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Annals of horticulture in North America for the year ...
Annals of horticulture in North America for the year Author:Liberty Hyde Bailey Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III ORNAMENTALS. /. Recent Tendencies in Ornamental Gardening and in Ornamentals. § I. EVOLUTION IN TASTE. The last year or two has witnessed... more » a gratifying tendency in ornamental gardening to return to old species and to single flowered varieties. For many years the monstrous double flowers and horticultural curiosities have eclipsed simpler plants. It has seemed as if the freaks of fashion were determined to draw the gardener away from nature into a curiosity shop of monstrous forms and intense colors. This desire for abnormal forms of plants no doubt had its inception in the offering of striking varieties by dealers, but the desire appears to have outrun the means of its gratification and to have demanded impossibilities of the agents which gave it birth. The result has been that seedsmen- and plantsmen have exercised every ingenuity to satisfy the public demand. Like all mere fashion, however, this love of novelty and monstrosity must reach a time when it shall sink into the purer and more permanent love of simplicity in nature. It is not necessary that all monstrosity and curiosity in plant variation should be discarded, but it is a rule which ever)' person of artistic taste must hold that the abnormal and unusual shall never rival the normal or natural. The two characters hold the relation of spice and nutriment. There is at the present time a prominent reaction in favor of the older herbaceous perennials and a steadily growing desire for native plants. This "renaissance of herbaceous perennials," as Edward Lincoln happily characterizes the movement, brings back to our gardens the endearments of long associations and carries us towards the love of nature rather than the admiration of the conservatory. The most prominent phase of conventionalism in ornamenta...« less