call them little onias; you shall just see them I grow, them be the true big onias, as large as the palm of your hand."
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