The Florida agriculturist., 1884-11-05

bon, in the seizure made of his goods in
1928. And this prince, who, it is said,
possessed it for eighty years, could not
have kept it except in an orangery. THE
orange tree at Versailles, known as
Francois Premier, is the most beautiful
tree that have seen in box 1t is
twenty feet high, and extends its bran
ches to a circumference of forty feet.
Spite of that scarcely believe that this
fine stalk dates from the fourteenth CEN
tury. 1t is too vigorous, and the skin is
too smooth to be able to count so many
years. 1t is propable that in so long a
course of time it has been cut, and that
the present tree is sprout from the old
root. This might have occurred after
the frost of 1909, which penetrated
even into the sheltered places. One cir
cumstance gives foundation to this con-
lecture. The tree is composed of two
stalks, which both come out of the earth,
and have common stalk. This is never
the way it grows by nature, still less in
a state OF culture, and from roots held in
vases. have mostly remarked it in the
greater number of trees growing upon
stump which had been raced at the
level of the ground. In such case one is
forced to leave two suckers, because the
sap, being very abundant, could not de-
velop itself in one shoot. It would expe-
rience a sort of reaction which would
suffocate the stump and make it perish.
This a well known fact in the South,
where we cultivate largely the orange,
and where the trees of double stems are
generally recognized as reietOns, or suck
ers from old roots.
After all these data, we are authorized
to think that in the fourteenth century
they had begun already to erect build
ings designed to create for exotic plants
an artificial climate. But at the begin
ming of the fifteenth century orangeries
passed from kings gardens to those OF
of the people; chiefly in countries where
they were not compelled to heat them by
fire, as in Brescla, Romagna, and Tus-
cany. (See Matioli, who says that in his
day the orange was cultivated in Italy,
sn GtL the gardens Of the interior, where
angeries. Diosc. c. 132. We also find in
SprengePs History of Botany, that
in this country there were at that time
many botanical gardens where they
cultivated exotic plants: circumstance
which presupposes the necessity of hot
houses)
About the middle Of the seventeenth
century this luxury was very general,
and we see distinguished by their mag
nificence and grandeur, the orangeries
Of the Farnese family at Parma, of the
Cardinals Nantes, Aldobrandini, and
Pho, at Rome, of the Elector Palatin at
Heidelberg, (Olir. de Ser, p. 633D of
Louis Thirteenth in France; and even
at Ghent, in Belgium, that of M. de Hell
libusi, who imported plants from Genoa,
and carried his establishment to the last
degree of magnifcence. (See Ferraris,
p. $50, where he describes the orangery
of M. de Hellibusi at Ghent, and that of
Louis Thirteenth at Paris. The latter
has been replaced by that OF Versailles,
of which the magnifcence renders it
perhaps the finest monument of this
kind to be found in Europe.)
We now see orangeries in all the civil
lied parts of Europe, it being an embel-
lishment necessary to all country seats
and houses of pleasure.