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

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School of Horticulture •♦♦a - -. .. —: whole garden full of old trees, iron gateways, balconies and fountains, which give it the atmosphere of a very old Italian garden. Each house has its own individual plot of land bordered on three sides by a low stone wall. A narrow path leads out to the center public walk, ending in a small gate. The owners have an agreement always to keep their service quarters towards the street, and the dining and living rooms at the back overlooking the gardens. Every house is unique in itself, for no two are exactly alike. Some have balconies from the second-floor windows, and others bay windows from the first floor, and an addition of two rooms on the roof. The colors of the houses vary also. One is a lovely light green, and another is the usual reddish tan, with a large ship painted on it between the first and second floor. The four end houses each have a long porch out from the second floor, overlooking the gardens, while a high wall closes in the ends of the garden from the public eye. The History of the Pansy Theresa Schindler, Ph.D. The heartsease or wild pansy was first mentioned and described by O. Brunfels (1533) and by L. Fuchs (1542), both Germans. The latter wrote that the Herba Trinitatis, the name by which the pansy was then known, was found not only wild in Germany at that time, but also as an ornamental plant. He describes the upper petals as purple, the two side petals as white and the base petal as yellow. Viola lutea also was grown in gardens at this time. The name, pansy, as far as we can learn, was used for the first time in botanical literature in 1537, by the Frenchman, Ruellius, but in its Latin form, pensea. By 1597 the heartsease, or pansy, had found its way into Gerard’s Herbal and because of its three colors, “purple, yellow, white or blew,” it was called Viola tricolor. From all records it seems certain that this dainty flower was used as a garden subject during the latter part of the sixteenth century, in the Netherlands and in France, as well as in England, while the next century found it in the gardens, also, of Denmark, Poland, Sweden and Italy. All this time, however, even into the eighteenth century, these pansies resembled both in size and coloring those growing wild, and it was not until the nineteenth century that the lovely forms which we admire today resulted from hybridization and selection.

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Wise-Acres •♦♦a Cuttings of soft green wood two to three inches long can be taken in summer and inserted in frames. They root more quickly if a hotbed of manure one inch thick is made under the sand. Keep the sashes on, syringe daily and shade with burlap. Hard wood cuttings six inches long can be made in autumn of new but ripe shoots, cutting at a joint or with a heel of older wood. Tie in bundles and bury in soil outdoors below frost line to callus. Take up in spring and plant three inches deep and three inches apart in nursery rows, outside. The cuttings can also be inserted in a propagating bench in the greenhouse in autumn. Layering should be more used as a method of propagation. Many shrubs with drooping branches root themselves into the soil around. Others can be induced to make roots by being simply pegged down into some good sandy loam mounded up around the plant, while it is necessary to cut a slit or tongue in some before pegging them into the soil. Layer in spring or autumn, keep moist, and leave for a year to make roots, then sever from the parent plant and put in nursery rows or permanent positions. A City Garden Audrey Hedge When you speak of your garden it is always taken for granted that you mean your garden in the country; for where else would you have one? The middle of New York City is one of the last places where one would expect to find a garden, but there are quite a few settlements hidden by the high walls of the city houses, which no one who had not seen behind those walls would dream existed. Turtle Bay Gardens, although not a true waterside colony like Sutton Place, was one of the first of its kind to be started by a group of literary and artistic people about nine years ago. The name seems to imply that it is on a river bank, but the lovely title originated from a rocky cove three blocks south on the East River. There, in the old days, famously large turtles were caught by the picnickers, and in the Colonial WTars the cove was frequently fortified and held by the British. The gardens are a block of twenty houses, back to back, between Second and Third Avenues, facing on Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth Streets. They were remodeled from the typical tenement houses, with dingy back yards and high board fences, into houses of stucco, with one

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WILD PANSY and CULTIVATED PANSY OF 1830 Prow “Pansies, Violas and Violets” By William Cuthbcrtson This improvement began in England and therefore this country is usually considered to be the home of the garden pansy. Two people became interested in this modest flower at about the same time, Lady Mary Bennett (later Lady Monk) and Lord Gambier, the former in 1810, the latter in 1813 or 1815. Soon their gardeners, Mr. Richardson and Mr. Thomson, respectively, became exceedingly interested, saved everything of merit from their own gardens, obtained new colors wherever they could, planted the seed of only the most beautiful and grew them in special soil. In a short time, due to this continual selection, and to the cross pollination brought about by insects, each garden contained a good collection. Others began to raise pansies. As they responded almost magically to garden treatment, they gained rapidly in favor. By 1835 there were four hundred named varieties on sale in England. In fact, so much of a favorite did the pansy become that it ranked with the rose itself, even, for popularity. Both distinguished amateurs and talented nurserymen devoted themselves to the cultivation of the pansy and gained surprising success. The English horticultural societies encouraged this competition by offering prizes for the finest flowers. Every nobleman, every owner of an estate wished to have his own special collection of pansies, and the. nurserymen, who were well rewarded, did everything they could to keep alive this interest of the public by constantly producing new varieties. In the middle of the thirties the price for new and good varieties was five shillings a plant and for especially excellent ones a much higher price was obtained. Ten pounds was offered for one seedling and refused. One of the largest private collections belonged to a Mr. W. Sydenham and contained in 1898 two million plants. This popularity increased to such an extent that several pansy, and pansy-and-viola societies were organized both in England and in Scotland. Two of these are still in existence today. The development of the flower in different countries is very inter- £f 30