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

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W ise-oA cres the organisms live in the soil and are able to resist much cold and dryness. It has also been found that the lower leaves are infected first from the soil. On this account all diseased parts should be gathered and burned and the soil around the plants should be soaked with Bordeaux mixture. This should be done in spring before growth begins and later both the soil and the leaves should be sprayed and the growth of the disease checked in the beginning. We have several Delphinium plants which are infected with Leaf Spot and we are trying several preventions. Spraying and dusting with Bordeaux mixture may be a preventative but it is certainly not a cure, for the spots appear again on the leaves after several dustings. Some of the plants and the surrounding soil were treated with a solution of three different strengths of permanganate of potash. The strongest solution was i oz. of potassium permanganate crystals dissolved in 250 cubic centimeters of water. This concentrated solution was mixed with an equal proportion of water and the plants were, and are, being sprayed every ten days with 250 cubic centimeters of solution. The surrounding soil is stirred and also soaked with the solution. Formaline solution is also being tried as a spray and it is surprising to notice that the plants have survived this drastic treatment. Formaldehyde, as you prob' ably already know, is supposed to kill all living protoplasm, both in animal and vegetable cells, so we have hopes that the disease may, at least in some way, be checked. The solution made was one cubic centimeter of 40 per cent, formaline to 288 cubic centimeters of water and the application was the same as the potassium permanganate solution but used once only in four weeks. Lysol spray has also been tried on our plants in the same way as the two pre ventatives already mentioned. We are now making many experiments with various solutions and hope, in time, to not only check but cure the disease. The soil in which both the seed is sown and the plants are grown, is being sterilized. At present we have not found a definite cure but we hope to do so in time and if so, we shall publish it in the next issue of “Wise Acres. To prevent any possibility of getting disease on our young seedlings, we are taking all the necessary precautions. The soil used for seed sowing and pricking out is well sterilized with formaldehyde solution and it is left for a few days to dry before using it. The beds which are being prepared to receive our next crop of Delphiniums are frequently sprayed with formaline solution, using it twice as strong as before mentioned. We can only hope by using all these precautions to grow good, healthy Delphiniums free from the troublesome disease of Leaf Spot. The varieties of Delphiniums are all beautiful, and 1 should, indeed, hesitate, if asked to say which variety I liked best. The mauve ones may not appeal to some of us as much as the clear blues, but when wandering through a perennial garden, gay with many flowers, picking a few flowers here and there, one finds it extremely difficult to resist picking even the mauve ones as they look up with their dark brown, yellow, or white eyes and invite me to add them to my bouquet. Twenty-eight

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W ise-oA cres qA ‘Different Objective Beatrice Williams BATTLEFIELDS —the word has become almost a distant echo. Yet last July, as the train left the Gare du Nord it seemed but yesterday that I had taken my departure from this same Paris to see for the first time the Devastated Regions of Northern France. It was in reality over seven years ago. I was going as an agricultural worker to one of the units of the American Committee for Devastated France. This time my mission was a less vital one. I was going to look at the garden site at the Chateau of Blerancourt. Arrived in the village where the American Committee had had its headquarters in the days when I knew it, how changed everything seemed. An air of tranquillity had settled over everything—there was no longer that breathless activity which ensued just after the War, when desperate efforts were being made to raise some' thing—just any kind of shelter out of the ruins. Ruins there still were but they had become accepted facts. The town was of historic interest long before the last war on account of the great beauty of its seventeenth century Chateau. At the time of the French Revolu' lion, the Chateau was destroyed almost in its entirety. All that remains of it are its two massive stone carved portals, one at the entrance to the domaine, the other at the entrance to the Chateau proper, across the moat, into which the porte cullis was fastened; two similarly carved stone pavilions, one on either side of the second gateway and at each extremity of the ramparts which rise from the moat to form the foundation of the ancient Chateau. These remains are listed with the Beaux Arts as “Monument Historique . The pavilions were seriously damaged in the last war. They were restored by the American Committee and given with the adjoining land to the Commune of Blerancourt, to be used as a public garden on the condition that one of the pavilions be kept as a Museum and the other as a Guest House. Behind the pavilions on the emplacement of the original Chateau, some of the walls of which are still standing, the site was chosen for the Memorial Garden. The beginnings of this Garden had already been made. Little, however, could be said to be growing, owing to the depleted condition of the soil, and to the quantity of war debris still unremoved. The reconstruction of this garden was then to be an all absorbing occupation for two coming months. I was to revamp my French to affect a gardening vocabulary. Evenings were to be spent in tortuous calculations in metres and centimetres, and an international search of nursery cata logues was to ensue tracking down international favourites. To do the actual planting, I was to have two French gardeners. They are perhaps more meticulously trained than gardeners of any other nation, owing possibly to the demands made bv the universal French Style which is classical. These gardeners are painstaking almost to a fault. There is, in their method of planting, no flexibility. A sense of balance and an eye for a straight line and square corners is innate in any everyday gardener. The ceremony used in the planting of boxwood could not be outdone. They like to plant by a metre stick and they prefer parterres to perennial borders. Irregularity they abhor. The removing of the old soil and the bringing of the new was all done by con-tract so that I had only to sec that my plan was correctly executed. The Garden setting was ideal. The pavilions, the imposing gateways, designed and carved in the time of Louis XIV, might have been a little piece of Versailles. Thirty