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Show FLORICULTURE A MODERN SCIENCE. It is a truly astonishing thing to reflect that Shakespeare, for all his love of owers, would have been able to namo scarcely a single bloom in a twentieth-century garden. Ho would hardly have been able to distinguish the qijeen of flowers Itself, so greatly has the rose changed in tho last throo centuries, while as for the begonias, the chrysanthemums, the dahlias, the geraniums, the fuscliias and carnations, carna-tions, these were unknown even to our great-grandfathers, who would have regarded thorn with wonder and delight. For many of our most beautiful flowors are purely modern productions produc-tions and three centuries ago there were no flower gardens In England What wore then thought of as gardens gar-dens were horbaris, places where rosemary, mfcnt, rue, thyme, and cago grew, and perhaps a few primitive blooms, such as violets and primroses woro suffered to exist, must as popples pop-ples and cornflowers do today. Only about a quarter of a century old ia the science of floriculture which has so completely altorod out gardens gar-dens and is so still altering the forms and colors of familiar flowors as In many casos to render them entiroly ncw"spccle8. The flowers of today are the result of cross-breeding, stimulated stimulat-ed by olectricity, drugs nnd hot-water baths. Hundreds of oxpert botanists botan-ists arc hy these methods ongaged in -breeding new flowers or nqw form of old ones In the gardens ajid hothouses hot-houses of Europe and . America. Strand Magazine. |