Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women - Wise Acres Yearbook (Ambler, PA)

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blooming well. Though personally not admiring this method, I do often plant so closely that the bulbs almost touch each other. More room is likely to produce larger blooms, and deep planting assists in keeping the plants upright. Other plantings may be made at intervals of two or three weeks, to provide a succession and prolong the season of bloom. The later plantings are apt to come forward more rapidly than the earlier. The time of planting will of course vary with latitude. There is some discussion among growers regarding fertilizers. I think it probable that a slightly acid soil as for potatoes is desirable, and a fertilizer carrying a good percentage of phosphoric acid, and I should judge potash also, to make large, strong bulbs, though I have not proved it yet. An application of nitrate of soda just before flowering is said to increase the size of the blooms, but tends to soften the texture. Bonemeal is recommended by some, and probably is good. Some varieties increase by means of cormels at the base of the parent corm very rapidly, and others sparingly. These may be sown in drills or shallow trenches, and many of them make blooming bulbs by fall. If kept damp, or if well soaked for some time before planting in order to soften their hard shell, their growth may be hastened. This deservedly popular flower which is so rapidly growing in favor, is of such easy culture that is should bring its refining influence to every home. Almost infinite in variety of shades, coloring, and markings, beautiful as lilies or roses, rivalling the orchids, its good keeping qualities, its ready adaption to many uses by the professional florist, and its wide range of territory, make it almost, if not quite unexcelled among flowers. Perhaps its greatest draw-back, which is no diaw-back for the masses, is its moderate price, either for bulbs for planting, or as cut flowers for home decoration. THE DEPARTMENT OF BOTANY By George E. Nichols, Associate Professor of Botany. From The Yale Alumni Weekly, April 4, 1924 “ ‘The study of botany seems peculiarly adapted to females So wrote Mrs. Lincoln some seventy-five years ago, in her Lectures; and while one cannot but enjoy Mrs. Lincoln’s naive account of the health and cheerfulness which accrue from cne study of botany, it is to be regretted that this archaic view should be the one that is still held by the large majority of people. It is indeed very doubtful if any science is so thoroughly misunderstood by the general public as the science of botany. Even the educated layman indulgently regards bot- ll

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things considered, none really superior to my original stock, after two years' work with them. I then resorted to hand pollenizing, following instructions given by a neighboring grower. The method followed was to go out in the early morning, and with scissors clip off the end of the petals from a bud of the female parent selected, choosing a bud just starting to open, removing about three-fourths of an inch of the tip, opening out the flower and clipping out the anthers. I then found a bloom of the variety desired to furnish pollen, bearing pollen of the right maturity; the sign of this condition being the anthers burst longitudinally with plenty of fresh pollen showing, and the anthers not too dry. With a small sharp knife blade, I scraped off pollen and transferred it to the stigma of the flower just clipped. The most important thing after this procedure is to tie a hood or cover as muslin or cheesecloth, over the whole flower to prevent further pollination by insects, and then to tag the plant, and make the appropriate record in a notebook. The process may be repeated with other blooms, and with the same crosses or different ones. The beginner in this line of work may be surprised to see how early in the morning the bumble-bees will begin their work of cross-pollination, working their way into a slightly opened bud in search of their breakfast of nectar with astonishing dexterity and persistency, accomplishing Nature's object of cross-fertilization at the same time. One needs to be on the job early to be ahead of these industrious workers and non-observers of union hours. They are the true daylight savers, often camping over night within an open bloom. Growing the seedlings is a developer of patience, or of disgust, as the case may be. A fine, rich, continuously moist soil, a covering of about one-half inch over the seed which has been soaked in warm water for a few days, patient waiting for the somewhat slow germination, down on one's knees to pull the tiny weeds which are apt to appear first, and at length the delight of seeing the wee green sword-blades pricking through here and there. The seed does not all germinate at once, like turnips, for instance; but unless very favorable conditions continue, it may be near the end of the season ere the blades appear, showing an exasperating indifference to the flight of time and the short remaining period of growth before frost. The mature bulbs may be planted as early in the spring as the ground is workable, in rows two to three feet apart, and four to six inches in the row, or even closer if the space is limited. They should be covered with six to eight inches of soil, a light sandy soil calling for a deeper covering. I have seen them scattered in a trench, higgledy-piggledy, any old way, perhaps a dozen or twenty to the foot of row, and 10

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any merely as the 'study of flowers', and the botanist ‘as a man who gathers flowers, names them, dries them, and all of whose wisdom consists in determining and classifying this hay which he has accumulated with such zeal.’ Yet how can it be expected otherwise when even the erudite university professor talks about “Botany and Biology , failing to distinguish the fact that biology embraces the study of plants quite as much as it does the study of animals. “A hundred years ago the study of the identification and classification of plants was indeed the outstanding phase of botany; it is still a field which demands the serious attention of a diminishing number of specialists. The ‘study of flowers' will continue always to be a source of pleasure to the ‘amateur botanist,' and perhaps a source of amusement to his friends. But this is not the sort of botany which today occupies the attention of thousands of professional botanists in this country; it is not the sort of botany which is recognized in the majority of our universities and colleges as one of the outstanding divisions of natural science; it is not the sort of botany that confronts the undergraduate electing his first course in this field of science. How far the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction is witnessed by the scant attention paid in our modern botanical text books to matters which pertain to the identification and classification of plants. In fact, there are not a few botanists in the rising generation who have attained that culminating goal of graduate endeavor, the Ph. D. degree, and who are yet blissfully deficient in what a century ago would have been regarded as the very essence of botany. “The botany of today is a subject which bears a vital relationship to man's welfare—in fact, to his very existence, since plants represent an absolutely indispensable feature of the human environment. In the absence of green plants there would be no food to eat, no oxygen to breathe. Fuel, whether in the form of wood or of coal, comes from plants. Plants, in the form of fibers, such as cotton, linen and hemp, furnish man with the raw materials for clothing, to say nothing of rope and twine and a whole series of textile products too numerous to mention. Wood, so irreplacable in its multifarious uses, from construction timber to paper pulp, is a plant product. So also are rubber, turpentine, various vegetable oils, tannin, the so-called cellulose products, and divers other materials which are of outstanding importance in relation to the industries. Quinine, strychnine, and cocaine are merely examples of the many medicinal substances for which the physician is indebted to plants. Agriculture and horticulture, forestry and landscape gardening, are but specialized branches of botany; the materials with which these arts have to do are plants; and their successful practice is based on the knowl- 12